[00:01] Announcer:
Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Baeder. Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio.
[00:13] Justin Baeder:
I'm your host, Justin Baeder, and I'm honored to welcome to the program Dr. Sarah Frank. Sarah is the founder of Open Literacy, bringing with her two decades of working in schools and universities. She's worked as a teacher, teacher educator, and professor in elementary schools and universities across the United States, including the University of Michigan, the University of Pittsburgh, Duke and Wayne State University. She has a master's in language and literacy from Harvard and a PhD in literacy, language, and culture from the University of Michigan. And we're here today to talk about her work at Open Literacy.
[00:45] Announcer:
And now, our feature presentation.
[00:47] Justin Baeder:
Sarah, welcome to Principal Center Radio.
[00:49] Sarah Frank:
Thank you so much, Justin. I'm thrilled to be here.
[00:51] Justin Baeder:
So we're here today to talk about an idea that really started to enter my mind a couple of years ago when I spoke with Robert Slavin about proven tutoring and this idea that if we care about students who are behind their peers, who are below grade level, who are perhaps not reading at the level that they need to be reading at to make academic progress, one of the key solutions that we need to not overlook doesn't actually involve the classroom teacher, but involves a tutor. How did you get into this world of tutoring and what's your take on the role that tutoring plays in helping all students make progress?
[01:29] Sarah Frank:
I mean, Robert Slavin was truly a pioneer and he's right. Tutoring is the most high leverage intervention we have available to us. We have a ton of research on the power of tutoring, and now we have a ton of emerging research on the power of virtual tutoring. So we're really coming to an understanding that across a variety of settings, tutoring and the relationship that emerges in that both academically and personally is really quite powerful. Open literacy turned to tutoring in June of 2020, when a small district here in Pittsburgh came to us and said, we have these 18 kids who we have not seen since March. And we want to make sure that when they return to school in September, at that point, we thought we were just returning to business as usual in September.
[02:14]
We want to make sure that they feel connected to the school, that they feel like they have made some academic progress. And so we hired eight tutors and met with these 18 students virtually. At that point, because that was the only way that we could do it. And we learned quite a bit about that it was possible and that students enjoyed it and that tutors enjoyed it. As you know, we didn't return to business as usual in September of 2020. And so we continued tutoring.
[02:42]
as schools were recognizing that kids were returning with gaps or students were not returning to school, even in a hybrid setting. And so our business has grown year over year as virtual tutoring has become more commonplace in the sort of instructional landscape.
[02:59] Justin Baeder:
One of the things I noticed as an elementary principal was that we could have quite a bit of progress just from, you know, from any caring adult working with good materials, you know, following a plan that was, you know, put together by a reading intervention specialist. You know, it didn't necessarily take someone with tons of training, tons of experience to make a difference. Now you work primarily or exclusively with certified teachers. Is that correct?
[03:24] Sarah Frank:
That's true. We have a few programs where we use community-based volunteers, and I can talk about how we train those folks to work with our materials. But by and large, during school K-5 tutoring, we work with certified teachers.
[03:38] Justin Baeder:
Let's talk, if we could, a little bit about the theory of action of tutoring. How does tutoring work in the sense of... catching students up or closing gaps, because I think we tend to refer students for tutoring or want to provide students with tutoring when we sense that they're not benefiting from what we're doing in the classroom because they're behind, because they have some sort of gap, because they're not where we need them to be in order to benefit from grade level instructions. In that sense, how does tutoring work?
[04:06] Sarah Frank:
So as you think about the task of a classroom teacher of making sure all students are making at least a year of growth, the task is pretty enormous, especially if students are two grade levels behind. And so tutoring provides this amazing opportunity to sort of bring in a village that can help a classroom teacher meet that goal. Because right now the task is too hard. How can you use tutoring to say, all right, given the instructional needs in this classroom, how can we, Augment Instruction, provide many, many more at-bats? Provide 30 minutes of one-to-one tutoring four times a week. so that that student can make two years of growth and hedge towards grade level by the end of the school year.
[04:50]
So I think that's driving our theory of action is really how do we make the job of teaching doable and sustainable? And how do we use tutoring in a very strategic way to meet that goal?
[05:01] Justin Baeder:
Yeah, very well said. I think it does come down to time, right? There is simply not time in a day to teach a whole class and to catch everyone up who's behind, especially if you have a lot of students who are behind. And I think one of the things that is a challenge is sometimes we have a tutor, sometimes we have a couple of tutors, but we need more than that, right? We need more in some schools and they may not be on hand. So I think one of the innovative things that you're doing that's surprising that it works is that you're providing tutoring virtually, even for very young students.
[05:36]
Is there not a minimum age where virtual tutoring starts to work, or does it work with very young children?
[05:43] Sarah Frank:
So Open Literacy works with first grade through sixth graders. We have worked with kindergartners in the past. We found that they're not as successful online. But the first through sixth graders, I think you'd be surprised to see just how comfortable they are online. They're used to being online. Some of them went to school online for a year or even two years.
[06:02]
And so this is just something that they're quite fluent with.
[06:05] Justin Baeder:
They get used to it very quickly, even if as adults, it seems strange to us because, you know, we weren't doing things virtually as kids, but it's second nature to them. Well, talk to us a little bit about what we can accomplish in that format, because certainly, you know, we want students to make progress and we want to make sure that what we're doing is actually producing that progress. You know, how do you measure success in tutoring and how do you make sure that the kids are actually making the progress that we want them to?
[06:33] Sarah Frank:
Yeah, so we're seeing two years of growth and one year of instruction. And I think what's fascinating is in a pilot study conducted last year by an external evaluator with three online tutoring providers, with the control group being the in-person tutoring, every single online tutoring provider outperformed the in-person tutoring, which you would not expect to see, right? You would expect to see in-person as sort of the old standard. Wow is right, yeah. So I think that's just a really important touch point to say like, this is a very powerful intervention. I think that there's a couple of things that make it really powerful.
[07:10]
One is that it always happens. So open literacy provides subs. I know that's really common for our virtual tutoring providers. So if you have a tutoring session scheduled, it's going to happen unless the student is absent, but it's not going to be because of a staffing issue. So that's really key. The other thing is that for your third and fourth and fifth graders who are very behind, being able to hop online and sort of be anonymous, like with their headphones on, and maybe do phonics work that is not even close to grade level, there's a safety in that, that they can do this sort of privately with their online tutor, create that strong relationship, but they don't have to be in a group with their peers working on phonics, or maybe embarrassed by their reading level.
[07:52]
And so we saw these really great, amazing relationships develop that were real, that kids cried when tutoring was over. And so we're seeing growth, we're seeing authentic relationships, authentic, caring adult relationships. And we're seeing kids' identities as readers shift. So we do a pre and post about their perspective on reading. And the data, every single kid had stayed the same, most of whom because they already came in with a positive attitude about reading. or improve their perspective on reading.
[08:25]
How do you feel about reading at home? How do you feel about reading in school? How do you feel about reading for pleasure? All these sort of attitude questions, their attitude about reading shifted in a positive way. So that's great.
[08:36] Justin Baeder:
Now, it has always seemed to me that one of the reasons tutoring works is that kids appreciate is that kids appreciate when an adult is paying attention to them, that there's a relationship there that has a motivational role that's different than you would get from, say, an app. And I'm sure there are apps that will tutor your kids in reading, but it's not really a tutor because it's not a person. How important do you think it is to have that person? And I mean, it sounds like that personal relationship still happens even though it's virtual. Does it work the same way as it would in person?
[09:12] Sarah Frank:
A hundred percent. I mean, we do think there's a role for AI tutors. As you think about typically developing students, maybe in tier one, like 40% of kids are going to read with no matter what kind of instruction they provide. That's I think who that those AI tutors are going to really be for. For our students who are in tier two or tier three instruction and need a high level of support, that one-on-one attention, they love it. You know, it's like, The only time during the day when they are the center of the universe.
[09:45]
In a classroom of 26 kids or more, that's just not going to happen. There's a lot going on. There's a lot of need. There's a lot of noise. And in this one-to-one setting, that's all just quieted. And they get the full attention of that tutor.
[09:59] Justin Baeder:
Well, Sarah, one thing I recall coming from a very high performing elementary school prior to when I was a principal, I worked in a extremely high performing school that had quite a few tutors who would work pretty intensively with a small number of students. And I think one of the reasons that system worked so well at keeping students from falling through the cracks was that there weren't very many students. It was only a handful of students in each class and there were enough tutors to go around. And it strikes me that today we have kind of the opposite problem, right? In the classic RTI model, you have 85% of students who benefit entirely from tier one instruction, and that's fine for them. And then you have 15% who need tier two or tier three.
[10:39]
But a lot of educators today look at those numbers and say, well, it's not 15% of my class that needs something more. It's a lot more. We're seeing very, very different numbers today for a variety of reasons. We're seeing concentration of those numbers in some classrooms and schools. And the idea of having, say, four tutors who can serve an entire school just doesn't really seem feasible anymore because that's not where our number are. We have a lot more students who need help.
[11:05]
So how do you think about that problem of scale and that problem of being able to actually meet the need with more than just one or two people?
[11:12] Sarah Frank:
Yeah, I think that the principals that are listening would be dancing in the street if their numbers were 85, 15, and 5 across their MTSS system. And that is where I think we can get to. We know that 95% of students can learn to read well with really good instruction. And so I think you need to think about a system that takes sort of like your inverted pyramid where you have, you know, many more than 5% in tier three and tier two and tier one. And as you use, you know, maybe you have 60 tutoring seats for three years and then you have 40 tutoring seats for two years and then you have, 20 tutoring seats, you know, for the long haul. So it is about creating instructional systems that allow you to shift that equation so that you can build towards.
[12:00]
I mean, I think we're seeing, you know, the University of Florida Literacy Institute has an amazing tier one phonics program. And you're seeing schools, you know, working in K1 and 2 to start to shift that equation. Those schools with a strong tier one, and there's other great strong tier one programs, As we're shifting the equation and the quality of the instruction in tier one and using tutoring in tiers two and three, we can shift so that we can sort of right size the challenge of meeting all students' needs. And our goal is to not to entirely put ourselves out of business, but to participate in that right sizing and then be in it for the long haul, become just part of the landscape in sort of a boring, sustainable way. And there's always 20 virtual tutoring seats. That's part of a principal strategy to year after year after year be that high-performing school.
[12:55] Justin Baeder:
And I think one of the reasons that we are reluctant to... put serious effort behind tutoring is that we feel like we should be hitting those classic RTI numbers. We feel like we're failing to address tier one if we have lots of students who need tutoring. And every time I talk about RTI, people say, well, if you have more than 15% of your students who are at tier two or tier three, that's a tier one problem.
[13:20]
And I don't want to say that that's never true, but the reality is your tier one can be really, really solid. And if you have kids who are chronically absent, the best instruction in the world isn't going to meet the needs of kids who just aren't there. Or if you have students who come in from other schools, maybe they just arrived in your school, fixing tier one two years ago didn't do anything for those kids because they weren't here. So we're always going to have kids who need extra help. We're always going to have kids who are behind. And I think one of the things we've really got to come to grips with is just how much does this cost?
[13:50]
Like if we're really serious about ensuring that all kids are readers in elementary school, like it's going to cost some money. It is going to not cost zero, but it's also going to be doable at scale. I truly believe that, that this is not some sort of pie in the sky dream. I believe that we can get all students to read, or as you said, virtually all students. We might have a few students who have individual struggles and will continue to need support throughout their school career. But I mean, pretty much this is a problem we know how to solve, correct?
[14:23] Sarah Frank:
It is. And you can spend now or you can spend later. It's way easier to get kids to grade level in K through five than it is to get a high school non-reader to both learn to read and graduate high school. So investing when the landscape and the terrain is manageable, you know, is going to save you money in the long term. I know that that probably, you know, doesn't look great as people are managing their budgets because they're like, here's this huge investment. But it's like, well, you can invest here or you can just spread it out overall.
[14:56]
You know, like you're going to spend the money somewhere. And so why not do it where it's best for kids and best for their life outcomes? We are already spending a ton of money on intervention. And I think that's really important for us to remember. So how are we using Title I and Title II and Title IV funds in strategic ways? You know, if you're spending a ton of money on ineffective tutoring, you know, over three years, why not, you know, find an effective intervention, spend that money on tutoring.
[15:24]
Maybe it costs twice as much, but you get twice the outcome.
[15:28] Justin Baeder:
Well, Sarah, I've really enjoyed this conversation about tutoring and about getting all students up to where they need to be in reading. People want to learn more about your organization or get in touch with you. Where's the best place for them to go?
[15:38] Sarah Frank:
You can learn more about us at openliteracy.com and you can email me directly at sarah, with an H, at openliteracy.com.
[15:46] Justin Baeder:
Sarah Frank, thank you so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio. It's been a pleasure.
[15:49] Sarah Frank:
Thanks, Justin.
[15:51] Announcer:
Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.
