Q&A: Leading Literacy Through Podcasting

In this 2021 question-and-answer, Leslie Zoroya and Mara Shinn Smith of the Los Angeles County Office of Education describe how helping teachers with student podcasts led them to launch the Leading Literacy podcast. The section below, added in 2026, looks at what research says about student podcasts and gives a short plan for starting a project.

Leslie Zoroya and Mara Shinn Smith are literacy leaders in the Division of Curriculum and Instructional Services for the Los Angeles County Office of Education (LACOE) with a mutual dedication to supporting reading and language arts programs. Together, they are constantly looking for ways to increase student achievement in literacy and provide better information access for the multiple districts that make up Los Angeles County. 

As podcast listeners who also helped bring podcast creation to classrooms using tools like Soundtrap, Leslie and Mara recognize that podcasts are a valuable medium to widely share stories and information that enlighten, entertain, and open minds. During the pandemic, they put these ideas into practice in a new way by launching the Leading Literacy podcast, which they co-host. Through Leading Literacy, they share conversations with experts along with additional insights into literacy research and advice on practice. They see storytelling as a powerful medium and podcasting the perfect vehicle to expand the literacy stories of LA County and beyond. 

Nearly 20 episodes in, the podcast is off to a great start. We caught up with Leslie and Mara to hear about the process they’ve gone through in creating Leading Literacy and how the content can support educators across the U.S. Read more in the Q&A below:

edCircuit: You got an introduction to podcasting by helping teachers implement student podcasting projects in the classroom. What does this program look like in your county? 

Leslie and Mara: As the Reading Language Arts Unit at Los Angeles County Office of Education, we support educators in all 81 school districts in Los Angeles. We were interested in creating a podcast that could serve as a vehicle for accessing quality literacy experts and practices. It has been amazing!  We’ve been able to connect our teachers with some of the leading specialists in the country with respect to reading, writing, English language development (ELD), and critical media literacy, among other things.

We also wanted teachers to understand how they can use podcasting in their classrooms. Because podcasting involves all literacy domains (reading, writing, listening, speaking), it’s a great way to synthesize and demonstrate learning. 

edCircuit: You seem to have organically evolved into hosting your own podcast. What motivated you to get started? Were there strategies from student podcasting that you were able to carry into the process of producing Leading Literacy?

Leslie and Mara: As avid listeners of podcasts, we were intrigued with how we could utilize podcasting in our own setting as a vehicle to provide educators with engaging, motivating, and substantive content. Once we learned how easy it was to produce podcasts in Soundtrap, we were off and running!  Surprisingly, and likely due to the pandemic, we were able to interview literacy experts that otherwise might have been unavailable. So this confluence of factors really enabled us to jump right in and create some quality podcasts right from the get-go.

edCircuit: What has been the most fulfilling part of hosting your podcast? What’s been most surprising?

Leslie and Mara: The most fulfilling part has been having personalized and informal conversations with experts who are personable, knowledgeable, and honestly, fun! We have really enjoyed just the conversational aspect of it. Plus, we feel like this modality, because it is informal, allows listeners to feel like they are part of the conversation―and yet, learn new ideas and strategies.

When you are reading a lot of researchers’ written work, it can feel remote and formal. Podcasting allows for informal conveyance of the same information but in a friendly and practical way. The ability to ask questions about the work is an added bonus. It’s a two-way conversation instead of a one-way.

The most surprising thing has been that all of the experts we’ve had conversations with are easy to talk to and down-to-earth practitioners. They have the same passion as we do and getting to talk live about that is really exciting.

edCircuit: What are some of the most interesting things you’ve learned from the guests you’ve interviewed on Leading Literacy?

Leslie and Mara: There are so many surprises but what stays with us is the multi-dimensional aspect of all of our guests. We tend to view experts through one lens and being able to have these conversations allows listeners to experience the many facets of our guests’ personalities, lives, and work.

One example of this is in our interview with the Young Adult (YA) author, Francisco Stork. He did not become a writer until later in life after a career as a lawyer. This was so fascinating and a great example of how anyone can pursue a literacy passion at any point in their life.

edCircuit: If a new listener wants to check out the podcast, are there 1-2 episodes you’d recommend they start with?

Leslie and Mara: We’re a little biased and love all of them for different reasons, but we’d recommend episode 7 with UCLA’s Dr. Jeff Share, who is an expert in critical media literacy. We know that navigating through the vast realm of information on the internet is daunting (and dangerous!) for students and Dr. Share’s practical advice for teachers in how to instruct students in dealing with misinformation, is crucial.

Another episode that we loved is Episode 11: Teacher Roundtable. We gathered a group of teachers to talk about their experiences during the pandemic and it was amazing! Their focus on the positive aspects of really getting to know their students and families was inspiring.

But, listen to them all! Each one is uniquely informative and fun!

Student podcasts and literacy: what research says and how to start

Leslie Zoroya and Mara Shinn Smith explain above that podcasting touches every literacy domain: reading, writing, listening and speaking. Their point is the main reason student podcasts have drawn the interest of literacy teachers. Researchers have studied classroom podcasting for more than a decade, and the studies are small and closely observed, so they are best read as case studies that show what is possible and not as proof of what will happen in every class.

What studies of student podcasts show

Early work looked at young children. In a 2015 study in Theory Into Practice, Vivian Vasquez described a diverse urban second-grade class that produced a podcast series. The work involved careful research and drew on cultural and visual resources that print-centered texts do not easily allow. Older students have been studied too. A 2010 study by Suzanne Smythe and Paul Neufeld in the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy followed a podcast project in a Canadian grade 7 class of English language learners over four months. The podcasts created a useful new space for academic work and built digital and multimodal literacy, but they did not change assessment, the curriculum or classroom relationships, which is a useful reminder that a project alone does not reshape a school.

A more recent example is a 2024 study by Anne Gill and Olivia Stewart in the same journal. Eight students aged 16 to 18 in a social justice class used podcasts as supplemental texts over 10 weeks. The podcasts exposed students to marginalized voices, and the students became more critical of texts and raised their own voices. The sample is small, so the result is an illustration and not a measurement. A 2022 analysis by Jason Griffith and Joseph Sweet in Teachers College Record looked at informed consent in the podcast Serial and recommended that teachers use such tensions to teach critical listening, which connects to Dr. Jeff Share’s work on misinformation mentioned by Zoroya and Smith.

A short plan for a first student podcast

The two literacy leaders say they were able to start quickly once they learned how easy it was to produce podcasts with Soundtrap, an education recording tool. The steps below are suggestions drawn from that experience and from the studies above, and a teacher can adapt them to the grade and the tools available.

1. Listen first. Play two or three short episodes and ask students what they notice about how each begins, how the speakers sound and how the episode ends.
2. Choose a purpose and an audience. A podcast about a book, a local question or a unit of study gives students a reason to read and research before they speak.
3. Plan and write. Students draft questions or a script. This is the reading and writing part of the project and the place where a teacher can give feedback on organization and evidence.
4. Practice speaking. Students rehearse aloud, which builds fluency and attention to the listener.
5. Record and edit. A web-based tool can handle recording and simple editing. Check the privacy settings and the terms for student accounts before the class uses any tool.
6. Share and reflect. Decide who may hear the episodes, with family permission where the audience is public, and ask students to say what they would change.

What leaders and teachers can decide

• Decide whether the recordings stay in the class, the school or a public feed, and obtain permission from families accordingly.
• Tie the project to existing literacy goals, such as speaking and listening standards, so that it does not become an extra.
• Consider using professional development podcasts such as Leading Literacy, which Zoroya and Smith describe as a way to reach experts, as a source of ideas for teachers.
• Plan how to support students who find speaking in front of others difficult, for example by offering a script, a partner or a chance to re-record.

For an example of student voice in the classroom, edCircuit’s article Podcasting Brings Authentic Voice to Ethnic Studies is listed in the original under further reading.

Further Reading

1. edCircuit – Podcasting Brings Authentic Voice to Ethnic Studies
2. Soundtrap EDU Blog – Unsung Songwriting Competition Amplifies the Voices of Youth Justice
3. Education Week – How a Bathroom Log Helped One Middle School Understand Their Literacy Issues

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