 I am so excited to be here. I am still doing the analysis of the case studies. I will probably go to my grave reading case studies. Not soon, I hope. Not soon, I hope. And it is fabulous. It is truly a labor of love. There are times when I cry. I really literally cry. There are times when I am just so overwhelmed with the wonderful spirit and caring of the teachers that I read from. So before I start presenting the results, and I'm sorry, I have to apologize about the results. I have all kinds of wonderful visuals to put in them, but last night at 11 o'clock, I was still analyzing, so I had to sacrifice them, so it's just words today. Before I start, could I just get a show of hands? How many of you were part of my e-friend group this year? How many of you sent me an email at some point this year? Wow. It just makes me feel like I have such a big network. You were great. I can't say enough when we talk about the ERAs and in every district. I can't say enough about the work that you did to get the material to me. It was truly awe-inspiring, and it was almost as awe-inspiring as what I ended up with when it all came in, which was truly amazing. How many of you completed a case study? How many of you were in the project and completed a case study? That's great. They were wonderful. They are just wonderful. So I'm going to do three things in the presentation today. First of all, I'm going to show you the results for the case study kids for all the kids. And those of you who did case studies will remember that in the very last session, you were asked two really direct questions. One, how much did this child improve? And then the second question, because it's always so hard to get at this with big shots of data, the second question was what's happened to the gap? Could you tell us for this child, have they, is the gap between this child and grade level expectations bigger than it was last fall? Is it the same as it was last fall? Is it smaller or has it gone? Has it completely disappeared? And for me and all of the research and all of the things that we show in the quantitative research, that's the big one because I understand what everybody was thinking when they filled it in. And I trust that data. I really trust it because the second part of it was, tell us about it and you did. So we have an evidence-based case for how these children have changed and that's really exciting. So that's the first thing I'm gonna talk about. Then I'm going to talk about, and that's for about the 500 kids who were in case studies. Then I'm gonna talk about the qualitative analysis that we've done. After everything came in, I put together case records for each child. And those of you who were part of this will understand that that took me nearly two months because I took all the pieces that you sent and then I would find Charlie in, oh, we'll put Charlie in Fort St. John, Charlie from Charlie Lake. And I would find all the pieces that had been submitted about Charlie. So the cover sheet, right, it's back to the beginning. The, each of the times that you met and filled out the four squares about Charlie, I'd find all Charlie's entries for that. And the summary for Charlie and put it all in one folder called SD60C. Because until we could put, until I put the kids back together as cases, we couldn't analyze the case studies because we're trying, coming back, it's all about the story of one child. So you're following the story of one child and I'm trying to follow the story of 500 children. And the purpose of it all, the purpose isn't accountability. We are accountable, of course. I'll tell anybody who wants to know what we found out. But the purpose is to give you back the wonderful information you gave us. So each of you contributed, each of you who did a case study, contributed amazing information and insight into one child. My job is to take, in this case, I had 420 usable cases when I was finished, take the 420, synthesize them, read them, understand them, understand them in my bones, and then come here and say to you, here's what we learned from you. This is the deeper story. This isn't the number story. This is the story under the numbers. This is the story under everything. So everything I tell you today isn't mine, it's yours. But my job is to be the conduit that gets that information from this amazing network of fabulous teachers. And we'll go on reporting on this all year long. I haven't even started, right? I've done the big strokes analysis and I'm starting to do the big strokes presentation. But there will be times when we'll do things, we'll use the newsletter and the website to say, okay, well, there's all this stuff on one to one. How are people doing that? And we will send you a list. This is what teachers have told us about not about why or about the impact, but about how. Here are 15 waves people have found to increase one to one time for their struggling readers. Here are 22 things teachers have done to really work on, try to work from students' interests and passions. Here are 437,000, whatever. So we'll keep feeding those back to you as they came in. So I'm just the conduit, right? So to all my E-friends, I hope we're E-friends again this year and I'm sure we'll be better at it. One of the things I'm gonna do this year is spend a lot more time reading things as they come in. And because it's the second year, as Maureen keeps saying, it's so wonderful to be in the second year. Because it's the second year I know where I'm going. I didn't know last year. I couldn't come and tell you last year what I was gonna do, because I didn't know. And I knew I was gonna do the very best I could. That's what we all do. But I love the ambiguity and the exploration and I've talked to you before about when you're doing qualitative research, you take what the data gives you. So I had to see what it was going to be. And it was so much more wonderful than I ever even imagined it was going to be. Every time I looked at it, I had to think, I thought of more things I could do. So that's the background and the context. So as I said, there are three parts. First, I'm gonna show you the results for the 500. Then I'm gonna talk about the deep analysis we're doing. And we took a sample of 120 out of the 5,000 to read the full cases. We included every district. We included every single child who did not make progress, I read their case study. Every one, because we need to understand what went on there too. And then we read another hundred or I had lots of help. And then finally, the best part is you're going to hear from one of the teachers and see a video clip of a little boy who was one of our case study students. So that we bring it, so I'm kinda taking it apart. And at the end, we'll put it back together so that you see, and here's one, here's the real thing. So our big questions, senior researchers always have questions. The big questions, how students change in terms of reading. I'm not reporting on self-regulation or the social and emotional aspects, just a tiny little bit. It's there, and Deb's gonna be reporting on some of that and it will keep coming up in lots of other ways. But for this summer, we couldn't do everything. Here we said, we need to go for reading first. Our second question, what practices are associated with improved literacy as judged by teachers? So if you told us that the student you were working with made major improvement and that there was no longer a gap between that student and grade level expectations, we wanna know what you did. Wouldn't you, don't you wanna know what people did? A lot of times, and it's not an all or nothing, a lot of times if the child improved a little bit, we still wanna know what you did. I'm very curious. And then we also wanted to look, as I said, what, when a student didn't improve, and we know everybody was doing the best they could in trying everything they knew, but where those students didn't improve, what could we uncover about the students that might help to explain that? Because that may be another whole study. In order to figure that out, we had a couple of enabling questions, the first one being what our teacher's doing. And reading the case studies gives little windows into that. Sometimes people have said, why don't you just ask them about your big themes? And you know when you just directly ask people, they tell you what they think you want to hear. So sometimes it's better to go add it through the student and what's going on and just read the whole thing naturally. I told you about the data sources. So this is the graph that shows when we asked teachers in May, how much did the student you were working with improve? And they gave us evidence. Like I can't emphasize that enough. When we had teachers here who said that child made major progress, they told us how they knew. I can go to every one of those and take it to the bank. It isn't, you know, yeah, no, maybe, some of them wrote a page about how the child had improved and all of the specifics. So we had 40% of the case study students identified as having made major progress. That's amazing. Because remember the case study children are struggling children. The case study children, these aren't the high flyers that are floating through school. The case study children in most classrooms were the most vulnerable children who were having the most difficulty. And teachers identified 40% of them as having made major progress and 54% as having made some progress, which is 94% of them. And only 6% where there was little or no change. That's pretty exciting. But this is even more exciting. When we asked about the gap, because changing results for young readers to change the results, we've got to get those kids closer, right? We have to keep moving them closer. We don't have to make the gap disappear all the time, but we have to move closer. 20% of the students, the gap between the struggling, vulnerable student and grade level expectations is gone. And the student is now reading at grade level. And again, remember there's always evidence for this. And one of them that I loved reading that the teacher said we had got a new learning assistance teacher. She can't believe he was ever identified as having a problem. He's just good. 45% the gap decreased. Okay, so in the fall, from fall to spring, these children came closer to the other children. So in the fall, the expectation would have been lower and in the spring it's higher. So again, we have 65% of the case study children for whom the gap between them and grade level expectations was smaller at the end of the year than it was presumably at the end of the previous year. So clap for yourselves. That's amazing. And only that little 8% were the gap widened. So just take a minute. Turn to the person next to you and talk about what do you think about that? Or if you were part of the study, where did your case study child fall? Or if you were working with someone who was part of the study. So just for a minute. I think maybe you have to have been following in my shoes for the last 35 years. To know how exciting this is. I've been doing research. I've been working in education for much longer than most of you have lived. I have been doing research in education in BC for about 35 years. And one of the things that is just enormously frustrating to me in every study I've ever done. And in the old days, I used to chair the Plap Assessments of Reading. In every study I've ever done, we have the same finding. It just makes everybody crazy. Kids who start school with disadvantages fall further behind every year. So the gap doesn't disappear for most kids, right? The pattern in school, and as I said, it makes me crazy. It's wrong. The pattern in school is a child enters school behind developmentally for whatever reason, right? And instead of the gap, because we're a public school system in a democratic nation and we care for all kids, and I know we care for all kids, instead of school making that gap go away, it gets bigger. So what's a little gap in kindergarten, by the time I look at them in grade 10 is huge, right? It's a classic finding. I used to report every four years on reading for BC, back in the 70s and 80s, and every four years, I gave the same report. I told them I was gonna quit doing the research. You know, how are BC kids doing? Overall, BC kids are doing really well. But, kids who start school, struggling for whatever reason, the gap gets bigger every year. And that's wrong. That isn't what we're about as a public education system. And this is the first major study I've been involved in. That's province-wide. This isn't about, and I have to tell you, and I believe me, I know the data. You wouldn't wanna give me a test. This represents every single district. This isn't, oh, District A does this, and so all their kids, the gap, has disappeared. The gap disappeared. That represents about 90 kids. Those 90 kids are all over this province. They're in different grade levels. They're girls, they're boys. They're in all kinds of classrooms with all kinds of practices that their teachers care most about. And so this is like hope. This, one of the things it says is you know what? It isn't inevitable. We don't start writing them off when they're four. Yeah, it's gonna be a struggle, but you know what? It's possible. And we can bring you 100, nearly 100 kids to show you that it's possible. And it's just so exciting. It's just, you know, you just want it for every kid who struggles. So I'm gonna show you one little bit about some of the other aspects we looked at and asked teachers about, and then I'm gonna go back into this and try and give you a flavor for as we read all of these case studies, and remember these are cases that typically have five different pieces of information about a child. And they're not retrospective, those of you who are new to the project. So when we talk about the difference between October and May, we get the October stuff in October and put it in a file. We don't ask people in May to say what they thought was going on in October. We have it. We have what they did in December. We have what they said all year long. Another thing that we asked in May, and those of you who filled out the form will remember it was a little table in the middle with places to tick things. We looked at six aspects, self-regulation and several social-emotional aspects, and we asked teachers, how much did you focus on this? And then we asked them, how much progress did you see with this child? And this is the focus, right? So the blue bar means they said, I focused on it a lot or I focused on it some. And the lighter blue bar is, this was a major focus for me. So you can see that confidence is a huge issue for most teachers working with the case study kids. And I can tell you from reading the case studies, it is everywhere, right? Talking about these vulnerable kids who have no confidence and what it takes to build the confidence to create a reader. So that was a huge piece teachers worked on. Attitude and motivation came next. You know, and the two often went together. It's pretty hard when you have no confidence to be really highly motivated. And it's like, okay, I can't do it, but I'm really gonna try. It's like, really? When's the last time you felt like doing that? I can tell you a whole list of things that I can't do and I'm not gonna try. And it's amazing how my mother won't give up. Self-regulation was a very big issue for many people and in many classrooms. And social, social is cover social competence. Kids that can get along with other kids who have friends who are, so that was an emphasis. And identity, particularly around cultural identity, was less of a focus for many teachers than we expect it will be this year. Because clearly the interest in it grew along the way. You know, and as a side note, I'm working with Joe Crona developing, and there are three districts here who are involved, developing a continuum for looking at competence around personal and cultural identity. And we think that's an idea that we'll see more and more. And certainly having wonderful materials like the strong readers just makes it way easier. So that's what teachers said they were doing. What did they find out? So this is what they saw in terms of change. Look at the confidence one. So the dark bar again is there was some change in this child's confidence, right? These are individual kids. These are, like, I can find names for them. This isn't a, you know, ephemeral abstract thing. These are specific kids. And major change, right, in over 50%, a major change in their confidence. And you did that for them. And these are things that people tell you you can't do sometimes. These are the kids who, it's the oh well, right? But you did it. Growth and attitude motivation. It's interesting that these bars parallel the last ones, right, which also shows you that the more you work at something, the more likely you are to get results. These are really heartwarming results. These are really exciting results. I've been sharing them with other researchers who are working on different pieces of it. We're pretty excited about that. So turn to the person next to you and tell them if you were looking at this category of stuff, which part would be most interesting to you in your classroom? This is the essence of changing results for young readers. We don't stop there, because we wanna know why. What things helped? What was really going on? So, we did a qualitative analysis. I did a qualitative analysis of the case studies. I couldn't read all 420 that I had available. It just, at one point I thought I might. I've scanned them, right? Like if you came and talked to me about a kid, I might be able to identify them. But we did, I did a qualitative analysis where I took an in-depth look at each of 120, and I had help. And that's essentially what I've spent my summer doing. And some of you may have done some qualitative analysis at one time or another. Hardly anyone ever does it in a public project like this because quite frankly it's too expensive. It takes forever, right? It just, it really takes a long time. It's way easier to get somebody to tick off a few boxes and make a graph, right? But at the end of it, you still don't know. I've always wanted to know how you got to be a researcher. So, I started, decided from the beginning it's a small enough group that I really wanted to know that 6% where the gap got bigger. It's like what on earth is going on? Cause it's not that their teachers don't care. It's not that they're sitting out in the hall. It's not that no one's trying to teach them. But it's wrong. So what's happening there? That we could learn, or what do we still need to learn so we can help with those kids? So I took all of them and I read them all first. We took one or two from every single school district then. I went through and randomly picked from each district from the case studies I had, I took at least one. Sometimes two depended on the size of the district and how we didn't know until, I didn't know until pretty much last week how many I would actually get through cause you just keep going and I draw my sample in such a way that if I have to stop at any point it's okay, it still has integrity and move on to the next piece. I oversampled in the highly successful group because I wanted to be able to talk about them with quite a bit of confidence and if I had just taken one from every district I might have missed, so I didn't take them all but I think I ended up with 40 or 50 of them. So that was enough to get a good look. And I did have help. So Lori Irwin from Help was a sounding board for me and a consultant for me as I was designing the qualitative research. Jude King is always one of my support go-to people on this kind of research. She's busy doing case studies through a different lens in Penticton and she's a really good sounding board for me always cause we like to talk about this stuff. We've been doing this kind of research together whenever we can going way back when she was in Burnaby. Every summer Jude and I had a project where we pulled stuff out and looked at it and tried to code it. Then I had my super team and these are people who gave up parts of their summer as volunteers. This is all of the analysis of the case studies as a voluntary including mine, right? We couldn't put, if we had enough money to pay for that we'd put it back into school so you could work with more kids. We can't do that. But every now and again the universe sends you something. You know, sends you a gift and you just have to accept it. And this is the gift the universe sent me. So these people were all volunteers who spent part of their summer sitting with case studies filling out forms. We didn't have budgets, we didn't get together. So Kim Betcher was getting up at three o'clock in the morning, where are you Kim? She's tired, yeah. So Kim was up in Charlie Lake in Fort St. John getting up at three o'clock in the morning and coding a few cases before her day started and sending them to me. Penny was in the Okanagan wave, Penny. Penny was in Vernon doing the same thing. And like no getting together to train or anything. We're doing all of this electronically. I don't think we even had phone conversations. Kristen, working at the ministry between meetings, she had time between meetings. She sat down, where are you Kristen? I know you're here, over there, right? Sat down and coded case study. Maureen, because Maureen needs to know every piece of this. So I made her code. And then I did a lot. And that's how we spent our summer and our parts of our summer, and it was wonderful. How did we do it? The way, it's fairly classic in looking at qualitative data. Although I did more a priori decisions about themes than I normally would do. If we had been able to get together and work together and be in the same city and be in the same room, we might have done it a different way. But the way we were doing it, it had to be a little more tightly organized. So when you're doing qualitative analysis, you find themes. And typically you find your themes by reading through lots of the cases and seeing what comes up, what comes up, what keeps popping up. And sometimes, because you have a question in mind from the beginning, you come in with some themes that you code for. And then after you make your list of themes, you look at it and go, oh my God, nobody can code for 50 themes. So you start getting rid of them. And we got it down to 12, which is still really a lot to code for. But we only had one chance and this is what the universe gave us. So the first one that we looked at, developing a relationship, getting to know the student. So the way that we do this is we pick up a case study and we start reading through for evidence. We don't make judgments as we read them, we're just trying to read them with as an objective lens as possible, knowing that no one is totally objective. But we try, you put your prejudices and biases out on the table before you start. So I know I will always react to things that are about engagement and I know I will always react to things that are innovative because I do. And I can still be a good qualitative coder because I know that about myself and I say that about myself before I start, right? And T.S. Kirsten will always know, always notice anything about arts. And that's fine, that's true of all of us. We have all kinds of things in our background. So we go through and cut and paste into a little template. Every reference that we think is about teachers developing a relationship with a child. And we did this for a couple of reasons, we chose that one for a couple of reasons. One, it was there. It was there in spades. It was there in everything we read. The other thing is that when we had done our study a couple of years ago, that was one of the really important themes with the teachers who were working with struggling, vulnerable and struggling kids. We looked for evidence of teachers being flexible and resourceful. This is an inquiry project. An inquiry project means you're not just doing what you did yesterday or what somebody tells you to do. In an inquiry project, you're trying to solve problems, you're looking at things, you're open, you wanna do things differently. So we looked for evidence of teachers being flexible, problem solvers. We looked for evidence that teachers were considering the child's interests and passions because we know how critical that is around engagement. We know how critical that is in bringing in, again, these kids who are characterized by not being confident, are often disassociated, disaffected. So we looked for evidence that teachers were, what teachers were doing. And then, as we read through, we started to see things that came up a lot. We looked for evidence that children were getting to make choices. I know if this is the era of personalized learning, we better see some choice making because it ain't personal, people, if you have no choice. We looked for a focus on meaning. Now I have to stop and talk about that one for a little bit. I had not intended to code for meaning. So I started out with the assumption that all of the case studies assumptions are so bad. I started out with the assumption that in all of the case studies, we would see work with words in one way or another, words, letters, all of the things under pinning, decoding, and cracking the code. And we wouldn't code for it because it's there, everywhere. When you're coding, you want to code for things that have some variation. If the answer is everybody's doing this, you don't, it's hard to make a new inference. So I assume that there would be work on words everywhere, sounds, letters, however it goes, and it would be work on meaning everywhere. And it turned out that indeed it's true. Every single child in the study is getting systematic intentional work with letters and words at whatever level they're at. But it was not true that there was evidence of a focus on meaning in all of the cases. Now, when there's not evidence that doesn't mean it's not happening, just means that when a person's filling out the form, that isn't top of mind, that isn't the thing they're focusing on. So maybe every child is getting a huge dose of meaning. But in reading the case studies, we couldn't see that for every child. So we started coding for it because they will tell you, I don't want to look at her too closely, or she might start her rant now. You know, if there isn't meaning, what's the point? So that became a theme we looked for. We saw a lot, a theme that really popped to the top really quickly was teachers trying to find one-to-one support for kids. Teachers working really hard to ensure that kids got one-to-one support. We looked at changing classroom and literacy organization because in the first few we read it seemed like that would be interesting. It turned out to be not very interesting. We continued to code for it, but I'm not even going to report on it today. It turned out to be not as interesting as I thought it would be. And we looked for collaborating because after all, this is a collaborative inquiry project, right? So we thought we would see what people were saying about who they were working with, how they were working with other people. And then we looked at four things around students. And I'm not reporting on these today because I just don't have the analysis finished. But I will report on this for you the next time we meet. And when I write a written report in the next couple of weeks that will be on the website and everywhere else, I will report on these. We looked for evidence that children were experiencing the joy of reading because Maureen would never have spoken to me again if I did not include the joy of reading, right? We looked for evidence that children were developing ownership and agency in their own reading, that they were self-correcting, that they were seeing themselves as the owners of their reading. So we looked for that. We looked for self-assessment. Those two are closely related, but they were a little bit different. So we looked for what kids were saying. A lot of that, most of that came from your interviews with the kids. So we are clipping in like kids' words. And we looked for improvement. So we sat down with, you know, the way we work, we sat down with a case, we sat down with an empty template. Most of us worked electronically, I think we all did. And we just cut and pasted in and cut and pasted in. And sometimes it felt a little mechanical. And truthfully, sometimes I cried. And sometimes I was a little impatient, but not often. And our coding sheet looked like that. So then to analyze this, because at the end of this, you still have, you know, I started out with 3,000 pages, but now I have 250 pages. It's really hard to think about 250 pages, right? Like you have to keep getting things closer, because when you're doing qualitative analysis, you're looking for pattern, right? You're waiting for the pattern to come out. And so I would take all of the ones that were, for example, not meeting expectations, put them together in a table, put all the, from all the different coders, and then I could read down the column, right? So for the kids who, sorry, not meeting expectations, for the kids who, for whom the gap had widened, I could go down and read for all of those, what their teachers were saying about using their interests. What their teachers were saying about their opportunities for choice. What their teachers were saying about making meaning. What their teachers were saying about their relationship, about one to one, about all of those things. And also for each of them, what their teachers were saying about why they thought the child wasn't progressing. And so at that point, it starts to feel, you know, it comes closer. And I could do that, I can organize them, I have spreadsheets, I have indexes, I have, I can organize them by gender, I can organize them by grade, I can organize them by the teacher's perception of their results. I can organize them any way I want and read them that way. That's really good, but it's still, you know, a lot of pages. So then I make myself an index. So this is my index page. This is all of the three fours. So the threes, three means they've made major progress. And four means the gap has disappeared. Now I do this with all of them. I'm just showing you this one. I do this with all of them and I mix them up again. I have a spreadsheet, so sometimes I make sheets like this for grade ones and sometimes for girls and sometimes for kindergarten boys. I can do it anyway at all. This one happens to be done by achievement results. And I take all of the things I have and I just make myself kind of a little index. So you'll see the headings that I talked about. Relationship, interests, choices, meaning one-to-one, problem solving, collaboration, joy, ownership, self-assessment and what helped. And then I put little codes in. So yes means yes. STR means strong. Key means it was a key thing in this case study. Fam is family. I just make it up as I go along. So now I have all of these case studies into one page. Now I can start to think about it. Because I can carry it around with me. I can think about it. And I highlight. I highlight all the ones where I want to go back and look at the original because it's a really good example. It's not that it's the best case study or the best result, but it's just the teacher has explained something in a way that really is gonna be really helpful. It's gonna be a good quote. It's gonna be if I'm making a list of different ways people do things. And I don't tie the highlighting to the results. Like if it says here uses with three stars and a highlight, that just means that that teacher has described a way of using that child's interests. This seems really powerful. It doesn't mean that it worked. Means that they did it. And then I sit with the, instead of one, two, three, four to 16 down the side, I actually have their code numbers with districts. So I look at this and I go, what helped being safe supported, okay to progress at own rate, I've got it highlighted. I go back to the original and find the exact quote and put it in my list of things. And I didn't code all of these. I wasn't thinking about distinguishing. I was just trying to make myself an index. So here's our first finding. That's what the code sheet for the kids who didn't improve for whom the gap got bigger looks like. What's the first thing you notice? There's no green. I didn't set out to do this. I didn't even know I had found it until I was back looking at something else. And I went, oh my goodness. Something is better than nothing, right? That's one of our classic findings. The kids who improved a lot, it isn't the exact thing their teachers did, but they did it with such passion. Whatever the thing was the teachers were doing, they did it with such passion and commitment. And sometimes it was in the one-to-one column and sometimes it's in the advice. It could be anywhere. But when we got to these kids, there's not a lot of bright green. So I went back and read them again and I'm not suggesting these aren't good teachers because they are and they are committed, but there was never anything that was a spark because for these kids, reading was such serious business because they can't do it. Then it got kind of discouraging to read them. So that's the kind of background. And now in 15 minutes, I'm gonna whip you through what I found out. And I will. I'll just stop at any point that I get to. I'll just skip a theme. So the first thing was developing a relationship, getting to know the child, and they make you weep. It was absolutely the single most frequent thing. There is nobody filling out these case studies who hasn't gotten to know the child and built a relationship. It's just the difference is what kind of a relationship. I mean, when I say nobody, there may be a few. But really, reading them, you go, what could we say? What generalization could we make about teachers in the case study kids? Oh, man, they've built relationships with these kids. And mostly, they talk about the kids in the most positive, hopeful terms. Their attitudes towards the kids are just absolutely amazing. Our relationship has developed. He now knows our class is a safe place to try things. We are celebrating small games. In the future, he needs to be pushed with positive reinforcement and gentleness. I love this grade one girl. I can see this girl. She is smart, creative, wiggly, reader, resilient. We are friends forever. All right, I don't need an essay. Another grade three girl, I love the first she now includes herself in all our class activities. What a wonderful expression. Make that connection and let her contribute to the voice of the class. Everyone that we looked at was considering the students' interests and passions. And you know, we asked, those of you who did this, we asked you what are their interests and passions? It was not surprising that you told us. What was really different was a pattern. So we had some people in answering those kinds of questions who just listed them. She likes princesses and makeup. Sometimes, a lot of time, the teacher said, he's interested in animals. I need to get more books about animals. So really connected. And then there were some that were just astonishing where teachers looked at what the child was interested in and found the most amazing ways of making that connection for them. So one of my favorites was the teachers who had a young boy who was fascinated by BMX writing. That is his passion. So they didn't just try to find books about BMX, right? Which would be a good thing to do. Or they didn't just say, isn't it nice John's got a passion in life? They said, how can we use John's passion for BMX to help him become a reader? So they talked to, his name wasn't John, by the way. They talked to John and they made a list of things you have to do if you're gonna be a good BMX writer. What helps you get better at BMX? And then they talked to John about what helps you get better at reading from the same list. So whenever John encountered a problem, they could go back to there, they made a chart. They could go back to the BMX chart and they could connect what he was trying to do and how he was practicing in reading with his passion in life, which was BMX. It's like, yes, you have to be determined. Yes, sometimes you don't get it. Sometimes you make a mistake. Sometimes you crash. What do you do? And if it's BMX, will you do this? So what do we do if we're reading? Now school is a much friendlier place for that boy. So they did lots of things like that. That isn't the only one. There are hundreds of them. I think that was especially important for a lot of the really anxious kids that their teachers seemed to be able to go that extra mile with their interests. So here's one working on words. The teacher and child developed a personal word search, using all the words that were important to him. Then he used the document camera to share it with the class. Okay, it's word work, but oh, it was so much more comfortable. Making digital books. Continuing to draw a parallel between BMX racing. They taught teaching a boy to take pictures and make his own book. So there were lots of those. And again, so in my little code sheet, sometimes there's ticks and sometimes it says uses. And sometimes it says uses in capital letters with five great big stars. All of these are things your colleagues, you, and your colleagues are doing. They're not things in a book somewhere or, right? So we had lots of ways of enabling, lots of things teachers were doing to enable choices. I was kind of disappointed in some of the choice stuff that I saw. Some of it was great, but it did feel to me a lot like you didn't get to make choices till you could read. And so if you were still struggling with letters, you didn't get choices so much. So you got choices if you were older, you got choices if you're in grade three, you got choices if you were a good reader, but if you were really struggling, you didn't get to choose much. And I thought I didn't like that so much. A lot of choices about choosing a good fit book. And sometimes choosing a good fit book turned into a power struggle. One of my favorite ones, this is a little bit negative, but the teacher said, I need to reteach her what a good fit book is. And the kid said, I don't want to read a good fit book. I want to read a chapter book. You could teach that kid forever what a good fit book is. That's not the problem, right? She doesn't want to read it. So you have a different issue going on. One, a grade one boy that said, Ms. S, this is not a good fit book for me. There is no hockey in it. The words aren't right. I don't think it'll help me read better. A lot of times we had teachers who said I am learning a lot about choice. I'm learning how important it is. Making meaning, we have lots of people doing amazing things around making meaning. It was really interesting to look at because it is so different from one classroom in one case to another. And so there are some that are all about making meaning. And the making meaning tends to kind of clump up with choice, quite frankly. Because they're both about purpose. And in some classrooms you don't get to make a choice until you can read. It seemed like reading with a purpose might be especially important for boys. There's some gender stuff going on that I really need to poke out some more. But when I started pulling the quotes out, the really good quotes around choice, around meaning, and around interests were all about boys. They were all boys. And when the relationships won, there were both. In some of the others there were both. But those tended to be a lot. There's things like this around meaning. He especially likes finding information other people might not know. Like how Inuit people had baths, right? That's reading with a purpose. It might not be my purpose. It might not be your purpose. But it's his purpose. And then the case goes on to explain that he really didn't like to read very much at all. But if he could wow you, right? If he could find something to make everybody else go, I didn't know that! He would read it. The little girl who said reading is supposed to make sense. Another boy who's not coming along really well with the letters and sounds and all of the things around reading, the teacher said if we gave him a choice to build a rocket, he would be motivated to read the directions and complete the project independently. Wait for him to do science fair. But right now he's not. Right now he's struggling. So for him, the meaning is everything. When meaning kicks in, everything starts to happen. The quotes around one to one aren't as interesting as some of the others, but one to one was the single biggest difference maker in the eyes of teachers. If you read all of these and you came away with one message, it was find a way to get one to one support. Not help always, right? The one to one support came from everybody. There's one school, I really love the teachers and it comes into the problem solving that I'm not going to be able to show you. I really love the teachers who truly started with the end in mind. So there's one group at one school where they said okay, X needs 20 minutes of one to one time a day. How are we going to get it? Instead of saying we have support an hour a day, who are we going to give it to? They said X needs 20 minutes, where will we find it? And one of the written comments is there are a lot of resources in a school. So they just turned everybody's time into one to one time, right? You're in a classroom, you've got five minutes, go read with somebody. Don't clean up the shelves, right? Don't sort the books. Grab a kid and say hey, what are you reading, read it to me. And coming to making a huge difference for kids and probably if there was only one piece of advice in all of this, that would be it. Just amazing the resourcefulness and innovation of so many teachers. And again, a lot of it was that starting with the end in mind. This is what this child needs, how am I going to get it? Instead of saying this is what I've got, how am I going to dole it out? It's such a subtle shift but it's huge and never giving up. So back to the big questions. One of the big questions was when there is not success, when people are doing case studies and they are trying and they are doing, one teacher wrote, it just sticks with me forever. He is trying as hard as he can and I am doing everything I know. Right? That's just, it's just amazing. So what was going on? What could we tease out? Well, for low success sometimes the teacher identified that it was developmental, including language delays. And sometimes the developmental piece was really, the teacher felt was really serious and was really inhibiting and they needed a psycho ad and all of that. And sometimes the teacher just said, needs time, young, calm down everybody. And one of the quotes that I have on there, I'll see if I remember it, the teacher said, what's a teacher to do when a child's not ready for grade one? She should be in a play-based program, right? And so that's indicative of some of that. And that's a question that you can hold in your head from when you get a chance to talk. What would your answer to that be? I have some answers for that, but. Some of the kids who, for whom the gap has gotten bigger, the real issue is attendance and tardiness. And for lots of different reasons, sometimes it's illness, sometimes it's illness in the family, sometimes the teacher doesn't really know, sometimes it's tardiness. And by the time the child gets to school, the literacy blocks over, but that was the second most common thing. Remember, this isn't many kids. Some of them it's a suspected learning disability and or memory or processing issue. And in all of those cases, the teacher is saying, recommending for PsychoEd, trying to get on the list for PsychoEd, there's something. One said that I think there's something in her brain structure. We really need to figure this out. And some of them is family trauma. A little girl whose mother has really serious seizures and grandma's there, a little boy. Grandma's there looking after the children. There's a baby. If mom has a seizure, grandma has to look after the baby. And when grandma has to look after the baby, she can't do the things that the little boy needs to do to get his home reading and get to school. And it just goes on. When mom has a good day, grandma has a good day and the little boy comes to school with his lunch and all of those things are good. And it's just reality. But they stay hopeful, these teachers. So this is a student who is reported as having made little or no progress and for whom the gap is widening and this is what his teacher says. Overall, my student's confidence has remained intact even though he has made little progress. He continues to love reading. I pray this continues. His determination is a strong attribute and it will carry him through the tough times. When we find that connection for him, wow. That's just, you know, you just wanna know that person. A lot of times they're advocating for the kids. Kids who are making no progress. The teachers say, don't give up on her. Don't give up. It's gonna happen, right? Keep at it. You know, he has come so far and it would be heartbreaking to see him curled up in his hoodie withdrawn from the group like he was in September. Don't give up. Don't give up on her. She has just started to be a more successful reader and needs to have her program continued. If not you, who? If not, now, when? So, according to teachers, what worked? One-to-one support was at the top of the list. And again, a thousand different ways of getting, of the one-to-one support. Sometimes it was a gerbil. You know, really. It's just there was somebody, right? Often it was, sometimes it was a pat. It was a grandma. I started to believe that teachers were shanghai-ing people off the street. It's like, hey, I'm 20 minutes short here. How about you? Can you read? Feeling safe and supported was a theme that was really associated with success. Choice and personalization was really big for the kids who improved. Feeling a sense of control. I mean, I think it often went with the feeling safe and supported because when you have no choice, like the recipe for stress in the stress research literature is to have high stakes and no control. And for some of these kids learning to read, the stakes couldn't get any higher and they feel like they have no control at all. So it's no wonder they're stressed and then they don't learn to read. This is lovely. He is fearless to try in a supportive environment. So this is what I think. Hey, we're into the... So my sort of final words on where I am with this and I tell you, I wrote this last night at 11 o'clock. I'm not finished. But it really stands out to me that your work and your colleagues has had a huge positive impact on the most vulnerable kids in our system. It's just, and as I said, in my experience, that's very rare. Everything is connected. When we coded for different themes, but when we looked at it, it all goes together and comes back into being a child. It's not just, I'm going to increase choice today because choice is connected to personalization, isn't connected to interest and that is connected to confidence. That is connected to self-regulation and all of these things. Whatever the, wherever you pull on the string, it connects to everything else. So at some level, for teachers, it's a heartening thing is it almost doesn't matter which string you start to pull. And that's the message of all the green on the high improvement. Start to pull on something and then they all connect because it's all the same thing. Dennis Joplin was right. The commitment carrying in determination, I really, I stopped coding several times because I was crying. It's just, it's just, I can't say enough. The direction coming out of a case study, so what do we learn from the case studies that can change what we do? Regular one-to-one support is essential. If there is a child who is struggling and is not getting regular and regular people does not mean once a week. If there is a child that's struggling that's not getting someone to one time from somebody, even if it's a gerbil, their prospects of improving are pretty limited. And it's such a nice, direct, concrete thing to do. Children acquire confidence and skills in safe, supported environments. So if they're struggling with learning those letters, they're struggling with learning those sounds, if they're not feeling safe and supported, they're gonna just keep right on struggling. For some kids, grade, especially grade one isn't a very happy place. All children are receiving systematic instruction around words and letters. I did not find one that wasn't. And so when people start to go on at you about that, that battle is won. We're doing it. You don't have to convince me. You don't have to take phonemic awareness and phonics, letters and alphabet and beat me up with it. We're doing it. And we're doing it really well in a lot of places. And there's some intriguing relationships between gender and some of these things. All of the stuff around choice and meaning. And I need to work at it some more, but it popped out more around boys. So then you say, so is that because boys are so badly served in our system and it's such a girl system and we have to change it? Or is that because girls are compliant and we're just not paying attention because they're not throwing things across the room or getting up and running around the classroom as fast as they can when it doesn't, what's going on? So I need to get back in and look at that some more. So here's my very last word. It is. This is Sharon believes. The research will support me, but this isn't a direct finding of the research. I think you should not have to wait until you can read before you have fun. I think it should be unconditional for every child that walks in every day that this is gonna be fun. This is gonna be interesting. This is gonna be engaging. You can do this. It shouldn't depend. It shouldn't be conditional. You can do this when you learn to read. You can't pick a book yet because you can't read. I can't so pick a book. I can pick anything. You can't have fun because you need to go over here and learn the letters. At one point I had a batch of them and I started to think that it was no fun grade one. But then I read a whole bunch more and it was fun for lots of kids in grade one. But it sits there. It's because it's so important because we care so much. We have to be really careful that in caring so much, we don't take all the fun out of it because then who would want to do it? You know what, it should be absolutely unconditional. Having fun and being engaged in school, it shouldn't depend on whether or not your parents send your home reading books back. Right? And you can all think of the thing that it often depends on for kids. It just shouldn't depend on any of those things. It should be absolutely unconditional that every day you go to school and every day you think about reading and books, you should think about fun. And no matter what's going on, no matter anything else that's going on, you shouldn't, it should just be fun.