Episode Transcript

Announcer: This podcast is produced by Benchmark Education.

Kevin Carlson: Success. What does it look like in early literacy instruction and how does a district establish, create, and maintain the outcomes that it wants for students and teachers?

In this episode: “Explicit Phonics Instruction: A District's Path to English Learner Success.”

I'm Kevin Carlson and this is Teachers Talk Shop.

Brenna Austin: We're just so proud of our teachers and our students. Not about necessarily what they've achieved, but about how much they've grown. And that means our teachers, as well. Like, they're growing as well as the students. We have to remember it's a marathon, not a sprint. That we just keep going.

Kevin Carlson: That is Dr. Brenna Austin. She's one of three literacy leaders you'll meet from Kennett Consolidated School District in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania.

You'll hear more from Brenna, along with her colleagues, Jennifer Miller and Dr. Heather Collins, and you'll learn more details about them soon. But these three were not the only people involved in what happened at KCSD. The effort was wide ranging and so were the results—the percentage of English learners in grades 1 through 5 who were on track to proficiency grew from 7% to 55%.

Recently, Benchmark Education's Dr. Jennifer Nigh spoke with Brenna, Jennifer, and Heather to learn more.

Dr. Jennifer Nigh: I am so excited today because we have three amazing educators that are joining us, and I'm super excited because I've had the opportunity to learn from them and also hear the amazing successes they've had in their school district. And they're going to tell us a little bit about those successes. But tell us what's happened since then. So let's go ahead and dive into this conversation.

So ladies, tell me a little bit about yourself. Heather, let's start with you.

Dr. Heather Collins: Good morning. Heather Collins, I'm the Director of Teaching, and we have a really interesting district in our area. We are the mushroom capital of the world.

Dr. Jennifer Nigh: Tell me a little bit more about that.

Dr. Heather Collins: We grow the most mushrooms. We are one of the top, or if not number-one, largest distributor of mushrooms. So when you are eating mushrooms across the country, or even in the world, you're probably eating mushrooms that come from Kennett Square, Pennsylvania.

Dr. Jennifer Nigh: I love that. I'm going to remember that forever now. Every time I eat mushrooms, I'm going to remember Kennett Square. Fabulous. Thank you for sharing that.

Dr. Heather Collins: We also have—about 42% of our district also is Second Language learners. So we focus not only on all of our students, and that's in our mission and vision, but we also have a special population that we have been working to craft programing for. And so that's what we're excited to talk about today.

Dr. Jennifer Nigh: All right! Brenna, you want to tell us a little bit more about yourself?

Brenna Austin: Hi, I'm Brenna Austin. I'm the Supervisor of English Language Development in Kennett. I'm starting my 22nd year in education, all in Kennett, which I'm very proud of.

Dr. Jennifer Nigh: Fabulous.

Dr. Heather Collins: I was a Spanish teacher for 12 years at our middle school. I spent five years as an assistant principal at Kennett Middle School, our only middle school, and then moved into this role in the Curriculum Department.

Dr. Jennifer Nigh: Thank you very much, Brenna. Jen, how about you? Introduce yourself to us.

Jennifer Miller: All right. Good morning. I'm Jen Miller, the Supervisor of Elementary Curriculum here for Kennett. We have three elementary buildings and a kindergarten center. I've been with the district for 19 years. I taught at one of our elementary buildings for 16 years and then moved into this role two years ago.

Dr. Jennifer Nigh: Great. Well, welcome. Thank you all so much for being here.

So let's kind of go back in time a little bit and talk about your success story. Tell me a little bit about that. What happened before 2023 that was such a success for you all? Heather, do you want to tell us a little bit about that?

Dr. Heather Collins: Sure. Before 2023, we were coming out of Covid, of course, and the pandemic, also evaluating our literacy instruction, we were hearing and seeing a lot of things that we were in a balanced literacy system at the time. Science of Reading was coming around, and we were doing a lot of research. And so really looking at our data and realizing that K-12, we had a literacy issue that we needed to work on. So around that time, we had components of comprehension pieces of writing in. But what we were missing, particularly at the elementary level, our data was showing that we needed to work on phonics and phonemic awareness, early literacy, those pieces. And so we formed—we always form committees here in Kennett to involve our educators—formed a committee to review lots of a variety of phonics programs, just to ensure. But we also took it through the lens of, “What do our students need here in Kennett?”.

So at that time, the committee selected Benchmark Phonics and we started professional development and started moving that in and started also realizing that we needed a level of professional development for our educators. So we moved in the program first and did some of the program-level professional development. So that's where we started.

But, you know, that's not where we ended. But that's where we saw a lot of success with our students, because prior to that, I can't guarantee that we were providing phonics instruction at a level that our students really were showing gains—or if at all. It had been—I want to say 3 or 4 years, I think Jen will speak to that too—before we had even had a program for the teachers to utilize for phonics instruction. And so that's kind of where our success story spawned out of and the reason why we have seen such growth in our students.

Dr. Jennifer Nigh: Yeah, that's really interesting. And I think, I know for sure you're not alone, right? So many districts in schools have faced the same thing, like doing really good pieces of things, but maybe not having that systematic approach. And what I love that you all did is that you used the data to make that decision. It wasn't just, “Let's try this new trend” or “Let's do this”—you used the data to inform what you needed to do. And I really want to dive into that professional development piece in a little bit, too, because I think that is such an important equation that oftentimes, I don't know if it gets missed, but it maybe doesn't get the full time and dedication that it really needs and deserves for that success. So that's great.

Dr. Heather Collins: I think one thing that—and I know we're not alone because a lot of people have lots of conversations—but I think one thing that's easy to miss, that we did a nice job with, is really paying attention to K-12. At our high school, we have—and I know we're not alone when we say this—we have a lot of students who are struggling with reading skills. And so really looking at those skills and back mapping where does that start. And so I think it's easy to say when you have a middle school or high school reading issue, then you put all your efforts there, your best efforts, or you funnel a lot of money. What our district committed to, and our team, is understanding that if we were going to work on literacy, we needed to start at our foundation and the best had to come in through the elementary. And I know Brenda will speak to the data about that, but we had to put systems in place and get our elementary teams a product that was explicit and gave them everything they needed so also we don't lose educators, because we're exhausting them with trying to find resources. So trying to give them what they need. And so I think that was also a huge approach. It was a different way to look at it, but that was another piece of data that we utilized.

Kevin Carlson: After the break: Digging in to the data. Stay with us.

Mid-roll Announcer: There is one program that addresses all your phonics needs. Designed for Tier 1 and Tier 2 instruction in grades K through 5. Based on the latest Science of Reading research and aligned to the tenets of structured literacy. This is Benchmark Phonics. Developed by early reading specialist Wiley Blevins, Benchmark Phonics is packed with explicit systematic print and digital instruction, including daily reading and writing for students, a Teacher's Resource System with weekly cumulative assessments, multimodal manipulatives, point-of-use professional development, and much more.

Find out more at Benchmark Phonics dot com.

Dr. Jennifer Nigh: Jen or Brenna, anything you want to add to that?

Jennifer Miller: I think with all of that, when Heather was saying we found Benchmark Phonics and like, that was kind of step one in this process of almost—there's no other better words to say, but like, kind of digging out of a hole to get the instruction to our students that we needed.

We didn't have explicit phonics instruction for multiple years happening, and we were seeing those deficits in our students as they went into secondary school. So what happened was, we really spent not only a lot of time exploring Benchmark Phonics and getting deeper in that program, but really spending time with our teachers on giving them the background knowledge in the Science of Reading to make decisions, instructional decisions, in their classrooms so that they can support their students.

We did a lot of work, in addition, with the standards again, really taking a look at our state standards and making sure that the programs that we were putting in place and the curriculum that we were writing was rooted in those standards and what we needed to do to address them. A lot of teachers often were saying they didn't want to just follow the program, but they wanted to know the why behind the instruction. They wanted to understand how the phonics lessons unfolded and why they needed to teach things a certain way to students and what happens when a student didn't understand something. So it really was a nice dovetail of two things happening.

We adopted Benchmark Phonics, but then also really pushed ahead in the Science of Reading. And they worked really well together. And we saw a huge amount of success in a short amount of time, which is kind of how we wound up with this success story, which kind of leads us to what to Brenna and how we kind of went down this story, because it was like, by accident that we really, really sat and thought like, “What is it that is impacting our EL population so significantly?”

Dr. Jennifer Nigh: That's great. Brenna, do you want to talk a bit to that? What Jen just mentioned about the EL population in your school and that success as part of this?

Brenna Austin: Sure. So districtwide, we have 4000 students. As Heather mentioned, half of those students are Hispanic, they come from Mexico, Guatemala and some other Hispanic countries, and 20% of those students are English learners. Some of them might have been former English learners as well, or some just come from bilingual households or are bilingual themselves. So we have 800 students who are active English learners. And the state measures their growth goals each year. So they take an access test each January. And each year, they're supposed to make incremental growth in order to achieve proficiency. So about four years ago, 90% of our kids were not making their growth goals. That's scary, right? So the teachers are craving change, the data is saying we need to make a change. Then we implement a phonics program, which was great. And by two years later, 60% of our kids were making—

Dr. Jennifer Nigh: That's incredible.

Brenna Austin: It was so great.

Dr. Jennifer Nigh: That's amazing.

Brenna Austin: I know that some districts wouldn't be celebrating 60%, but for us, from going from 90% not making it to now only 60% not making it…

So I have a yearly meeting with our data management program team that we contract with. And he said, “Can I just ask you one question?” And I was like, “Yeah, sure.” And he’s like, “What did you guys do? What was it?”

Dr. Jennifer Nigh: “Did you find that magic bullet?”

Brenna Austin: Yeah, I was like, “Well, we started teaching phonics again!” I mean, it wasn't like anything, you know? And I was telling that to our Benchmark reps, Molly and Lynn. And then that's when they were like, “Can we do this story, can we do the success story?” So that's really where that came from. And I'm happy to report that the number went down again. We're at 50% of our kids making their growth goals.

Dr. Jennifer Nigh: That deserves so much celebration. So what's happened since 2023? And it sounds like that trajectory, which I remember when we talked about your success story originally, we kind of concluded, like, “We're just starting. Like, we've got so much more to accomplish.” And it sounds like that is absolutely happening. So tell me a little bit more about what's happened since 2023 and what has led you to even better successes.

Dr. Heather Collins: Yeah. So I think what also we've worked on is, we started a literacy stakeholder team. And so that includes our administrators. We have our educators with us. And so we developed, really, guiding principles around literacy. If we're going to be a literacy focused district, what does that look like? We added in the remaining materials from Benchmark to leverage out the balanced literacy because we realized we could not have—and that was a tough conversation that day. It's like you couldn't have one foot in Science of Reading and structured literacy, and you couldn't have another foot in balanced literacy. And so we took time and really dove into, “What do we need? What do we not have?” And then we defined curriculum. We really defined, “What does curriculum mean?” It's not a program, it's an entire package, an experience for kids. And so we've just been working on being very responsive to our educators, just ensuring that they knew the why, how things are leveraging, but to Jen's point that they know how to make teacher decisions and when they're in time and they have the ability to do that.

So we're still continuing professional development. We're doing coaching around reading. We're doing a lot of getting deeper in the science and really ensuring that the professional development is what needs to happen. We changed up our universal screener from this work, to give us more data and deeper data and give us more diagnostic assessments. So while we're running things and staying not just—we needed the right data. And so I think that was something that we—it was a really tough time to have that conversation and when you have to make so much change. But the group decided that, they picked, they selected that. So those are things we've been working on. Just a few, because it's a lot. But I know Jen and Brenna will share too.

Dr. Jennifer Nigh: One thing I want to comment on is that, just listening to your story and how your journey is continuing is—you've instilled excellent change management. And because, change is not easy, right? Like, nobody likes change. And especially I think as any teacher—I used to teach—you're in there and doing everything that you feel is best for those students. And when your practices have to shift because we know that there are better ways of doing things, that's not easy. And that probably, like you said, led to some difficult conversations, is giving up something that you may have been doing for a really long time to a new way of doing things that's led by data. But you've really captured that change management, I think, in the way that you empowered teachers and the way that you created collaboration. And you just mentioned you created this, what did you call it, like a literacy…?

Dr. Heather Collins: That's our literacy stakeholder team.

Dr. Jennifer Nigh: Literacy stakeholder team. So it's showing the value that you're placing on this, but yet the support that you're there to provide. So to me, that collaboration, that professional development, is such a key because no one curriculum is going to do it. No one instructional practice is going to do it all. It takes all of these pieces to really help cultivate effective teachers that are going to then create that change.

Kevin Carlson: After the break: PD at KCSD. Stay with us.

Mid-roll Announcer: Phonics instruction. It's key to every child's ability to read. For students in grades K to 5 who need extra support, there is a new program for Tier 3 intervention: Benchmark Phonics Intervention. Developed with literacy expert Wiley Blevins, Phonics Intervention is based on current Science of Reading research and aligns with the tenets of structured literacy. The print and digital materials include a wealth of decodable texts, Teachers Guides that support English learners and students with dyslexia, point-of-use professional development, and other explicit, systematic, multimodal tools to help accelerate students to literacy growth and mastery. 

Learn more at Benchmark Phonics dot com.

Dr. Jennifer Nigh: Jen, tell us a little bit even more about that professional development, because it's such an important part of your equation and I think for schools that are making this same transition for them also.

Jennifer Miller: I think one of the things that helped us is that we started the PD in a very focused manner, with our youngest learners and their teachers in kindergarten, because then people saw the results. So we had two things going on: We had our ELs seeing more success with the implementation of explicit phonics instruction, but we also had our entire kindergarten population growing, so people saw that results were happening and that that's where the change was stemming from. So this past August, just last week, when we brought the entire teaching staff back, there was some hesitation and reservation about jumping fully into using materials that are Science of Reading-aligned and abandoning some of those balanced literacy practices, moving away from guided reading to small-group instruction focused on skills.

But the great thing is, by the afternoon of our PD session, teachers were seeing that big picture. They're like, “Oh my goodness, this all makes sense. It fits together. The comprehension goes with the phonics instruction and the small group resources support what I'm teaching to my whole group.” And then we had that leg to stand on, that these kindergarteners coming up were doing that for a full year. They were getting coaching with a Science of Reading-trained coach. And they were seeing students blend words earlier than ever. So it was exciting to see it come together a little bit, and it was just day one of getting it started.

Dr. Jennifer Nigh:  But that's incredible. Day one is pretty good! (laughter)

Jennifer Miller: By midday to have so many people turn around and say, “Okay, we can do this,” is an exciting way to start the school year.

Dr. Jennifer Nigh: Absolutely. And you mentioned before the why behind things. That seems to be coming through in all that you're doing. It's not just how and “do this, use this, do this, use that.” It's the “here's why this is important for us to adopt and use.” And I don't know in professional development if we dig that deep into that typically, and if we do, what a difference that could make.

Brenna, I know you focus a lot on multilingual learners. How about that with the teachers and understanding the why to support that population of students?

Brenna Austin: I think, actually, with our ESL specialists, they are certified K through 12. So those who tend to work with our youngest learners probably had background in elementary education. But the ones who work at secondary have background sometimes in foreign language or another subject, a subject specific to a content area. So for them, I think they understand the why. But sometimes our secondary EL teachers don't understand the how. And that's a vulnerability thing for them too, because they're like, “I've never learned how to teach a kid how to read, but we have older learners now coming to us with gaps in their education who need to know how to read.” And it's like a vulnerability to say, as a teacher, “I don't know how to do that.” Like, “I know what language instruction looks like, but I don't know how to teach a child. I don't even know what the word decoding might mean,” or something like that. And it takes a lot of vulnerability for them to say that. So I remember bringing some of our high school English learner teachers down to the elementary school, and we went into a Benchmark Phonics Intervention lesson, and they're like, “Oh my God, this is exactly what our kids need!” But I remember them saying that the materials weren't appropriate for the kids, because “we have 16-year-old students who don't know how to read,” and they can't use this book that has, I always say, pictures of baby turtles in it.

Dr. Jennifer Nigh: Baby books.

Brenna Austin: Yeah, like, cartoon turtles. So they were prepared to take the text and then go find actual pictures of turtles and use it for them. And that's when we talked to our rep who said, “Have you guys ever heard about Benchmark RIGOR?” And we were like, “What? No!” So it all kind of came together and we started using RIGOR at the middle school and high school, and it's made a ton of difference.

So I think for them, they understand the why. They know that these kids need to learn, but they didn't understand the how, actually. So we've been leveraging our elementary teachers as experts for our secondary teachers to really teach them all about that, and then we've actually hired some of our elementary teachers in the multilingual academy that we have for our newcomer students at the middle school and high school, because they have that expert knowledge of teaching kids how to read.

Dr. Jennifer Nigh: Yeah, that's a really, really important point, because—whether we're talking about multilingual learners or just the immense population of students in those middle and high school grades that are not reading nearly at grade level but need to access grade level content. And you mentioned that's a vulnerability for teachers to mention that, to say that out loud, but you created a space where it was safe for them to do that and then provided a solution to help them be able to meet those students’ needs.

I have two high schoolers and that's something I feel is really challenging for these teachers today, because they're experts in their content, right? I mean, they really know how to teach biology. But like you said, what do you do with the child that comes into that classroom and needs to know those standards associated with that content, but can't access the actual content? So I love that you took your experts in-house, your elementary teachers, and used them to support that. So that's wonderful. 

Let’s talk a little bit more about those experienced teachers, and were there any other ways that you leveraged them through this process? Because, again, they're the ones that have been, maybe, doing what they've been doing for a really long time, and they're amazing teachers, but needed to make a shift, and that's not always easy. So how did you tackle that?

Dr. Heather Collins: So I think one of the things that—when the whole Science of Reading movement was coming, and so when we were looking at the phonics and looking at what we needed to do, we had a realization. And if you think about it this way, then you're like, “Okay, this makes sense.” We have experienced teachers who have had, so for them they'll say, “Oh, we're going back to what we used to do.” So they have had a level of training that has come before balanced literacy. It was the explicit instruction. And so leveraging them to—so it was a different kind of way to address our experienced teachers when they say, “Oh, the pendulum is swinging.” You know, we've heard that. I know everyone has, like, a pendulum swinging back to this. But leveraging them to say, “Okay, we're going back to best practice, but we're going to get even better, because now we have 20 years of research to say, ‘How do kids actually learn to read?’” So for them, it's getting deeper in their why and not just giving them a program and say, “Just go teach it,” right? We were really adamant that we were going to, but we utilized some of our most experienced teachers and reading team to help support and deliver the professional development, but then also realizing that we had another level of teacher like in that—depending on when they finished their coursework, they've only ever been trained in balanced literacy. So that was a different conversation to say, because they're very tied to that, to say why we needed to change.

So the why became different based on the groups of educators. But I think that was our biggest “aha” of sitting there listening and then thinking about when are educators—like, I think about myself and the people on this call. We've been doing this a long time, what kind of training we had compared to our current teachers and workforce, and then with the teacher workforce the way it is, then ensuring that our newest teachers, who may not have always had—so we really crafted a layer of professional development, and it's not perfect by any means because we still get, “Well, we're doing this way,” and we still get these questions. But I think paying attention to that was important and continues to need to be important when we talk about our teachers feeling confident in moving forward and listening to them and really being in tune with what they need, I think is important.

Dr. Jennifer Nigh: I think at some point in our conversation, all three of you mentioned research, and I think back to—so I was, my first year of teaching was about 23 years ago, something like that. So it's been a while. But I think back to those years when I was in the classroom and I didn't know what I didn't know, but I know I wasn't reading research to determine the validity or efficacy of what I was using or what I was doing. And I really think that that is a big shift for a lot of teachers, and I think it's a good shift, but I think it's also one that needs to be handled delicately because we know teachers don't have time to sit and read 50-page research articles and everything. So how did you handle that? How did you bring in research to the practices that you are all implementing now?

Dr. Heather Collins: I would say the way we've leveraged it is we have, we are a professional learning community district, and we are still in the infancy stages of that too. But we have the ability to work with collaborative teams with our educators as well as our literacy stakeholder team. So we leveraged a lot of the research in that way initially. And we did a little bit each time. We also did modules around the Science of Reading. And so we talked about, what is the Science of Reading? And we had, just like every other district probably, too, we had snow hours to make up. And so we utilized that kind of—so really, taking advantage of the time that teachers are with us during the day and not taxing them before after was important, but also giving them a little bit each time and then go and do something with it, was important because it has to feel—and we all know this, we need to be able to read something and then do something with it. And so then how do I apply that? So I've read it now, I now know about the four-part process—now how does that apply in my instruction? And so that is one example of how we have tried to leverage it, and utilizing articles, quick reads, but also capitalizing on our professional development days was important to us, so that we don't exhaust our teaching staff.

Dr. Jennifer Nigh: Back to that key element: Professional learning and leveraging it in different ways. Your professional development is definitely not the beginning-of-the-year or middle-year, one-day sit and get and move on. You really have that sustained, scaffolded, embedded PD woven throughout your time here and your journey. One of the things kind of along that lines, but I know something that you all have mentioned before is that, this isn't happening overnight. This is something that is a sustained journey. Brenna, I think you actually made that comment that, in the success story that we're just starting this journey and this is sustained. Can you talk about the importance of that? Why this is not an overnight thing and schools going on this journey, we can't expect that it's going to change overnight or even in one school year? And to your point about your initial data, some people saying, “Oh, well, 60% isn't great.” Well, it is when that's happened over a short period of time. And it used to be 90%. So how important is that recognition in that message to your teaching staff that we recognize this isn't happening overnight and this is a long-term journey?

Brenna Austin: I think just because they're kids, they're so different from day to day, right? Year to year. These are not the same kids that we taught ten years ago, five years ago, pre-Covid, post-Covid. Like, it is just so different, and we're also getting a different type of EL coming to us. The ELs coming to us from Guatemala, we've had to do a lot of research into what school looks like in Guatemala. It's very different than school in Mexico—how long kids are going to school, what languages they're learning there. They're just different kids, right? And so we're just trying different things. And so it's going to take a long time—not a long time, but it's going to take—

Dr. Jennifer Nigh: One step at a time.

Brenna Austin: One step at a time. But I think just having a seat at the table has been an important part for the ELD teachers, English language development teachers. Jen and Heather have made sure that ELD teachers have been part of every committee, every professional development. They get the same materials as the classroom teachers. One of our service models for ELD is co-teaching, and so we really feel like the service should come to the kids, not the kids going to the service all the time. So for that, they need to be seen as a classroom teacher who gets all the same professional development, the same materials as that teacher, really making them feel part of the process and the PD. So I think that has been an important part of it, as well.

Dr. Jennifer Nigh: Yeah, that's a really good point. Because unfortunately, you hear that a lot, is that there's sometimes this separation or this perception of separation and what you're doing as part, again, another piece of this big puzzle, there's lots of pieces to this puzzle, is creating this kind of level space where we're all equal here, trying to support the needs of this student and creating that collaboration, I can imagine, only creates better consistency across instruction with those teachers, whether it's in the classroom or whether it's with the multilingual learner teachers and whatnot.

Brenna Austin: One of the things that we say to our new teachers, and that we did at our professional development for ELD the other day, is a kind of joke with them a little bit and say, “Let's give a hand to our language teachers, stand up if you're a language teacher,” and, like, the Spanish teacher will stand up and the French teacher and maybe the ELD teachers and I'm like, “No, come on, I need to see more.” And then eventually I'm like, “Everybody stand!” And we say, “In Kennett, everyone is a language teacher, every single teacher is responsible for the language teaching of our students. It has to be part of everything that we do in health class, music class, math, history. There's a language of all of that.” And we ask them to have a language lens on all of their assignments. So, “What kind of linguistic blind spots might you see in this assignment or this project or this assessment for our students?” And I think that has helped know that it's not just the ELA teachers’ responsibility or the classroom teachers’ responsibility to teach language, it's all of our responsibility.

Dr. Jennifer Nigh: Yeah, I love that. That's a fabulous kind of tie-up to our conversation because I think, to your point, everyone's a language teacher—and this is part of change too, but I think everyone's a literacy teacher now too. Because back to your point about having, the eighth-grade science teacher who wasn't taught to teach reading and writing, that wasn't part of what they learned and what they were expected to do. But as you mentioned, kids are different now. Schools are different now. Times are different now. And that requires a new lens on how we approach what we're doing in our schools and in our classrooms. And you all have been on an incredible journey and have had so many successes that I know will continue, and done such an amazing job of just taking those many pieces of the puzzle and looking at data and looking at research, bringing together teachers in collaborative ways for sustained professional learning, and creating new change through curriculum is really, really an incredible feat. So I know a lot of schools can certainly learn from your journey. So I appreciate you all sharing that. Is there any last words that you would like to share with our listeners today?

Jennifer Miller: One thing I was thinking, it's been a messy journey. And sometimes in the daily grind of the day and with everything going on, we're like, “Oh my goodness, are we making any progress? Are we getting there?” But it's situations like this and times when we get to speak to others, or times when we sit down and reflect—it's messy work, but we are seeing the steady progress. And so just not to give up, because there are many days where, like, making a huge shift like this hasn't been clean. There's been times where we looked at each other and we're like, “I don't know, what are we doing?”

Dr. Jennifer Nigh: “Is it Friday yet?”

Jennifer Miller: Yeah, there's a lot of mixed—there's a lot of—I mean, we work with students. We work with teachers. We're a people profession. So there's a lot of emotions in this journey and everybody at the end of the day wants to do what's best for our students here in Kennett. And so we just have to keep telling ourselves that—that this work is for our students and we're seeing progress, but not to get lost in the daily mountain.

Dr. Heather Collins: I would also add too, like, really trying to bring—I think the biggest change in education is the continuous improvement model, right? And so we don't have 31st days —like, it shouldn't be the same thing every year. And so really trying to change that is what we're on. And so just always knowing that every year we're going to reflect and make change, but it's messy and that's a part of that process. And so I'm glad Jen mentioned that because it's not all sunshine and rainbows, most certainly. But I think teachers and educators really want to do the right thing, and so at the end of the day, we're all committed to that. And so we just kind of stick with, the continuous improvement model is really that—change is just something we should embrace, one thing we can guarantee that's going to happen. And so we just have to keep that in mind.

Dr. Jennifer Nigh: Absolutely.

Brenna Austin: And we're just so proud of our teachers and our students, and not about necessarily what they've achieved, but about how much they've grown. I don’t think we tend to look at the achievement results as much as the growth results. And that means our teachers, as well. Like, they're growing as well as the students. So you have to remember it's a marathon, not a sprint. And that we just keep going.

Dr. Jennifer Nigh: Absolutely. Great. Well, those are wonderful words of advice to end on and to each of you, Brenna, Heather, and Jen, thank you so much for sharing your success story, but also sharing the continued journey, because I know a lot of others that are going through the same process for you can learn a lot from your successes and even the recognition that, like you said, it's not all pretty, It's not all easy. But together you will get there.

Kevin Carlson: Thank you to Kennett Consolidated School District for sharing their success story. And to Brenna Austin, Jennifer Miller, and Heather Collins for helping to tell that story.

Thank you, Dr. Jennifer Nigh, and thank you for listening to Teachers Talk Shop.

If you want to read about KCSD’s growth toward proficiency for their English learners, navigate to Benchmark Education dot com, go to the Professional Learning header, and select “White Papers and Success Stories.” There, you'll find a paper called, “Explicit Phonics Instruction Moves the Needle.” Check it out and learn more.

For Benchmark Education, I'm Kevin Carlson.