Elfrieda “Freddy” Hiebert
Dr. Elfrieda “Freddy” Hiebert is known for her work addressing how fluency, vocabulary, and knowledge can be fostered through appropriate texts. Through documents such as Becoming a Nation of Readers, published by the Center for the Study of Reading in 1985 and Every Child a Reader, published by the Center for the Improvement of Early Reading Achievement in 1999, she has contributed to making research accessible to educators. With co-authors, Freddy has published over 150 journal articles, appearing in journals such as The Reading Teacher, Reading and Writing, Reading Research Quarterly, Reading Psychology, Education Sciences, Literacy Research: Theory, Method, and Practice, Journal of Literacy Research, Educational Researcher, and Educational Leadership. Many of her publications are available at academia.edu or Google Scholar. Most recently, Freddy published the book Teaching Words and How They Work with Teachers College Press. She has authored around 1000 texts that are freely available at TextProject.org. Dr. Hiebert was elected to the Reading Hall of Fame and received the William S. Grey Citation of Merit from the International Reading Association in 2008. She also received the Oscar Causey Award for Outstanding Contributions to Reading Research from the Literacy Research Association in 2015, and received the Research to Practice Award in 2013 and the Notable Vocabulary Researcher Award in 2017, both from the American Educational Research Association. For more than 40 years, Freddy has worked in the field of literacy education, first as a teacher’s aide and teacher of primary-level students in California and, subsequently, as a teacher educator and researcher at the universities of Kentucky, Colorado-Boulder, Michigan, and California-Berkeley. Since 2011, Dr. Hiebert has served as President and CEO of TextProject, Inc, a non-profit corporation that prioritizes creating products and prototypes for student reading programs, primarily based on the TExT model of text complexity, providing teacher support resources and classroom reading activities, and supporting and disseminating related research. You can connect with Freddy through the TextProject website at www.textproject.org or LinkedIn, Instagram, Blue Sky, and Facebook.
To cite this episode: Persohn, L. (Host). (2025, June 17). A conversation with Elfrieda “Freddy” Hiebert. (Season 5, No. 11) [Audio podcast episode]. In Classroom Caffeine Podcast series. https://www.classroomcaffeine.com/guests. DOI: 10.5240/4631-DA23-14D0-79DB-B764-K