A Year of Reading Futures

A year ago, we launched Reading Futures to help children who struggle with reading, including those with indications of dyslexia. Our goal was to reach students who lacked access to effective intervention, especially those who have been historically underserved. We’d like to share the story of this year and our plans for the next. 

What did we do?

We found children in need. 

We served just over 100 students this year – most in public district and charter schools, a few friends and family. The majority of our students were two or more years behind in reading, at or below the 10th percentile in decoding, fluency, and comprehension. 

We served first graders who were pre-alphabetic; second graders with unstable letter sounds; third graders who couldn’t read words ending in “silent e.” Many of our students had suffered for years and were losing hope that they would ever learn to read. 

A special education coordinator from one of our partner schools described administering a universal literacy screening to one of our students:

When [he] arrived this year, it was quite alarming when we gave him a Fluency and Decoding assessment and he just sat there smiling at us for 1 solid minute, smiling at us with his goofy smile, unable to read even a single word at the 5th grade level.

These children are everywhere, suffering and struggling. We were lucky to find school leaders who were committed to helping them. In places like Muncie, Indianapolis, Rochester, Brooklyn, and San Leandro, we partnered around their students’ success. We were proud to earn their trust.

We followed the evidence. 

There are lots of ways to teach reading to struggling readers, even those with dyslexia. There are methods, programs, private schools, and learning centers. Outcomes and efficiency can vary, so we turned to the research base.

Stanford professor Dr. Jason Yeatman studies the brain: how it changes in response to intervention, how to assess reading difficulty. He joined us as our Scientific Advisor and guided us to Drs. Maryanne Wolf and Maureen Lovett. Dr. Lovett founded and leads the longest-operating lab on intervention for children with dyslexia in North America. Dr. Wolf has published some of the most profound insights on reading in a generation, including on the heterogeneity of dyslexia and the importance of meaning to fluent reading. 

They first collaborated on a large multi-site grant from NICHD, together with Dr. Robin Morris. Their team taught children with dyslexia, experimenting with reading components, teaching methods, pacing, dosage, and even group size. Over ten years, they evaluated, they iterated, they got remarkable results, and they published – first peer-reviewed papers, later programs.

We are proud to teach Dr. Wolf’s RAVE-O program, together with our own foundational skills companion program, in grades 2-4 and Dr. Lovett’s Empower Reading program in grades 5-8. We do our best to replicate the programs and methods as originally studied. We teach groups of two to four children, and we aim for 80-100 hours of individualized instruction in a year. We are especially proud to work closely with the researchers and lead teachers for these programs to bring their work to scale.

For the reading professionals out there, these are multi-component, strategy-based, metacognitive programs. We teach phonemic awareness in the context of print, continuous phonation, decoding and encoding. We teach Dr. Wolf’s “whole circuit,” activating meaning, attending to sentence structure, connecting spoken language to print. We help children select and apply strategies when reading on their own, building their confidence to take on unfamiliar text.

We hired great teachers. 

We found great teachers – and they found us. Cary Rhodes tracked me down on LinkedIn, taught last summer, and stayed on for the fall. Her husband is in the Air Force, and his redeployment from Colorado to Texas meant she traded the responsibility of running a Title I school’s RTI program for an entry-level role in a new district. For her, and for our other teachers – staying at home with young children, married to a military service member, or otherwise unable to work full time in a classroom – Reading Futures was a chance to connect with children and to contribute:

When I left the classroom last May, I was worried my next role wouldn’t carry the same weight or hold as much meaning. At Reading Futures, that hasn’t been the case at all! My work holds even more meaning because I have the resources, training, autonomy, time, and support I need as a teacher to support my students the way they need it. Despite working in a virtual setting, I have been able to build strong relationships with my students and their teachers. We have seen amazing gains, and we aren’t done yet! Teaching at Reading Futures is literally a dream come true.

Our teachers are on LinkedIn. If you’re curious what it’s like to teach here – ask one.

We found a tech model that works, and charted a course.

We went a few rounds on technology, trying virtual manipulatives, app-driven word lists, virtual whiteboards, and so on. Building on some as-yet-unpublished research and our own teaching experiences, we settled into a workbook- and reader- centric model, using technology to support virtual small-group work and tracking and reporting on student progress. Our teachers loved having an explicit curriculum and supportive tools, with room for their voices. Our students just had a lot of fun – with stories, with characters, with room to play with language.

Our technology roadmap has two key dimensions. For parents and classroom teachers, we have upgrades planned to improve the quality and usability of updates on student progress. For our students and parents, we have plans for practice activities and videos that can support a child’s progress through our scope and sequence from home.

We found logistical models that work, with room for growth.

We served students at home, in libraries and cafeterias, in resource rooms and principals’ offices. At some sites we had 12 students in a room wearing headsets; at one site we had a single student working alongside a full-time paraprofessional. 

We troubleshot challenges with noise, with distractions, with schedules, and with group dynamics. The answers, as they usually are in education, were found in relationships. We were at our best when our teachers worked closely with the instructional assistants, paraprofessionals, and teachers in the building, and we kept up a cadence of student case management with the principals. 

As we grow, we have ideas about how to do better on logistics and scheduling. But our main focus will be on the people – our partners in the school building and at home, the children at the center of our work.

We began to build a community of care.

I’ve visited with a half-dozen schools for children with dyslexia, with community-based intervention programs, with private OG tutors. I’ve visited with parents, teachers, principals, and most important, with students.

This work succeeds best when it is part of a community of care. When parents value their child’s participation in the intervention. When teachers, administrators, and staff have a clear view into student goals and progress. When literacy wins – that tricky multisyllabic word, that super fluent read – are celebrated.

Most of all, when the students feel loved and cared for. On our last day of class, we had children crying, we had teachers crying, we all had a lot of feelings about the year of work we’d put in together. 

We helped build some well-deserved reading futures.

End-of-year testing is underway, so we don’t have a full-year wrap-up. At the middle of year, we generally saw growth, with bigger gains in 2nd-5th grade than in first. 35% of second graders in one of our districts improved from “red” to “yellow” on their universal screener. In one of our charters, second graders grew from the 12th to the 19th percentile on their universal screener between the fall and the winter. And some of our older students – 5th graders – improved from reading 0-4 grade-level words correct per minute to reading 30-40 after just a few months of instruction.

We care about the data – we are measuring our work, and reacting to our results. But let’s remember the children behind every data point. Revisiting the 5th grader we met earlier:

The improvement in his reading has been fantastic since the start of this program. Beyond just his fluency and decoding improving, and giving him the access he needs to the content in order to be successful, we have seen him make strides in other ways I don’t think would have been possible if he wasn’t emerging as a reader.

His willingness to try challenging academic tasks and his desire to be a positive member of the learning community have shifted greatly since his reading has improved. He still has his moments, but he now comes to school with the mindset that he can do things, even if they aren’t yet exemplar or at grade level. This year, and his investment in this program, has given him a new lease on his education. It is as though the reset button has been hit for him and now he is beginning to be exposed to opportunities that he otherwise would not have.

He’s building his own reading future. We are honored to be a part of it.

Forward.

We have so much work to do. It’s daunting, exhausting, and endlessly rewarding.

We have some exciting forward-facing news to share – partners in our growth, opportunities for further research and development, a growing team. We’ll roll it out in the next week or two. 

For the moment: thank you for your friendship and support. Thank you to our school partners – principals, teachers, assistants – with whom we worked so closely. Thank you to our friends in the academy for helping us do the best teaching we possibly can. And thank you most of all to our teachers, who showed up every day with joy, compassion, and determination. 

Forward!

Dave Stevenson

CEO