Alec Patton 0:04 This is high tech, high unboxed. I'm Alec Patton, and we are coming to you live from the National Summit for improvement in education, happening at the same time in San Diego as the deeper learning conference. The name of this session is the Mississippi miracle demystified, and it's being moderated by Derek Mitchell. I'm going to leave you in his capable hands from here on out. Derek Mitchell 0:29 Good morning. Good morning, everyone. It's great to see you all. Thank you for being here this morning. And would you help me welcome two of the most extraordinary young people I've met in recent weeks, who are two of the many architects of what folks are calling the Mississippi miracle, Dr Tenette Smith and Dr Elise Brown. We're going to engage in a bit of a conversation about what has happened in Mississippi, and there's an ongoing conversation in the National Coalition for the improvement in education about what constitutes thrilling results. And I don't know of another example that would be thrilling results than what has happened in the state of Mississippi. It's gone from 49th and 50th in elementary reading for decades to top 10. It's a growth that has never happened as long as is the assessments have been happening. The closest has been Kentucky. Kentucky went from the mid 30s to the top 10 what these folks have accomplished, and it took a long time and a lot of work, so it's not a miracle, which is why we why we're here to kind of decouple and demystify it. And so we're going to start first with understanding a little bit about the young people who are here with us today. So Dr Smith, one of the things we do at NC is we talk about why we're improvers. I'll model it for you, but as as I do, can you then tell us a little bit about yourself, about why you do this work, and then, and then pass the mic on. And so I'm Derek Mitchell. I'm an improver because I believe anything worth doing is worth doing well. And since nothing is done exactly right the first time you have to improve stuff in order to actually do them well. And so that's why I do what I do. That's what excites me, that what brings me joy. And I'm really happy to be here. Tenette Smith 2:32 Thank you, Derek, well, you said young people, so I thank you for that. But after you know, over 33 years of serving students and parents and the community in Mississippi, I am an improver because I believe that I've seen what happens when we underestimate children right, and conversely, I've seen how quickly the narrative can change when adults come together with clarity, with purpose, with a sense of belief in what we can do. And that experience shaped me, and it's taught me to that improvement isn't an option. It's a responsibility. It's a responsibility that we all have, for every kiddo in the United States, and in the last two years in Maryland, that same commitment, it followed me into what we do now. And so as I work through this landscape of education, I'm constantly learning and adjusting and aligning and making sure that our systems rise to meet what every kiddo needs. Elise Brown 3:46 Good morning. I'm Elise Brown. I am an improver because I like to go slow and think strategically as we build build out systems. I have been in education for almost 20 years now, so also not a spring chicken, but in my time, I have had several opportunities to build programs from the ground up, starting from just teaching, moving in as a math Professional Development Coordinator, and then building a whole Digital coaching program in Mississippi during that time, having the gap of leadership after Dr Wright left, led me to Maryland along with Dr Smith, because I just wanted to work with like minded individuals who really tackle hard problems in a strategic way. Derek Mitchell 4:36 Wonderful. Well, let's talk about Mississippi for a minute, because Mississippi is an incredibly amazing place, and I don't know if our audience has ever had a chance to visit there. How many of you guys have visited Mississippi? Yeah, we've got some folks who have a sense of it. So tell us about the context that this work happened in. Tenette Smith 4:53 Well, Mississippi is it's a community based it's very. Much grounded in community, right in relationships. We trust matters in Mississippi, they have to trust that you are have their best interest at heart. Right when I first came to Mississippi, or when we first started the initiative, one of the big conversations was this law, this initiative, will impact only our black and brown and our poor children, right? This is going to be horrible for the most at risk students and Dr kimyana Burke and I, we were adamant that the initiative of what we were building would have a positive impact on every kid in the state, not just our poor support. So Mississippi is our community. It's community minded. It's, yeah, grounded in a sense of purpose, right? Elise Brown 5:58 Yes, and I would say there's an assumption about the South, about Mississippi, but even within the state, there are probably six very unique regions that you'd have to approach differently. And there was a lot of community outreach and explaining of how students would benefit from the strategies that we were putting in place, from the policy to the professional learning to the coaching, everything had rationale behind it, and it was in the best interest of those students. Tenette Smith 6:30 Yeah, in Mississippi, we started out with the literacy based Promotion Act in 2013 mind you, Derek has told you that we were 49th when I started, and the people were, you know, all over the country, well, especially Louisiana, Alabama, at least we're not Mississippi, right? Because they were 48th and 47th you know, they flip flopped. But we were constantly at the bottom. And as we in 2013 the governor, who was Phil Bryant at the time, who was also dyslexic, said, You know, we have to do something better. And so Senator Tolleson, along with policy makers and from one of the leading think tanks that came together and proposed this initiative, the literacy based Promotion Act, which would require students to be able to read at a certain level, proficiency level, by the end of third grade. Again, people were up at arms, you know, and the community was up at arms. And we did a lot of of outreach. We did a lot of communication. Our communication policy, or was top notch, because we knew we had to get out and sort of dismill dispel some of the myths around what we were doing. We're not trying to retain every kid in Mississippi. We're trying to intervene and prevent retention. And so we changed the narrative around what we were doing. This is not a retention policy, this is a prevention policy, and so we sort of embraced that. And one thing I think people have to remember is that 65% of the students in Mississippi Public Schools are students of color. Conversely, people of color only make up 37% of the population in Mississippi. So I think that's very, very important for you to wrap your minds around right smaller part of the population, but the larger part in the public school setting. That means that we had a lot of students who more affluent student, students who were in some of the race based private school settings that were initiated in 6867 during integration and so still, that's still very pervasive in many parts of Mississippi. Again, we wanted to ensure that the poorest kids, regardless of their zip codes, regardless of where they were located in the state, had access to quality instruction across the board. Derek Mitchell 9:13 Well, I would say that as as it happened, I was working partners. My organization partner school innovation, was supporting schools in Indianola, in Delta in Mississippi at the time when, when this policy passed, and I got to tell you, it was terrifying for district leaders and teachers, the thought is that your third grade is just going to balloon, right because you're not allowed To promote them if they're not able to read, and they were promoting a lot of young people who really weren't able to read. And so there was a lot of fear and a lot of worry, but very soon after a lot of support happened. And so let's talk about what it is the state did once at. If you've made that you passed that law, you then provided us an incredible amount of support to schools and districts. Let's talk about those pieces. Tenette Smith 10:08 Dr Carrie Wright at the was the superintendent at the time, and we had a groundswell of community activism to coming in to say, no, no, we can't do this. And so our state board said, No, you can't talk to the activists. You can't talk to any of the advocates, because that's not what we do here in Mississippi. Carrie Wright, being Carrie Wright, anybody who knows her, is like, Yes, I will. And yes, we will. We will partner with them. And so we started to have these commute, these community outreach nights with our advocacy groups, and started to answer some of those questions and ask questions of the community. And the main question, or the biggest question, we asked, was of parents, raise your hand if you don't want your third grader to know how to read by the end of third grade, no parent is going to raise their hand. Right? Every parent wants the best for their kid, and that's the message that we had to send to them. We don't want to retain your kids. We want to make sure that your children are receiving quality instruction as soon as they walk through the door of an elementary school, pre K through grade 12. And I thought, think that that was a an essential piece that communications practice, the strategy. Elise Brown 11:33 No, I would agree with that. I think that we had a lot of work to do with tier one instruction, though, because we didn't want to live in intervention. We needed to make sure teachers were equipped from day one to do what they needed to do. We had a high quality instructional materials push to make sure that every teacher had the best materials in their classroom, but they were also trained on how to use them. You can't just put materials in front of a teacher and hope that miracles happen. Yeah. So along with our HQ I am push, we also had our Professional Development Coordinators boots on the ground going into schools across the state where principals or or superintendents could request to come have pre free professional learning in their building. So we would travel. I lived at the very top of the state, just south of Memphis. I would drive six hours down to the bottom of the state to support any teacher that needed me. So we had the PL push, we had the HQ im, we had our science of reading trainings, and then came along the coaches. Tenette Smith 12:36 Yeah, so, but let me push back on that, because you have to remember, when we started the lpba, we had nothing, yeah, we were building the plane as we were flying it. They hired. We the as they were trying to recruit people to become coaches. Lbpa passed in 2023 I mean, 2013 they were trying to recruit people. They interviewed over 600 people, right? Other 600 people, they asked name the five components of reading and give me a strategy that you could use to support a kiddo who is struggling in one of those components. Only 24 people were able to answer that question. Okay, so 600 people. We're talking about administrators, teachers, Ihe institution of higher ed professors, right in our reading classrooms, they were not able to answer that question, and so they hired us 24 people, because the governor said, We want 75 coaches, and we want them deployed right now, 24 people. So we said, Okay, this tells us that there is a capacity issue within the state. And so we knew that we had to build our teachers understanding of what the science of reading was all about, what the research tells us are good practices with for teaching reading. And so that became our first lever. So we built that initially, and then we knew we didn't have very much money. They only gave us $9 million the first year, and so we deployed with the $9 million and we went out and did an audit of what schools were using in their classrooms. Well, lo and behold, they didn't have instructional material, high quality instructional material. They had whatever, and they piece milled. And as a state with a very little, you know, small amount of money, we knew that we had to help them identify those gaps. And so we started piecemealing things. We Frankenstein curriculums for the first two years, and then at that third year, we sort of pivoted to note to the HQ I am, yeah, 20 Yeah, 16 ish, 2016 ish, we sort of pivoted and and looked at aligning more of that HQ I am with our instructions. Derek Mitchell 14:59 So do. You be sure you understand. So you deploy literacy coaching from the state directly to the school correct, bypassing this school district. Tenette Smith 15:11 Yep, yes, wow. And believe me, there was a pushback, right? You know, you're sending people into our schools, you're coming to get us right. And so we had to change the perception of what it meant to have the state in your schools. Our literacy coaches were there as support, non evaluative, coaching supports for our schools that were the lowest performing schools in ELA, third grade ELA, that was our, you know, initial inroads. So we use a methodology wherein we took two years of third grade ELA data, rank ordered them, you know, averaged them, rank ordered the schools, and then we deployed directly to the schools, not the LEA, not the district, but to the schools, in and of itself, recognizing that we're going to get more traction if we improve this school and hopefully the other schools around them will see the gains and want to improve right Derek Mitchell 16:22 at as an improver, we one of the things we talk about is reducing variation, and that was clearly a strategy to Level Level Up coaching that's provided directly to schools. Let's talk about some of the pitfalls of implementing that strategy, because I know, having talked to the both of you that there are some huge challenges with implementing, and then, of course, sustaining that policy, and also that no social promotion legislation was repealed or stopped at some point, right? And so let's talk about what happened when that happened. Elise Brown 17:02 So going straight to the school means there's going to be a little tension. You're in this state, you're walking into a building, and I will speak from my perspective, when I started, there was not a good reputation at the Mississippi Department of Education, and we had a lot of work to do to repair relationships, working with the principal and building that relationship while keeping teacher practice safe, like between a coach and a principal and not sharing too much information about what's going on in the classroom, really helped build the relationships with teacher to see the change in Practice, which then led to the principal trusting the coach in the building a whole lot more. So from my end, it was just getting doors open that was one of our biggest challenges. Tenette Smith 17:51 Elise brings a different perspective. Elise was a coach actually in the schools, right? So she was one of the people that we deployed to go out and to support, she was a digital learning coach. We had, literally under my purview. We had literacy coaches, early childhood coaches, special education coaches, school improvement coaches, as well as digital learning coaches, math math coaches, MTSS and data coaches. Speaker 1 18:21 You say leadership, oh, and Tenette Smith 18:23 leadership coaches, so, yeah, we we expanded, of course, that came, you know, a few years later, but in the beginning, there was just the literacy coaching initiative, but we recognize the power of coaching, the non evaluative piece, the supportive piece, and people actually recognize it. Recognize that as well. We did have a lot of pushback there. We had schools who were in Mississippi, there was a law that said if your school district was rated A or B that you didn't have to accept, yeah, supports from the state, and so we had pushback from those AB districts. Now, mind you, they had F schools within those districts, but because those students scores were masked by the more affluent parts of the district, they felt they didn't need it once, we finally gained inroads into those F rated schools in those A B districts, and they saw this F district outperform this a school, this F school outperform this a school in the same district. They're like, wait, what's happening this school today is still outperforming those a rate of school. Yes, you can give them a big snap, because it was like pulling teeth, because not only were they pushing back on that, but they were heavily invested in balanced literacy, right? So they had huge libraries of the. Lucy calkin books, and they were adamant on not giving those up, right? We're not giving this up. We're seeing great results. But who are you seeing results from? Are you seeing results because of, or were you seeing results in spite of, and it was definitely in spite of. Derek Mitchell 20:19 So what about when, when you no longer had the policy driver of no social promotion how was it? Did it impede the work? Did it have no impact? Tenette Smith 20:31 I don't think the the no social promotion policy really impacted, or had the negative type of impact we you know, people would expect, because we were framing this around intervention, because we were framing this around providing quality tier one instruction, and we recognized, yeah, Alec, you're right. You can't tear your way out of, you know, a hole, right? And so we continue to promote and provide quality. We grounded all of our work around three legs, professional learning, HQ, I am, and intervention, and those three key pieces, along with providing access to quality early childhood programming. Mind you, when we started in 2013 we did not have any early Derek Mitchell 21:24 childhood program. In fact, you didn't even have Kinder in many places in Tenette Smith 21:29 the state. Yeah, many places. But kindergarten is not, still not a mandatory requirement in Mississippi. Once you enter kindergarten, then you are mandatorily required to attend, but you're not required to attend kindergarten. 80% of the students in the state do. But when Dr Wright started, there was a big newspaper article, Carrie Wright comes from the north to snatch children from the arms of their mothers, right? She's like, No, I just want them to have quality early childhood programming, right? So in quite they changed the tune, right now, Mississippi invests probably over $50 million which is huge considering they started with a $4 million investment, $50 million a year in early childhood programming is, yeah, quite substantial. Let's talk about Derek Mitchell 22:25 policy for a minute, because I think it's important for folks understand the context. In Mississippi at that time, there was also a policy that required families who were getting assistance that if their students were in school, it impacted how much assistance they got. I mean, because ideologically, you think, well, they're getting two meals in school so they don't need as much, you know, welfare assistance. And so families would keep their kids home in order to actually maximize access to their welfare benefits. So it's a strange situation where the learning of your child is being, you know, is being impeded, you know, by the resources that you need to feed and house them, right? Talk a little bit about that. Tenette Smith 23:13 Well, that policy also had some unintended consequences, right? So we had to really shift people's mindset around providing access to nutritional assistance. And so we saw an increase in our chronic absenteeism rate because parents were keeping their kids home. And so now the legislators had to go back and we think, okay, maybe we may not need to connect that back, because now our chronic absenteeism rate is that one of the highest in the country, and so we had to do a lot of explaining to our our General Assembly, you don't want to to legislate everything. It was a huge shift our policies in 2013 when they when that policy went into place, there was the policy for early childhood, a policy for dyslexia screening across the state, a policy for the literacy initiative as well as a policy for interventions. So they had a very heavy hand in education. And I think Carrie Wright's leadership sort of put a pause to that, because her thing was, let us handle the education part, right? You guys, just help fund it. We'll help you, sort of guide you in writing this legislation, you know, legislation that will actively or actually increase our student outcomes. Derek Mitchell 24:55 So let's summarize quickly, so you implemented policy. Policy that created the inertia to concentrate on the science of reading and to make sure students can read beyond third grade, use centralized coaching so that you provided intensive support for schools that are that are not meeting standard in coaching, use centralized high quality instructional materials, and made those available across the state to schools and districts so that, you know, you knew that they had access to the materials that are, you know, science of reading and related sets of materials. And then you provided centrally deployed professional learning, professional development structures for all teachers and leaders and then coaching in in various content areas, all you know from the state, correct, across the state, right, right? That led to some great results. Let's talk about those real quick. So what are you most excited about in terms of the successes of this initiative frees you the most pride. For me, Tenette Smith 26:05 it's the change in teacher knowledge and the change in their confidence. It's also, I think, the measurable, measurable improvements in student outcomes, our students of color and our most our economically disadvantaged students outperform those students their peers across the United States. So for me, that is a very big source of pride, because again, you know, our most at risk students are. They're doing it right? They're actually performing. And coming from Mississippi and going into a state that is very, very blue. Mississippi, big, you know, super red, right? Majority red, and going to a very blue state where you see people say, poor children learn differently. Do they really? Right? Or, you know you have to teach you know, students of color differently. Do you really? So it's I have a very strong sense of pride that in a deeply red state, that are their sense of of pride of what they're doing for all students, regardless of where they live, is quality, right? Elise Brown 27:43 100% agree. I think just the fact of where we are politically as a country, a state like Mississippi, coming together and agreeing that our children come first was huge, and it's why that Mississippi is not just top 10 right now, when you account for poverty, it's number one in the country. So I just want to throw that out there. If those children can do it, we can do it everywhere. I would also say I'm most proud of the sustainability of it. Yes, this has been ongoing. It was not a miracle. It is a marathon. And the momentum keeps going. And that just shows if you put in the work, if you stick with it, you're going to see those outcomes. But you have to have that strategy in place, and you have to think through how all those systems play together. Tenette Smith 28:31 Yeah, we didn't give up once. Something didn't work, you know, we it was persistence. It was coherent. You know, we the professional learning. You partner all of that together, and we didn't try to jump on the bandwagon of every new thing that came along. We stayed the course. And I think in education, we do have a tendency to sort of shift, oh, this didn't work. Two years down the road, three years down, this didn't work, so we're going to shift our focus. We stayed the course, and we did not give up, and we made those small tweaks. We pivoted slightly. You know, this was a huge ship. You can't turn a ship on a dime, right? You have to make small, incremental changes in your trajectory. And that's what we did to ensure that we had the sustainability. We're still going strong, right? I've been gone for two years. The people that we put in place, you know, I'm poaching people left and right, you know, if I can, right? But the people we put in place are still there, and they're still making great strides to instill increase student Derek Mitchell 29:41 outcomes, wonderful. So you are now both working to try to replicate the success in an entirely new context, in the state of Maryland, very different, as you mentioned, from red to blue or purplish, depending upon the year. Tell us a little about how that's going. How. Is it going, what's what? Uh, what barriers are you? Are you facing that you wouldn't have anticipated? Tenette Smith 30:06 That's a deep breath, deep sigh, kind of moment. We're we're trying to replicate what we did in Mississippi, but we recognize that it's not a cut and paste type of thing, right? Take what we did in Mississippi, and we're just going to drop it into Maryland. There are so many additional contexts that we have to consider coming from a right to work state, you know, at will, state in Mississippi, to a very heavily unionized state, you know, 2524 different unions with 24 different collective bargaining agreements. It was something that I was not prepared for. Nobody told me about this part, but we are. I think we're making inroads. Elise Brown 30:55 Maryland's also in a different starting point. So Maryland has over 800 coaches already spread out across their districts where Mississippi didn't have that and so there is a strong starting point for us. So we're looking at, how do we build state level coaches to get in where we need to provide that direct support, but also, how do we support the coaches that are already out there to make sure that we are limiting variation and they are getting the best training so that they can support the teachers that they work with. But yes, there are very different tools at play that we're learning as we go. Tenette Smith 31:35 Yeah. Additionally, Maryland also was a very high adopt has a very high adoption rate of HQ. I am Mississippi, of course, when we started, we didn't have any right. So they adopted material in during covid. Their implementation rate is very low. Additionally, Maryland also invested quite a bit of Esser funding into providing science of reading training, right? So teachers have a different starting point, right? They have a more level playing field, so to speak. So their content knowledge is higher than where was what we started with in Mississippi. So just making the programming more coherent. Elise Brown 32:22 Resources are there? It's the time that becomes the issue, time to train, time to have access to teachers, that has become the issue. So really, to your point, we are a high adoption state. We have, I think it's over 75% of our schools have already adopted. HQ, im but when we look at our implementation rates, it drops down to 30% of our teachers are using them regularly the way they're intended. So that's the importance of a coach, though, to make sure the teacher feels supported, that they understand how to use it day to day, so that they're not over supplementing, that they're not over scaffolding for their students, and we just have that work to do, Tenette Smith 33:04 I think, also changing their mindsets as well. There's a mindset shift that we have to build in Maryland. A new RAND study in 2025 says that our teachers in Maryland has we have some of the lowest beliefs in what our students are able to do, and so shifting our teachers helping them to understand that, yes, our kiddos can do use those HQ I am. They are not too difficult. They are on grade level, so we want them to provide that on grade level instruction. So when we came through the door, Dr Wright said, Okay, we need to revise and review our standards. So we went through the last year and a half, we have been on a roll. Elise Brown 33:54 We revised, I'm tired. Tenette Smith 33:57 Y'all, every standard we've done. Elise Brown 34:01 ELA, math, science, social studies, pe health, and we're working on arts and world languages in our secondary math pathways. So we have been very busy looking at our standards, making sure that we have aligned what we expect our students to know and understand. We've also added an early literacy policy. We're working on our adolescent literacy policy, and we passed our K 12 math policy, which requires 60 minutes of math instruction for K through eight. Tenette Smith 34:33 So very busy Derek Mitchell 34:35 does sound busy? So in Mississippi, you could mandate for the word professional development in Maryland, you have to negotiate for the time to do that, and so but you but as you know, if you're not able to, you'll build up quality by providing coherent professional learning across the board. You. Um and reduce variation by building the skills of the related coaching structures, you're unlikely to get the same kind of thrilling results. So new skills you need to build. You need to have, new negotiating skills, new relationships, new relationships with collecting bargaining partners and enrolling them. How are you enrolling them in the work? How is how is it going to to bring them in the team? Tenette Smith 35:28 I'll pass this to our assistant superintendent of instructional programs, Elise Brown 35:34 coming in as an outsider into a new state. It's taken a lot of time to build relationships, to get them to trust us, and we've had to really omit saying, in Mississippi, we did this, they don't like that too much. We learned very quickly that we just have to take a step back and celebrate what they that what we've been doing in Maryland that has been working, and then gently nudge in the direction that we need to go I think we've made a lot of progress this year, we have several groups that we bring together. Since we only have 24 districts, it's a lot easier than in Mississippi, I will say so. Dr Wright has her superintendents work group. We bring together the chief academic officers and assistant superintendents every month to get them in the room. We have our content supervisors that meet individually quarterly. So we're really pulling people together. Their biggest push has been for us to be aligned at the agency, which I think is very normal at any state. They often ask, do you guys even talk to each other, so we've been really working on coherence and taking a step back and saying these policies are misaligned. We have to fix something. We can't expect them to figure it out at the district level. What are we going to do to make their experiences better? And that's gone a long way with building relationships with them and getting them on board for the change, I think also in Tenette Smith 37:05 Mississippi to Maryland. Mississippi, we had the State Board of Education, right? We were working in, you know, in alignment, lockstep with the MD State Board of Education. In Maryland, there are two boards. There's the accountability and implementation board, which oversees the implementation of the multi billion dollar investment into Maryland's education system, the blueprint for Maryland's future. And there is the Maryland State Board of Education, and so delineating the responsibilities of these two boards has been imperative for pushing or moving the work. We have to let the AIB know that this is your swim lane, and you want to stay in your swim lane, and we will swim in ours. And ours is around instruction, as well as the implementation of the blueprint. Yours is to ensure that there's accountability around the spending of the funding, the money around the blueprint. So that that, in and of itself, was again a paradigm shift for me to answer to two boards. Wow, yeah. Sounds very Derek Mitchell 38:15 complicated, very so we reached a point where we can start the Q and A so all of you who have a question for our guests, please go ahead and raise your hand and Alec will bring the mic. So please don't start speaking till you have the mic in front of you. Go ahead, Alec. Questioner 38:35 Thank you so much. This was really, really enlightening, and I would love for you to share a little bit more about where you would expect Mississippi to be 10 years from now. Behind that question is what lasting capability looks like and where that lives in the system Tenette Smith 38:55 in 10 years, 10 years from now, I expect Mississippi, I hope that Mississippi maintains its current level trajectory. I This is recorded, right? Derek Mitchell 39:12 Don't let don't let the skeptic in. Oh, I won't Tenette Smith 39:15 let the skeptic in. I just say that leadership matters, right? And so consistently ensuring that the focus of quality instruction remains at the forefront of everything that they do is imperative. And right now that leadership is is focused on that. And so in 10 years, they will have a newest may have a new superintendent. I just want them to continue to focus on ensuring that kiddos across the state have access to quality instruction. Elise Brown 39:55 I was going to say leadership matters. I I want my heart is still. Mississippi. I want nothing but the best for them, and it's going to take a strong leader to not come in see a new shiny object and shift course. So I really hope that they stay the course that's been set for them. Questioner 40:14 Buenos dias, thank you so much for just such an inspiring work. We had the opportunity to look at Mississippi when making hour shifts. So a really incredible case. My question is around the capacity of your coaches. What did the coaching cycles consist of? And how did you manage change without the I'm going to assume consistent presence, given that there were 24 across the state. Tenette Smith 40:44 Well, okay, so, yeah, let me just clarify. We started 20 we started with 24 however, by 2016 we reached around 87 coaches deployed across the state. Dr Wright went back across the street to the that's what we call, you know, going to the legislators, and they said, Okay, give us more money. We started with 9 million. They gave us 18. And so we were able to deploy more coaches across the state. We got up to 87 then covid hit. And so we had a lot of people decide, okay, you know what? I think I want to go back to my school. I think I want to be an administrator. We had a lot of coaches. What we what we hoped to do with our coaching initiative was to build this cadre of experts and then send them back to their school so that they could build their school's capacity right. And so we had a lot to transition back into their their their local education agency, as well as to their back into schools. Dr Brown, talk a little bit about what you saw. Elise Brown 41:54 We training is really important to us. I'll say, in Maryland, coming in we've tried to or or existing or several Frankenstein coaching models. So we've really tried to stay, take a step back, select a coaching model and train on it. We hold, or even in Mississippi, we held monthly coaching meetings where all of the coaches across the state came together in a centralized location, in person, to not only receive knowledge, but also work through problems of practice. And that was really important for them, to get to role play and discuss what challenges they were seeing, and kind of talk through, how do you deal with this situation on the spot? So those monthly trainings happened for all of our coaching programs, and that was really huge. We also had a moment where we pulled every coach in the state, which was over, over 100 coaches that we had, 150 coaches, came together in the space to talk about our work and how we align, so that if they have a digital coach, but they also have a literacy coach, those experiences are not completely different. We wanted to make sure PLCs were being done consistency learning. Walks were looking for consistent things. So a lot of the work was just coherence work, which really mattered for us. A bunch of questions in the back I Carmen 43:28 Oh, okay, good, good morning. My name is Carmen, and I'm I'm actually a Maryland resident, so glad to hear about all the work going on in Maryland. I have two kiddos in Maryland Public Schools, eighth and fifth graders. And so my question for you is, how can families support the initiatives and the implementation of high quality instruction? And do you have any strategies or things that we can be doing? I'm also with the PTA, so I would love to take things back to my community. Elise Brown 44:01 You are just in time. We're about to receive or release our family guides for student success. So we're going to have K through eight guides available that go through our literacy and math standards with activities that you can do at home. We're going to do some community pushes along with that this summer. So stay tuned. Tenette Smith 44:21 So this is a strategy that we employed in Mississippi, and we got very good feedback around the use of having those conversations with parents. So we talked to parents in Mississippi about as you are going to your parent teacher conferences. These are questions that you need to ask, right? This is the screener that your child should be provided at the beginning of the year, middle of the year, end of year. And these are questions that you should ask around your screeners this these are questions that you should ask around what interventions are being provided to your kiddo. So we plan to deploy a similar strategy in Maryland as well. If some of the things we will cut and paste for Mississippi, we'll just marylandize them, right? Questioner 45:08 Thank you so much for sharing today. I had a question about one to one technology. I'm wondering in Mississippi. And then as you look ahead, what role one to one technology you think will play in a k5 kind of literacy space, or specifically, maybe k2 and then also, like thinking about it in small group setting, or like centers, which are so common in those spaces. Tenette Smith 45:30 So I will, I will start, and then I'm going to pass it to my digital expert, Mrs. Mississippi Dr, right when covid hit, the one thing that she did very quickly was to ensure that every kid in Mississippi had access to a computer. So while everybody else was waiting on their computers to be delivered, we actually were, because she placed her order so early and for so many we were actually ahead of the game, and our children were able to have access to the computers. We deployed the school busses with the hot spots. But the other thing that we did, I think, is that we recognized that some places in the Mississippi Delta would not even with a hot spot, be able to access the internet or to be able to utilize the technology. So we had to find low tech ways to get information to families. So we deploy we partnered with the Mississippi Public Television, and we had over 600 lessons recorded and made available to parents. So from eight, seven to eight o'clock pre K was instruction was being aired on Mississippi Public Television. From eight to nine, we had first graders, first grade instruction being aired, and so we did that for the entire duration of covid. And that's why, when we came out of covid, you didn't see one of the reasons you didn't see as big of a gap, or we didn't have as much of a delay in learning. And so the use of technology is important in that k2 space, but I think it's also important to recognize that there has to be some guardrails for our youngest learners. As far as screen time is concerned. In Maryland, there is a big push to limit screen time, and so we are developing some guidance around that, those policies around for our youngest learners. Elise Brown 47:49 I'll just say, what Mississippi did was incredible. By November, every student had a computer in their hands, and we had 30 digital coaches deployed across the state to support teachers with understanding, not just the basics of how to use that computer, but like how to incorporate strong pedagogical practices with it, to make sure that the computer was not distracting from the content. And I would say that's why we did not see that backslide from covid. So that was a huge push that we made. It's not where we want to live, though, right? It was a band aid and a situation. But we know students need print books in front of them. They need to be handwriting so that they're retaining information. So there's a time and a place, and we just need to, as a state agency, provide guidance and guardrails for Responsible Use Derek Mitchell 48:47 good time for a couple more questions. Dr. Aaron Bailey 48:52 Hi, thank you. Incredible work. I'm Dr Aaron Bailey. I'm with Reading is Fundamental, and through federal earmarks, we were able to put print books in the hands of all the children in Mississippi, book access is always an indicator of reading achievement. So we like to think we were part of your strategy as well. My question goes back to what you said about the 24 I think, out of 600 teachers that were able to identify the five pillars from the National Reading Panel. I'm a former literacy professor, so I'm always asking this question, why don't teachers know how to teach reading? Is there something we should be doing in teacher preparation so that we don't have to go in and do this intensive coaching and training all the time? Tenette Smith 49:40 Personally, I think it does start with our teacher preparation programs. It can start there, just reflecting back when I came out of my preparation program, no one taught me how to teach reading, right? We were we were told to develop a lesson plan on some random. A topic. And, you know, I did what I was told, but no one taught me how to even use the instructional material. And you have to remember to back back when I was coming up, some 30 something odd years ago. Instructional material was seen to seen as a resource, and so you didn't use it from cover to cover. You just, you know, you cherry picked lessons, and that cherry picking of lessons really does not yield the type of outcomes that you expect because, you know, you were going by your districts, their blueprint, right? So, yeah, it was disjointed across the board. There was no coherence in it. And we know better. You know you live longer. You know better. And you you look at the instructional material that has been developed right now, it's a better quality than what we had some 30 something odd years ago. So nothing else. Louis Gomez 50:59 Good morning. I'm Louis Gomez, how are you? Thank you so much for a truly fascinating story for us today. I have two questions, and they're both about variation. I mean, I think that you all took variation head on and made great progress. First question, you can pick the point in time you like, when you left, or some other time you started this work, the work gained traction. As it gained traction, what did variation look like across the state? How would you characterize that? And the other question, which is also related to variation and sustainability, as you place these third graders in the rest of the system, in fourth, fifth grade, what kind of press did their expectation for learning have on the system as a whole? Yeah, yeah. Tenette Smith 52:04 So with the variation, for the variation question. So I think we see some variation depending on what part of the state we're talking about right North Mississippi, more access to resources. DeSoto County is now the largest county in the state of Mississippi urban district. Now, I think 10 years ago, it was not, it was not urban, right? It was considered a suburban district. Now it's an urban in Central Mississippi Jackson Public Schools was considered an urban it was the largest district 1015, years ago. Now, because of population attrition, it's considered a suburban district, and the population has significantly shrank, and so you see the variations based on the resources that are available. Unfortunately, I think, because the state is still deploying those coaches into those areas that need, that have the highest amount of needs, that those areas are making great strides. For instance, Jefferson Davis, Jefferson County, Jefferson Davis County in South Mississippi, one of the poorest districts in the state. The highest level of adult illiteracy is now an A district. It was an F district, but they attribute their gains to their literacy, literacy coaching supports, right? So not only did the literacy coach support the teachers, but we had a literacy coach who actually transitioned out and became the principal of the school, right? So now they're able, and now she's in central office, and she's replicating the supports across the district. So you're seeing the district make shifts, and they're replicating it across into middle schools, looking at an adolescent policy. So the variation depends on on what type of capacity and the knowledge that the leaders bring and the supports that are provided within the confines of this district? Second question, can you repeat it for me, because I'm old, Questioner 54:35 basically, I'm just wondering. You, one way to think about your work is that you, year over year, are creating these incredible cadres of third graders and who have a different expectation about what instruction means and what learning means for them. They land in fourth grade, fifth grade, sixth grade. I. How are they a force for change? Yes, they are a Tenette Smith 55:02 force for change. And then also, I think the thing that we recognize very early on is that, yeah, when these kids move on to fourth and fifth, sixth grade, as they, you know, matriculate up, we needed to ensure that we provided supports to those fourth, fifth, sixth grade middle school teachers as well. So we started out only focusing on k3 and probably by year six, we recognize, okay, no, we need to provide supports as you you go up. So we offer professional learning to those teachers in those grade levels. We ensure that we developed our spa dig coaches, which is our which are special education coaches for fourth through grade eight, they couldn't come to their training by themselves. Those special education teachers had to bring their general ed teachers partners with them. So again, we were expanding our supports exponentially, using a very small piece of funding to try to ensure that we were getting to the upper grades as well and so, and you see it in those eighth grade test scores as well, right? Derek Mitchell 56:15 Not as awesome, but still amazing improvement Stacey Caillier 56:19 in eighth grade. Last, last question, and my question actually builds on that too. I, as the mom of a now fifth grader who has struggled to read from the very beginning, is consistently behind. I'm really grateful for the work that you all are doing, and I'd love to hear more about the adolescent literacy policy and what, what that looks like, what challenges you're encountering. Because I think in our own work, elementary teachers expect to teach reading and literacy. When you get into middle and high it's I'm a content teacher. Here's the thing I'm passionate about. Don't necessarily see teaching reading as part of the job, per se, so there's an identity shift that also has to happen. So I'm just curious if you could speak to some of those challenges and how you're thinking about them. Elise Brown 57:09 As a former math teacher, I can attest to that, because I remember my principal one day saying, You need to devote 10 minutes a day to reading in your math course. And my response was, are they going to devote 10 minutes to math fluency? Not the best response, but it is a mindset shift, right? That we are all reading teachers. If my students can't read the word problem in front of them, they're not going to be able to solve it. The math policy, or, I'm sorry, the literacy policy that we are waiting. We have a month left before we take it to the board in Maryland, but it tackles similar issues. We want to make sure every teacher is trained in the science of reading, and we provide that for free, we have a secondary science of reading course. We want to make sure that we are using diagnostic screeners for our students that are at risk and that we're creating plans for how we will intervene with those students who are not entering fourth through 12th grade, ready to read their content knowledge. Any other areas you want to touch on in that? Tenette Smith 58:13 Well, I'll just add that Just look to Mississippi as well, because they are they have legislation that should be coming out with foreign adolescent literacy policy. Maryland, we do things a little bit differently. We are leaning more heavily into policy from our State Board, instead of looking at legislation or statute to ensure that people get where they need to go right. But with their adolescent literacy policy in Mississippi, they are asking the legislature, where it's actually asking to have an eighth grade retention piece put into the exactly and put into place. I don't know how far they will get with that. Again, it's intervention over retention, and so hopefully they can get to a point where they're not, don't have that particular gateway in place. But with our in Maryland, our adolescent literacy policy, we are attempting to make it a comprehensive policy where we look at it consistently, coherently, from grade pre K to grade 12, right? Again, looking at ensuring that screening students who are at risk, but not over prescribing or over over screening students who don't necessarily need the, you know, the the assessment, we it's a delicate, very delicate procedure, and like an operation, so to speak, right? So we are really being very thoughtful and strategic as we develop this policy out so that we are not being too prescriptive to our LEAs, where it becomes cost prohibitive as. Well as kills their master scheduling, right? The master schedule, it runs everything, and it has become sort of our one barrier. That's probably the biggest hurdle that we have to undertake as we move in Derek Mitchell 1:00:17 this work. We can't advocate time to it. It ain't gonna happen. Yeah, exactly. So I know everyone here is excited to continue to learn with you about how implementing this work in Maryland is going to go. So please consider this an open invitation and make your way back and let us know how what you're learning along the way and shifts that you're making, because we need to understand all of that too, and we're super excited about having these same kind of thrilling results in Maryland and in many other places from that point on. So join me in thanking our team for coming being a part of this conversation. Alec Patton 1:00:59 High Tech. High unboxed is hosted by me Alec Patton. Our theme music is by brother Herschel. Huge thanks to Derek Mitchell, Tenette Smith and Elise Brown for this conversation. You can find a link to learn more about continuous improvement in the show notes. Thanks for listening. You.