 How many people here work with youth or have the experience of answering questions from parents about reading and reading levels? Yeah, a lot of you, great. We're gonna get into some of that. I could literally talk about reading all day long. So I'm gonna try not to verbally vomit too much information at you, but I developed and run the Fog Readers Program which is focused on struggling readers in grades one through four and is a one-on-one tutoring and reading remediation program here at the library. So Fog Readers stands for Free Orton Gillingham and has anyone heard of Orton Gillingham before? Yeah, it sounds fancy. It's really, it's our evidence-based method. It's evidence-based and science-based method of instruction. It's really a fancy way of saying a very structured phonics-based program and I'll talk about that a little bit more in depth later, but it's phonics-based and it's sequenced based on how we all learn to read. And so it was developed in the 1920s specifically for individuals with dyslexia but it's really helpful for anyone who's struggling with their reading skills. So our numbers for our program changes almost daily. There's a constant influx of new students and tutors leaving and moving around. But right now we have about 140 students meeting weekly with their tutors at 26 of our 28 locations. Since the beginning of this calendar year we've had 240 students meet with their tutors. Some students are just starting out with their tutors and some students have been meeting with their tutors since almost the beginning, so over two years. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about the community need for help in reading. So half of California students are not reading at grade level. So I really want you to let that sink in. One of every two students that you encounter are struggling with reading and could use some reading help. So research shows that these students, when they leave first grade behind they can't catch up on their own. They need a specific intervention to catch up. Students who don't learn to read fluently by third grade are likely to remain poorer readers for the rest of their lives. And they're likely to fall behind in other subjects as well. People who struggle with reading are more likely to drop out of high school to end up in the criminal justice system and to live in poverty. But nearly all kids can learn to read if they are taught the right way. So really the problem is, also this is a little bit of a call out, but not really just some hard truths, that many American elementary schools, many Californian elementary schools and schools right here in San Francisco aren't teaching reading the right way. We're not teaching reading in a way that serves all of our students. So typical reading instruction that we might see in a school is driven on the assumption that learning to read is natural. And that's really not the case. Learning to read isn't natural. It's not like learning to talk. The human brain isn't wired to read. And kids must be explicitly taught to connect the sounds and the letters that are on the page. And really that's phonics. So that's kind of the basis of our program. And so because of this, because many of our students aren't getting an phonics instruction in school, they need an explicit systematic intervention to catch up. And that can be really costly. In San Francisco, we've priced it out anywhere between $80 and $120 an hour for this type of intervention, which is really just cost prohibitive for a lot of our families, especially in a city like San Francisco that's already so expensive to live. Okay, so since half of our students are struggling and getting the right type of help isn't possible for everyone, we've been able to create a free program with the help of volunteer tutors. So we focus really on the one through four grades because that's really the learning to read ages. So we do have some exceptions to this. We have I think 11 fifth graders and one sixth grader in the program right now. So they had been working with their tutors and they're gonna continue to do so. Cause those are students who are really impacted by their reading struggles. The way it works is tutors meet once a week at a library location for 45 minutes to an hour with their student. They meet on an ongoing basis so they're really forming a relationship with their student. And that's a key aspect to working on this. It's a lot for kids to go to school all day long and struggle and then come to the library and work on that thing that they're struggling with. So that forming a relationship can be really helpful because we want their time to be productive but we also want it to be fun and enjoyable. So the goal of our tutors is kind of to move students away from habits that they might have formed so these habits could be guessing or memorizing words. We have the ability to memorize about 3,000 words on site. Many of our students are doing that and we're really pushing them to learning to crack the code of English. So tutors go through an initial six hour training with me. Usually I do it on a Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday evening. We have a lot of young professionals that come and volunteer to be tutors in the program. So we do it six to eight-ish. And so we cover the science of reading and we cover the six type of syllables that make up all of our words and the combinations of letters and the sounds that they make and really just the first part of the curriculum that they'll be working with their student. So every student, no matter where they're at, they start at the very same level. Everyone starts at the beginning of the curriculum and then the tutors go through that curriculum based on the student. So they don't have to come up with what they're teaching next. They just follow an order of introduction and they might go through it more quickly. Like if you have a fourth grader, you might go through it much more quickly than if you're working with a first grader. So the pace is based on what the student that they're working with. But the way that they deliver the content is up to them. So we really encourage tutors to be creative and to think about different ways to incorporate movement and to incorporate their students' interests in the lessons. But the same, every tutor goes through the same basic lesson plan, each session that they meet, then which ends in reading a book aloud together. And that book is based on the student's choice. So that's also something that is very important. We are seeing that students are being restricted on what they can read by their parents and teachers and by those levels that they get at school. That's not something that we believe in. We believe that this is the time that they can be supported with their tutor and maybe they can access a text that they wouldn't be able to. Maybe something that their peers are reading and that they haven't been able to. So that's really important when we're working with our students too. Also, there's no scientific basis on those reading levels. Okay, let's talk a little bit more about how complex reading is. I think for many of us who end up in libraries, reading was something that came naturally for us. And lucky for you, if that was you, you are about in the 5% of the population that that happens. Anywhere from about 40% of students are gonna learn to read no matter what kind of instruction they receive. But what about the other 60%, what about that half that's not reading at the level that they should? So learning to read in English is really difficult. So we use our eyes to read, but the starting point is really sound. And in order to become a reader, you need to figure out how those sounds connect with the letters and the words on the page. And in English, we have 205 ways to spell our 44 sounds. So we're really a non-transparent language. If you just think about all the words that can kind of trip students up that are spelled, just in ways that are weird, like through, though, thorough, people, it's bananas. So some students also have the added difficulty of a reading disability like dyslexia. And those issues come in with phonemic awareness. So that's kind of really being able to distinguish what sounds are inwards. And that adds another layer of difficulty when learning to read. So we're really using a method that was developed for students with dyslexia so we can teach those students. But it's also helpful just for any kids. And it's really helpful for our multi-language speakers, some of the kids that we're maybe just trying to keep up with instruction in the classroom, in English, in the early years. We're just trying to make sure that there's no gap in that foundational knowledge and skills. But reading in English is complex for anyone, even without a reading disability. So it takes English speaking students about three years to learn to read to mastery. As compared to other languages, like if you are a child in Finland learning finished, learning to read and write, it's a transparent purely phonetic language, one symbol, one sound. Those students learn to read to mastery in about three months. So that's just another, I'm just trying to highlight how difficult the English language is when you learn to read. And so tutors, when they go through training, we're kind of making it difficult for them so that they can empathize with their students. And it is hard, it's hard to think about the language in the way that we are teaching it, but it is helpful for students who are struggling. And we're seeing some patterns of students that are coming into the program. And some of this has been pretty shocking for me. We're seeing about a third of our students do not know the alphabet and sequence when they come in the first day with their tutor. So we really think about that as a pre-literacy skill, it's something that you learn before kindergarten or in kindergarten, but we're seeing this and it's not just first graders, it's with first graders, second graders, third graders, fourth graders, and even a fifth grader. So some people argue that you don't need to know the alphabet and sequence. I'm guessing if you don't know the alphabet, there's some other pieces that are missing that go along with that that are inhibiting your reading skills. And then we're also seeing that many students are presenting as good readers, but they're memorizing, guessing words based on context of the story or skipping. And these are really strategies that poor readers use. And often these work well for students in like first and second grades when the patterns and texts are more predictable, but they fall away as students go through third and fourth and the demands of reading increase and become more difficult. Okay, so this is a little bit more about the science of reading and the simple view of reading. So we know that efficient reading occurs when strong word reading meets strong language comprehension. So this means that in order to have strong reading comprehension, a student must have the ability to sound out a word and they also must know the meaning of those words. So when students have deficits in reading, they have deficits in one of two areas. So it's the ability to sound out a word or their language comprehension, so their vocabulary and their background knowledge, or both, dual deficit. So it's more likely that a student's gonna have difficulty in the area of sounding out words in that word recognition area. So if this child has a reasonable grasp on oral comprehension and has sufficient vocabulary, then reading comprehension shouldn't be far behind. But tutors do work on building vocabulary and building background knowledge, but this isn't the primary focus of our program. The focus is really to create solid decoding skills so that students can sound out any new word that they come across. So when students increase their phonics skills, reading becomes less laborious. Students are able to move that mental energy away from sounding out the words to the reading comprehension. And so when you're in the beginning stages of reading and it's really that choppy reading, students are spending so much mental energy on just sounding out the words, they're not actually taking in and internalizing what they're reading. So when we're able to increase those skills, the comprehension also comes. So I know this is a lot about reading, a lot of information. But by looking at this in a scientific way, we're really able to consider a student-specific profile in reading, so we're able to look at where their strengths and weaknesses in reading lie. And then as a result, we're seeing some tremendous gains. So we're able to make a game plan. On average, our students are gaining over half a grade level. In the first three months and over a year and a half in the year of working with their tutor, that might not seem like a lot, but these are for students who are previously not making any progress or making really very slow progress. And we're falling further and further behind their classmates. So that progress really is quite remarkable. So we're assessing students based on benchmarks that are grade level benchmarks in the areas of alphabetic principal phonics, decoding, fluency, accuracy, spelling, and comprehension. So from the reports that we see from parents, these increases are also seen in school work and in the reading levels they get from school. And also parents are reporting that they're seeing an increase of overall confidence at home and more of a willingness to read. So we also have an assessment that we can give at the end of level two. So our curriculum is kind of split into levels. It doesn't calculate to any sort of grade level. It's just the order that we introduce concepts. But the completion of the first two levels are really what gives the students the tools they need to learn to read, to kind of reading and learning on their own. So at this point, if a tutor feels that a student's on track and they've passed the assessment, we can go ahead and graduate that student. So that's what's happening here. And then that tutor, if they wish, can move on to another student on the wait list because there is a pretty lengthy wait list. So in every classroom in the country, every library in the country, we have at least a couple of students who are just not making progress in reading or whose progress is so slow, it's really just painful for everyone involved, mostly the student. So for these students, they can be students who you have them attend story times when they're young. You have their parents read to them and continue to read to them as they get older. They're taking home books. They might even attend a reading intervention at school, but they're still not making progress. So schools can help, libraries can help, but the key really is that we're using a system or a way of instruction that's giving the students the tools that they need to crack the code on their own and then to read on their own. So when we talk about summer slide or we talk about closing the achievement gap, these are things we talk a lot about in libraries. Even when we talk about STEM programs. Arming students with solid reading and writing skills is really where we're gonna make the most impact. Since we are a book-based place, I think it is important that we arm students with those skills to read the books. So I love to talk with all of you about exploring this topic more, but if you do email me, I will give you some homework. And the first step is really APM Reports. Emily Hanford is a journalist who's done some really great audio documentaries on reading. She has a three-part series that can be found at this website, apmreports.org slash reading. That's your first homework. Really learn more about the science of reading. So you can listen to it there. You can also download it on the Educate Podcast, wherever you listen to podcasts. And thanks for being here staying to the end and having hard conversations about reading. And I think we have time for questions. Thank you. It was super interesting learning about kind of scientific approaches to teaching reading. A question that I have, so I used to work at a nonprofit that worked with youth doing literacy and writing. And we were also very heavily volunteer-based and something that I noticed was even with a pretty thorough training with our volunteer tutors, like naturally some would be kind of more effective than others or maybe would sort of more embody the kind of onboarding that we gave them. And then sometimes we also give them like refresher trainings or like, you know, they'd have questions. And I guess I'm wondering what kind of supports or check-ins you do with the volunteer tutors and like what happens if like maybe they're struggling with being able to connect or teach their student even with the curriculum provided or if maybe it's not a good fit. I'm just kind of curious about what happens with their training and then what happens if they might need extra support. Yeah, that's a really great question. So, you know, you have the tutors in a room for six hours and then you kind of lose control after they go out into the world. But at this point, the program's really high touch. So I am emailing tips and things like that to tutors about every other week. I'm emailing parents every month just kind of giving ideas of things that they can do in the sessions and also open up that space where people can ask questions, ask specific things, tell me what's going on in their sessions. And then I check in with them quarterly, like in an official way to get, to kind of update the progress of the student. But I'm always available for tutors and we're trying to do more kind of meetups with tutors so they can bounce ideas off each other, things like that. So I've got a couple of questions. The first one, is this a program that's accessible to second language learners? And then number two, are there any lessons that you learned in developing this program that might apply to adult literacy programs? Yeah, oops, that's my water bottle. Absolutely, this program is, it's really helpful for multi-language speakers or English language learners. And that's really just because we're kind of covering everything from like the most very foundational pieces and making sure that there's no gaps in that critical reading knowledge. And so for some of our students, they're missing pieces. And it's hard to know if a student has like piece one, three, and four. We don't know that they're missing two and five. So you just kind of cover it all to make sure that they have all of those pieces. And then we're also like working on creating more structure in our adult literacy program because this is a science-based way of looking at reading. I would say that probably 90% of our adult learners in our adult literacy program have some sort of reading, learning disability. Often dyslexia, it's really common, not popular. One in five, one in five people are somewhere on the spectrum of dyslexia. It's a spectrum disorder. So it's anywhere from mild to moderate to severe. So when we think about dyslexia, one in five of you in this room is somewhere on that spectrum. Mm-hmm. Thank you. I was wondering if you can talk a little bit about locally what's going on with schools. I have a child in the school district and I learned how to read through phonics and it is kind of shocking what the instruction looks like and in light of what you just shared. And I think this is really important program that the library has initiated. Like what is going on? What are the conversations with educators on the science of how children learn to read and potential changes that need to occur? Yeah, so we have some connections with school district. How reading is taught in schools is really on a school-by-school basis. SFUSD doesn't have a curriculum that everyone follows but they use Bountas and Penel. They've invested a lot of money into that and I recommend that you listen to the third podcast in this series because it really talks about multi-cuing systems and that's really what Bountas and Penel is. So it's teaching students kind of guessing habits. It's things like look at the first letter, look at the picture, what makes sense. That can work in first and second grade but what happens when those pictures fall away and students don't have the tools to read on their own. So that's what we're seeing. We're seeing that in our sessions. That's happening a lot and once those habits are formed, they're really hard to break. So we're working. We've had conversations with people at the school district. I would really like to see changes in the way that we teach reading but I think it's gonna be a slow process. And that's not to say that all of our teachers are using multi-cuing. We have some really great teachers. I have connections with teachers at the Tenderline Community School in our neighborhood here. They came to a training on their own time and we're seeing that and so there's a lot of teachers who are really working and changing their practice. Do you have any suggestions for library systems who are looking to implement something like this, like any initial program development or outreach suggestions? Yeah, I mean, so we have materials that we will share. I mean, the thing I will say is that this is time consuming and you need a dedicated person to run this program and if your system is willing to put in that effort, we're willing to train and offer the materials that we have developed. So you don't need to recreate the wheel but we are gonna put you through some homework and it does take time. So it's a lot of time and effort but the payoff is really rewarding. We have one last question. So do you have a list of recommended phonics series that libraries should own to help kids who could learn phonics and did you already share that with my collection department? So I have a list on bibliocomments that I can share with everyone and that is really decodable books. So when you're thinking about really those early readers and having students read on their own, so students kind of need both. They need parents to continue to read to them so they can build comprehension and that they can have the enjoyment of high quality literature and learn from that but when they're really starting to read on their own, they also need books that they can decode on their own. So I really recommend decodable texts rather than those leveled texts that we often see because a leveled text will have words in it that aren't necessarily decodable. Like butterfly is not decodable for a first grader who hasn't learned how to decode those. Bob books are on the decodable list. Yes. Bob books are good. Any other questions? Great. Thank you.