Devin Kearns is joining the NC State College of Education during the 2024-2025 academic year as the inaugural Goodnight Distinguished Professor in Early Literacy, a professorship established by longtime NC State supporters Ann and Jim Goodnight to support the activities of a professor who focuses on teaching the science of reading in early literacy.
Previously, Kearns was a professor of special education in the Department of Educational Psychology in the Neag School of Education at the University of Connecticut. He also worked as a research scientist for Haskins Laboratories affiliated with Yale University and the University of Connecticut. He studies how students in elementary grades learn to read and designs instructional programs to better meet the needs of these students. He holds a master’s degree in elementary literacy and language arts from Loyola Marymount University and a Ph.D. in special education from Vanderbilt University.
Learn more about Kearns below:
The following Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.
Why did you choose a career in education?
I grew up in a small town in Maine, and there was a lot of rural poverty there. I worked, as a teenager, at a daycare center for families in poverty and, even at that age, you could see that there were kids who needed a lot of help to be successful, even in preschool. I decided to dedicate myself to what I saw as public service, so that was what got me started, and I developed a passion for it as well. I loved to help children acquire new skills and develop passion and, eventually, [help with] reading.
What first interested you in studying how to improve students’ success in literacy?
The story starts with failure. When I started teaching reading, I did not get good instruction from professors about how to teach reading. I used the techniques that were taught by them and that were included in the reading program that I had, and they didn’t help. My students made consistently better progress in math than they did in reading, so I thought, “What am I doing wrong?” That’s when I decided to learn more about how to support kids who need to gain reading skills. I worked in a clinic for kids with dyslexia and learned the foundations of the science of reading and then brought that back to my third grade classroom. The following year, I had kids who made dramatic progress. That’s when I realized there was something about the [original] instruction itself that was not working.
What excites you most about bringing your work to North Carolina?
The Goodnight Professorship has an emphasis on improving teacher professional learning and supporting the state’s efforts to make teachers more knowledgeable about scientific principles of reading and their application in classrooms. The state’s already done a lot of work around that, but there’s more work to do. I’ve done work on improving literacy in multiple states and for organizations; I have a Connecticut state project focused on improving literacy for kids through third grade, and I’m on advisory boards for the states of Rhode Island and South Carolina focused on improving early literacy outcomes. So, I have a lot of experience now supporting policy implementation, and I’m excited to share that with the community.
I’m also excited about the opportunity to work with some really great literacy folks. The College of Education’s Literacy and English Language Arts (LELA) Education program is chock-full of really excellent literacy scholars.
What are some of the greatest needs related to literacy that exist right now?
We talk about the scientific basis of reading; there is a lot of great evidence about how reading happens and best practices for teaching reading, but still, in lots of classrooms, people aren’t implementing scientific practices. So, I think one of the challenges is educating people who are totally uninitiated and then making sure that teachers who have learned something [about teaching reading] really know what is science-based and what is not.
What do you see as some of the biggest opportunities in working with teachers and students on literacy development in North Carolina?
With the background that teachers already have, I think they’re in a great place to build their skills and implementations. The state’s Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling (LETRS) professional development program has given them a lot of knowledge and opportunities to do some initial application. A great opportunity is leveraging that knowledge teachers have acquired, and administrators too, to link LETRS to classroom instruction. I think that puts North Carolina in an enviable position. I think there is some shared understanding across the state about the science of reading and what that means, and that gives us a tremendous opportunity to impact instruction.
I’m still learning, too. I think one of the things I’m looking forward to doing is working with my LELA colleagues and folks at the N.C. Department of Public Instruction (DPI) to understand the real state of things before I try to jump in, and to educate myself about exactly what is going on in the state. I’m really committed to learning fast, and I am planning to do as much as I can to be able to contribute meaningfully as quickly as possible and learn as much as I can as quickly as possible, so I can start to support the vision of this professorship.
How do you believe your research and previous experiences as a classroom teacher, literacy coach and professional development designer inform your current approach to teaching pre-service educators?
One thing I’m proud of in my career is that I am practically minded in everything that I do. When I design things for teachers and I work with teachers, my focus is always on how you can actually make something work in the classroom. I feel like I think like a teacher, and I also pride myself on being able to communicate complicated things to teachers.
I’m a big believer that teachers can know and should know really important ideas about how the science of reading works, including things that don’t always get taught because they’re really complicated. I like to explain these things to people, and I think it helps them understand, ultimately, why their kids are learning a certain way and why they’re not. I like explaining to people the science and then showing them how to apply it.
What are you most looking forward to about working at the College of Education?
Getting to know everybody. I do work on machine learning models of reading, like reading AI, so I’ve been looking at faculty who I might be able to talk with about that part of learning sciences. I’m also hoping to get to know my new colleagues in other departments and colleges who might have aligned interests.
What does success in literacy education look like to you?
Literacy success is having the skills to advance your own goals and those skills require being insightful readers, and therefore thinkers and fluent writers and communicators. Literacy is a gateway to a world of ideas, and it becomes a choose your own adventure of everything because books have so much in them. Researchers think that literacy is going to persist because there’s nothing else like it. Reading is going to persist as a technology for communicating ideas because it’s an efficient way to do it once you’ve learned it and then writing is a way to communicate your own ideas. I think that, basically, it opens worlds of knowledge.
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