 I would like to start off by thanking the changing results team for inviting me to speak and the Surrey School District for all of their support during the inquiry process. My name is Julia Thompson and I am a primary teacher at Mary Jane Shannon Elementary in Surrey. Last year was my first year as a classroom teacher in Canada and teaching at an inner city school. Kind of scary, but not really. Prior to this I was a learning support teacher and a grade 3 teacher in Abu Dhabi. Last September I was so excited to meet all my little learners. I did everything I knew how to prepare. I had Ziploc bags labeled with the anticipation of extra school supplies and I made math centers and I set up a writing center with shiny new pencils and crayons. I realized after the first week that I could anticipate all I wanted, but it didn't make anything come true. Half of the class came without supplies. Someone snapped all the crayons in half. The pencils were gone. A few students could read. Some didn't know what sound the letter A made. Some students were excited to be there. Others were not. One student growled at his journal. That was my reality. So when I received an email about changing results for young readers, I jumped on it. At first I thought, we can only choose one student? Can't I do this with the whole class? It took a few weeks to choose just one student with the help of the early literacy teacher. It came down to one question. Who will benefit from this the most? She asked. Dueth, I said. Why? She asked. Because it could change the rest of his life. Dueth was an interesting boy in my class. He had three brothers at Mary Jane Shannon, all of which were struggling. Dueth was in the same situation. He could not focus. He acted out. He could not participate in whole group activities or even small group activities. And he only knew three letters of the alphabet. I had a feeling that if Dueth was going to be successful, this had to be the year. This had to be the year that he became curious and an independent reader. If he could do that, it would take away a lot of the struggle I saw his older brothers going through. It would be setting him up with the tools he needed to be successful in reading, in school, and in life. In our first changing results meeting, I was asked to write down five words to describe Dueth. Being as positive as I could, I wrote down charismatic, perseverance, energetic, storyteller, and secretly sad. In the fall, Dueth's behavior was negatively impacting the class. He was always calling out. He talked to himself all of the time. He had no friends. And he struggled to focus for any length of time. After meeting as a group for changing results, I was faced with not only being very honest about Dueth, but taking a deeper look at the core issues. Questions were bounced around during collaboration time. Why isn't Dueth engaged? What is engagement? What negative behavior is he showing? Why is he acting out? And that was the question that changed everything. The one that made me understand my role as an educator of a reluctant learner. Why is Dueth acting out? He did not have the skills to participate in most of the activities we were doing as a class. The behaviors were not attention seeking. They were avoidance. What are we going to do about it? I set up as much one-to-one instruction as possible. We started with what he knew, the letters A, D, and E. Soon with the help of the early literacy teacher, the education assistant, myself, and any adult who walked into the classroom, Dueth learned the alphabet, how to blend sounds, and how to read short words. Meeting up in the changing results group month after month allowed me to listen to the success stories of other inner city teachers. We often asked ourselves, what's the next step? Some months progress was huge, sometimes small, sometimes a plateau. But the meetings helped me stay focused and always keep my inquiry question in mind. How can we use Dueth's interests to engage him in early literacy activities? I knew he loved animals, especially grassland animals. As a class we learned how G has two sounds through sounding out giraffe and graze. We read the story The Lion Who Wanted to Love, and the ERA brought in a felt board with every character. Dueth sat, frozen, listening to every sentence. He was hooked into the power of a story. In January, Dueth began participating in small group and whole group activities. He could read and sound out longer words. He loved to sound out every word in the classroom. Curiosity took over. I was reading a story one afternoon when I heard him talking to himself at the carpet. My first instinct was to do a quiet shh, but I really wondered what he was saying. Then I heard p-p-patter, patterns in the classroom. I realized he wasn't talking to himself. He was reading. The math makes sense big book sitting on the floor. I put the book down and we celebrated him as a class. I learned a lot by listening to Dueth. He read to me or another adult every day. He told the class about living in Sudan. He told me it was his job to help look for food, wash clothes, and that the first thing to do to survive is build a fire. He also told the class about war and children with weapons. I understood why I once described him as secretly sad, only now it wasn't so secret. Other students wanted to share their stories as well. Happy and sad stories. Pretty soon we became a very strong classroom community. My attention to detail with Dueth started expanding out to other students as well. I began to recognize when other students were using behavior to avoid work and I took steps back to a place where they could participate and understand. By late spring Dueth became an independent reader. He had strategies to figure out unknown words. By May he participated as a guest actor at the readers theater table during literacy centers. He loved to write stories too. By the end of the school year several things had happened that I was really hoping would. Dueth could focus during small group and whole group activities. He could read at grade level. He enjoyed reading. And some things happened that I could never have anticipated because of participating in the inquiry. Dueth gained self-esteem, understood his role as a classroom member, accepted responsibility for his learning and behavior, made friends, told the class his story, stopped acting out, saw himself as a smart person and a reader. My words to describe Dueth in the last case study in May. Confident, social, cooperative, reflective and engaged. Thank you. What do you like about books and stories? When they run and funny or not funny, they still fun. Okay. And my reading brain is still not here. And I still like and I still know how to read the books that I know that I get help. Yeah. Okay. You get help. Okay. In a tree, a hat dog. Do I see a heart? What do I see? I see a dog. All I will is give a smart reader as a listener. Dueth, what's this story called? In and out of the toy box. Okay. Can you read me a couple of pages? The children left their room today. They want to go outside before they left their room today. They put all their toys away. Thank you. What do you like about books? I like to see the pictures. Anything else? I even like to read it two times sometimes. Wonderful. What do you think you are good at when it comes to reading? Learning about the words. How do you learn about the words? The words go into my brain. So I know what to say about the words. Excellent. Okay. What makes you a good learner? Being a great reader. Being a great reader?