Mary Anne Rafferty has taught nearly every grade from kindergarten through high school and in schools across America and overseas. She’s been a classroom teacher, a district literacy coach, and, for a short while, a retiree.
When she reflects on what she’s loved about her career, Rafferty says it was the chance to support struggling teachers and the students who learn from them. And she credits lessons she learned while earning her master’s degree at the University of South Florida as a key part of that impact.
Rafferty said that at that stage of her career, when she was a few years in, she knew she loved middle school and she loved seeing kids learn to read. What she didn’t need, was prescribed curricula. She was hungry for knowledge about HOW people learn to read and HOW to help students and her fellow teachers.
A Program That Builds More Than Knowledge
That’s exactly what she found in USF’s Master of Arts in Reading Education, which is designed for educators who want to deepen their literacy instruction and lead schoolwide reading efforts.
When Rafferty enrolled, she was teaching full-time, raising three kids (two in college), and eyeing a new district-level role in Hillsborough County Public Schools.
“There was a job I wanted – a district resource teacher working with middle school teachers who were struggling in their classrooms. I wasn’t qualified for it. I didn’t have enough of a toolkit that would give me lots of information so that if I went into a teacher’s classroom and saw them struggling, I could help.”
Reading-related art created by some of her middle school students, shared by Mary Anne Rafferty.
So she decided to pursue a master’s degree, even without the promise of an immediate pay raise. She didn’t rush. While some students finish the program in a year, Rafferty took her time, taking several years to earn the degree alongside fellow educators juggling careers, families, and coursework.
“We all worked in the same district, and we leaned on each other,” she said. “Don’t sugarcoat it. We were juggling so much and going to school in the evenings while teaching all day was hard. But the professors kept us going.”
She landed that district job while still in the program. And, she said, the faculty made a lasting impression.
“These professors didn’t just email you back. They called. They gave real answers and ideas to try with my students the very next day.”
Rafferty also appreciated the program’s academic rigor. When she struggled with the assessment course, she took it again — not to boost her grade, but to gain understanding.
“I have a learning disability that makes it hard for me to understand numbers,” she shared. “When I took the assessment course, I passed with a C. But I didn’t understand the statistics behind it. So, I gave myself permission to take it again. I wanted to go deeper and truly understand, not just get by.”
She credits faculty like James King with making the content come alive. “Dr. King taught the History of Reading, and I thought it would be all dates and dusty textbooks. I learned more from that course about how reading has been taught over time than from any book I’d read or professional development I’d ever attended,” she said.
She also credits another professor, Nancy Williams, with helping her bring phonics instruction to middle schoolers in a meaningful way.
“I learned that you don’t have to go back to basic, monosyllabic words. These kids need phonics, but they need it in the context of real reading.”
Relevant Learning
Rafferty says she used what she learned almost immediately, both in her own classroom and, later, in her work supporting other teachers.
“When a student finds relevance in what they’re reading, they want to keep going. And when teachers see that spark, they want to learn how to make it happen again.”
She says the program changed how she approached teaching and how she helped others teach. “We talk a lot about standards and tests, but education is built on storytelling,” she said. “In grad school, in Professor Pat Daniel’s class, we read 15 young adult novels over one semester and talked about how to pick the right books for different ages and reading levels. That changed the way I looked at instruction.”
When asked how, Rafferty tells a story about watching students connect to content in unexpected ways. “When a high schooler embraces a picture book, and it sparks a question or recognition, that’s when phonics, vocabulary, and comprehension come together,” she said. “They don’t know they’re doing it, but the teacher does. That’s the magic.”
“Unretiring” and Returning to the Classroom
Rafferty is returning to the classroom in the fall, this time to teach sixth-grade reading/critical thinking in Hillsborough County Public Schools. Her decision was sparked by a news story about a woman who, despite graduating with honors from a high school in Connecticut in 2025, and earning a scholarship to college, says she can’t read. The young woman says she is illiterate. And she is suing the school district.
“This can’t happen,” said Rafferty. “We can’t have kids in today’s society who are coming out of K-12 who can’t read. Or that can only read to take a test.”
She’s rejoining the profession not just to teach, but to help more students find meaning in their reading, and to support the teachers who guide them.
“If a kid doesn’t know what a tariff is, how are they going to understand the world they live in?” she said. “Vocabulary, comprehension, context, it all matters.”
Even years after graduation, Rafferty says the lessons from USF still guide her daily practice.
“If you want to become a better reading teacher, this is the program,” she said. “It’s hard work, but it’s the right kind of hard.”