Episode 154: Raising Readers with Maya Smart
For this episode, I speak to Maya Smart, an early literacy advocate, parent educator, and author of Reading for Our Lives: The Urgency of Early Literacy and the Action Plan to Help Your Child. Maya is affiliated faculty at Marquette University and holds degrees from Harvard and Northwestern. Her website, MayaSmart.com, features weekly book picks, playful learning ideas, and free tools to help parents grow as their children's first teachers.
We get into how Maya became interested in reading and why she wanted to research early literacy. We dive into her research, advice for helping young kids engage with reading, and spend time discussing her book and how she wrote it. Take notes, it’s a good one!
Topics Discussed:
How Maya’s daughter’s birth inspired her work
Coming to education through journalism
Supporting kids to become readers
Resources mentioned:
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Read the transcript for this episode:
Welcome to Educator Forever, where we empower teachers to innovate education. Join us each week to hear stories of teachers expanding their impacts beyond the classroom and explore ways to reimagine teaching and learning.
Maya Smart is an early literacy advocate, parent educator and author of reading for our lives the urgency of early literacy and the action plan to help your child. She's affiliated faculty at Marquette University and holds degrees from Harvard and Northwestern. Her website MayaSmart.com features weekly book picks some playful learning ideas and free tools to help parents grow as their children's first teachers and forever champion. Welcome, Maya, so nice to have you here.
Maya Smart 0:28
So nice to be here.
Lily Jones 0:30
Well, I would love for you to take us through your professional journey in any direction you'd like to go.
Maya Smart 0:36
Yes. So I, my background is in journalism, so I wrote, initially, a lot about businesses, small businesses and entrepreneurs, and then I did some writing about education for Edutopia, which was a publication of the George Lucas Educational Foundation. But it was really my having my daughter, that really got me focused and locked in on how kids learn and what we as parents and even community members can do to help them.
Lily Jones 1:08
Yeah, so interesting. I taught kindergarten and first grade, and before I had my own kids, I also had a different perspective on many things, but even the very things that I was teaching, it just gave me such an interesting lens of what happened before kids got to my classroom, you know, and that it wasn't like, oh, they showed up and we're ready to learn how to read, right? Like it was, like all these other things. So can you tell us a little bit about maybe that journey with your daughter, and why early literacy?
Maya Smart 1:37
Yes. So when my daughter was born, we were living at the time, in Richmond, Virginia, and there were a number of news articles and reports that I came across that said that there was a big reading achievement disparity between black kids and white kids. So as a black mom, that really got my attention, but also as a book lover and a writer and someone who was interested in words and language and stories. I'm named after Maya Angelou. Named my daughter after Zora Neale Hurston. So amazing literature and books and reading was a big part of my bookish life, and I wanted her to have that same love of books and reading. And even though she was an infant, I felt like I needed to be doing more than reading to her. I felt like there just had to be more to the story.
Lily Jones 2:22
So how did you go about figuring out how to support your daughter or learning kind of where to start?
Maya Smart 2:31
I just started by asking a lot of questions. Even before asking the questions really was reading, because I read the local news stories and the national news stories every couple of years. There are these, this nation's report card and National Assessment of Educational Progress that just sort of documents the same reading challenges year after year after year. But then I started reading. I enrolled in a course on the fundamentals of reading instruction at the University of Virginia when she was a toddler, and I didn't really have a specific aim in mind. I didn't plan to be a classroom teacher or reading specialist, but I was like Foundations of Reading Instruction. Seems like exactly what you would need to know. And so have this interesting experience of being in a class, being a student, and my fellow students were actual classroom teachers who were responsible for teaching, you know, 2025, 30, maybe 30 kids to read, and it was interesting to be in that space and see that many of them felt like their teacher training programs hadn't really prepared them to teach reading. And so here they were, after working all day and grading papers and doing all these things, they were logging in for this virtual course, just like I was. But what I also discovered in that class was it didn't cover what came before the school years. It was really focused on, obviously, classroom instruction of multiple kids after kindergarten, and what I was interested in, well, what? What really gets kids ready to take advantage of all these best practices that the teachers in that class were learning? And so then I just continued asking questions, reading the articles assigned in that class, reading the footnotes, finding other articles, and then eventually using those journalism skills to just call people up and ask them. So a lot of people who wrote the articles were surprisingly open to chatting about their research. They spend decades studying these things, designing studies, researching things, and so much of their what they learn, is shared with other researchers and doesn't necessarily make it into practice in classrooms or in families.
Lily Jones 4:32
So I think that's such an interesting perspective to bring to being a journalist who then came to investigate early literacy. My husband's a journalist, so I understand a little bit of what that's like, you know? And I think as a teacher, it's exactly like you said, like we're so busy, right? Like Everyone's so busy, they have impossible jobs as classroom teachers, as people running teacher prep programs, like it's hard sometimes to stay up to date with all the research and Rec. Recommendations for best practices. You know, I'm getting my doctorate now. We've had a whole discussion recently of like, what me, what does best practices even mean? Best practices for who? Right? Like, there's so many different directions. So I'm curious just a little bit about your experience diving into this research as a journalist, and then what you found to be like the best practices or advice that you might give to either parents or teachers about the early literacy.
Maya Smart 5:29
It's really interesting when you wade into a lot of the research that people are now talking about, you know, the science of reading. What does that mean? A lot of the research doesn't provide a specific thing to do, so adding to this growing body of knowledge, but it doesn't it often isn't designed to tell you what to do. So that was one of the realizations. And also, you can't just read one thing and take and take that and put it into action. So it was like a lot of reading, but also just asking the researchers like you are the expert in this particular thing, whether it's phonemic awareness or alphabetic knowledge or and based on all that you know, all this knowledge you've accumulated over these years, what is the one thing that you would recommend that parents do, and something that parents and everyone, without exception, recommended, something that parents could actually do, like none of the things, none of the to do's were incredibly complicated. Things as simple as you know, point out letters describe their their their shapes. And so it's our words about these things that make them meaningful for kids. A child can see a line and not knows that a line is in an i is an L, it it doesn't have meaning until we tell them what it represents. And so just by talking and doing simple things, pointing out things, makes just an incredible difference. So I think that was really encouraging to hear you don't have to get a PhD to help your child.
Lily Jones 7:06
That's definitely encouraging and makes it doable, because just like teachers, right, parents don't have the time, right? So just knowing, like making it part of your normal conversation, pointing out letters and sounds around you in your actual life. I mean, that's good advice for all types of learning, right? Like Wendy, are we actually doing this stuff in our actual lives, right?
Maya Smart 7:30
And so as a parent, you don't have to teach in the way that some of the research would recommend that you teach in a classroom setting, because you don't have 25 kids like you can. It's very simple for you as an individual parent with your individual child to determine which letters they know and which they don't. It's like, actually much easier for you than the teacher who's trying to give a quick assessment to figure out you know all the letter, name knowledge in an entire classroom. It's like, easier for you as a parent to focus on the letters they don't know. It's easier for you as a parent to really know your child and what they're interested in. And, you know, emphasize the first letter in their name, for example. And you know, build around point out, if you drive past a Valvoline every day on your way to drop them off at school, talk about the V talk about the lines and the letter. So I think in some ways, it's more it's more fun to teach in everyday life, we just need someone to kind of point us in the right direction of what's important and when.
Lily Jones 8:29
Yeah, and I think that providing that foundation for parents is so important too, of just, how do I get started? And so I know you recently read a book, reading for our lives. Can you tell us about that book and kind of how it came about?
Maya Smart 8:43
Yes, so I buckled down. I'd been writing just blog posts on my personal blog, Maya smart.com just kind of summarizing some of the things that I learned throughout the years of my daughter growing up. And then when covid hit, suddenly I had this incredible opportunity. You know, my calendar was clear. I didn't have any where I needed to be or, you know, so you're quarantined with this idea. And so I just buckled down and wrote a book proposal and got an agent, and she sold the book to Avery, an imprint of Penguin Random House. And then the book came out the heart. The original edition came out in August of 2022, and then more recently, I had the chance to revise and update it for the edition that you mentioned.
Lily Jones 9:27
Fantastic. And what caused the updating?
Maya Smart 9:30
Some of it was the initial subtitle of the book was a literacy action plan from birth to six, because I really wanted to emphasize that there are things you can do with infants that support their language development and support their eventual literacy development. So it wasn't about teaching babies to read, but it was about laying the foundation of language and brain connections for future reading success. So but what we realized. When it came out was that a lot of the content applied to kids who were older than six because of pandemic learning loss and other challenges I had at my very first book event, the book launch event at Milwaukee Public Library, a second grade teacher raised his hand and said, You know, I have kids who are still learning these things, struggling with these things, and you know, their parents would benefit from reading this and supporting kids. So that was part of it. Also the book. I really wrote the book with parents of young children in mind, but it also sort of developed a following among preschool teachers and librarians and home visitors and other kind of professionals who work with families. So the paperback edition, the subtitle is the urgency of early literacy and the action plan to help your child, just to kind of emphasize it really was written with parents in mind.
Lily Jones 10:52
I love that, and I love hearing about the process of being in COVID, universal experience, right, being there. And I love how you said you were quarantined with an idea, and I'd love to hear a little bit more about the process of writing a book. Obviously, you're a journalism journalist. You have much experience writing, but writing a book, I'm sure, is different. And so I'd love for you to talk to us about what that process was like, particularly going from the blog post that you were writing to turning it into a book form?
Maya Smart 11:19
Absolutely so I think in my I imagined that writing a book was writing a bunch of articles, which I was very skilled at, and it's really not that.
Lily Jones 11:31
Good to know.
Maya Smart 11:33
It's a much bigger project and process. So it's a bigger kind of story arc, I would say. But also the step before writing the book, was writing the book proposal. And that really is like writing a business plan. So it's not only about the idea, but it's digging into and researching, well, who would read this? Who, What kind of book buyers would seek out this content? What? What is the market for this idea? How big is it? And sort of trying to define that and some of those questions, and how will I promote it? Will it be, you know, blogging? Will it be social media? Will it be speaking? And so the book proposal process makes you think about the content of the book, but also who it's for, and how you'll get it to them, which I think is a really interesting exercise. And go ahead, and then when you you also need to pitch it. So it's a it's a sales document, and you have to first pitch the idea to an agent. Most traditional publishers aren't reading manuscripts from people you know, emailing them randomly. So it was important, with my vision for the book being traditionally published, to get an agent. So you first have to sell that person on the idea, and then they are your representative and sell it to the publishing company. So there's, there's a lot to to do and learn on the path, and then once it's out, you have to kind of test your theories of how it will find its audience.
Lily Jones 13:09
So interesting, and I appreciate you unpacking it for us. So thinking about, I assume that having your audience from the blog and having written about this for a while helped you with the book proposal.
Maya Smart 13:21
It definitely did. And I think also one of the challenges once it came out is that a lot of time has elapsed, you know, from when my daughter was a baby and when she was a toddler, and I took that Foundations of Reading course, and then these blog posts that she's in elementary school, and then, you know, she was second grade when covid hit, and then, you know, another two years before the book is out, and now I have a teenager. So it's sort of like I'm getting farther and farther away from the everyday life with young children. And so parents in this environment are looking more to social media and other places that I wasn't when 13 years ago. So there's this continual I would say the key for people who are thinking about writing books is to stay in learner mode. You have your message and what you want to share, but you have to constantly be finding new ways to get the message out.
Lily Jones 14:17
What have you been finding has worked now that the book has gone through two iterations, how do you get the word out there?
Maya Smart 14:25
More and more, I am building relationships with speaking in front of meeting with people who work with parents. So whereas initially I thought I would be marketing directly to parents more, you know, through Instagram or whatever. Now more it's it's more intensive, more time consuming, but also more rewarding. To sell a book through a person that has a program that has these regular touch points. So it's almost like train the trainer. And I do, you know, workshops. Ups and give speeches for audiences of professionals that work with families. So that's one way that I'm reaching more people. And I like that, because as an individual author, I can only interact with so many people, but if I interact with someone who interacts with this group of you know, however many people I feel like I have more impact, and that person gets the messages of the book and surround sound so they can read the book or they can listen to the audio book. But they've heard about this book through this trusted professional, whether it's a librarian or a pediatrician or whoever it is, and they also have that person to ask questions of as well, of asking me.
Lily Jones 15:41
That's so interesting, and totally makes sense. You know, having more bang for your buck of thinking about who's already interacting with these people. I was talking to somebody who had an original business that was like, voice to text or something like that, for maybe for students who are hearing impaired or something like that. And he also started selling directly to families, but then realized that if you sold directly to speech language pathologists, you know, or got the word out to them, then they were able to bring it to so many more people. So that reminded me, kind of what you were saying of finding the people who are kind of the connectors, who already have an audience, or who already have a lot of parents who are ready for this book.
Maya Smart 16:18
Yes, and then I think that was another thing I had to learn as someone who loves books and loves reading, and, you know, has written a book you that isn't always the best format to get the message to every parent who might need it. So there are many parents who could benefit from the insights of the book, who themselves, aren't strong readers, aren't comfortable readers, or just don't enjoy it. So then there's the audiobook version for them. Or maybe they're just picking up things from social media snippets, but ideally they're also getting it through a person in one of these settings I've talked about. So you have to kind of separate the message from like that package, and so...
Lily Jones 16:58
It's like you're creating so much more than just a book, like a book is already big, right? Like being able to have that clarity around your ideas, and then thinking about there are so many different ways to get the ideas out there. And so I would love to hear a little bit about just your personal process writing this book. What did you learn about yourself through this process? And maybe it was through writing, or maybe through, through finding agents or figuring out how to do publishing, what did you discover about yourself?
Maya Smart 17:26
I learned about what kind of forms of authority resonated with me. So like in the book, it was very important to me that there was a strong research base. So there was a lot of, you know, reading articles, but also calling the people who did the research to make sure that my understanding was right, and then also hiring a fact checker to go through things and make sure that as I simplified and translated things for an audience of general lists. You know, like parents, most parents don't have PhDs in all of these areas that the research base was developed in that that was important to me to include the research and the evidence base. But I also thought it was important to include personal stories and so kind of one thing I discovered was just what I valued. I thought of who I was as a parent when my daughter was younger, and thought about what kind of support would I need for these recommendations, for me to act on them like and it's I would want to know that there was some research, but I would also want to know that parents had done this and it worked.
Lily Jones 18:42
Absolutely. I appreciate that too, and I like the way you framed that too, of what authorities resonated with you, and you get to decide, right? Like, I think that mix is so great, having the research and the stories, because it also kind of going back to what you're saying. If people consume books in different ways, different things resonate with different people, some people are going to really latch onto the story. Other people are going to be like, give me the facts, like, where's the data? And so having both I can imagine, helps you reach more people. Yes. So a lot of our audience are educators who either are in the classroom teaching, or they maybe want to try something outside of the classroom. Maybe they dream of writing a book. Do you have any advice for them if they have a certain area that they're really passionate about and they want to study or get the word out about it, what advice would you give them?
Maya Smart 19:29
I would advise them to start from a place of strength by recognizing that as a teacher, you're already a professional and conveying information to people. So your audience, it may be young children or high schoolers, depending upon what grade level you're teaching in, but you already have this expertise in communicating and sharing, and so that's a valuable place to start. So that's number one, don't feel like you're starting from scratch because you already have. This really valuable skill set that other people have to learn. Have to learn when they're ready to share their ideas, I would say to just start taking notes and thinking in terms of themes, like whether it's ideas that you want to share or points you want to make, and just get in the habit of recording your thoughts about things, and it doesn't have to feel like you're writing an actual chapter or an actual proposal. It can just be bullet points. But I think that that discipline of capturing what you're thinking and putting it on paper in some form is really important, and then over time, you have all this information and it snowballs into something, and it's okay to start with blog posts or articles. That's what I did. So you may not know everything, but you have this one thing that you think is really valuable to share, whether that's a story or a statistic or a study or something you've discovered, but just developing that discipline of valuing your thoughts, writing things down and then quickly sharing in some form.
Lily Jones 21:03
Great advice. And absolutely like it takes time and a habit and practice and discipline to build this thing. It's not like snapping your fingers. And so I appreciate your advice of affirming that teachers have that expertise. And also there's going to be some things to learn, right, and some habits to build along the way, absolutely. So Maya, it's been so great talking with you. Can you tell folks how they can connect with you?
Maya Smart 21:28
Yes, my website is Maya smart.com so M, a, y, A, S, M, a, r t.com, and every Monday, I publish a new article in the resources section. So it might be a list of seasonal children's books, or it might be a family literacy activity that people can do at home to teach kids about letters or sounds or to build vocabulary. So have a newsletter that comes out every Sunday morning, and you can find me on Instagram at Maya smarty, M, a y, A, S, M, a r, t,y.
Lily Jones 21:59
Wonderful. Thank you again.
Maya Smart 22:04
Thank you. Bye.
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