Ignite Your Teaching
Ignite Your Teaching
Transforming Classrooms with Empower: Evidence-Based Literacy Support
In this episode, we sit down with Erin Panda, a researcher from Brock University, to discuss her recent study on the Empower Reading Program. Collaborating with the Hospital for Sick Children and the Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board, Erin shares insights into the impact of Empower, an evidence-based reading intervention program that helps struggling readers develop decoding, spelling, and comprehension skills.
As a classroom teacher and parent, I’ve witnessed Empower's transformative effects firsthand. In our conversation, Erin explains the neuroscience behind reading, why some students need more structured literacy programs, and how Empower's research-backed strategies help students build confidence. We also discuss how teachers and parents can advocate for this essential program to make reading accessible to all students.
Tune in to learn more about the Empower program’s design, the importance of early intervention, and how strong support for literacy can positively impact student learning and classroom dynamics.
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In today's episode I interview Erin Panda. She is a researcher from Brock University and she's just completed some research using the Empower program and working with the Hospital for Sick Kids to study the implementation of the Empower program at the Hamilton-Wetworth District School Board. So Brock University reached out to me and asked me if I would be willing to have Aaron come on the show and talk all about the Empower program, its successes and how it was implemented. As somebody who has been a part of having students in my classroom attend the Empower program, having my own son attend the Empower program, I was absolutely thrilled to have Aaron come and join us today because I have seen such a positive impact for the Empower program. I was absolutely thrilled to have Erin come and join us today because I have seen such a positive impact for the Empower program.
Speaker 1:Now, this is not a sponsored endorsement by any stretch of the imagination. I am just a thankful mom and a thankful teacher for having the Empower program in my classroom with my own kids, because it has made such a tremendous difference for myself as a teacher as well as for my own son. So let's jump in and get started with my interview with Erin so we can learn all about the Empower program and her research related to its implementation. All right, erin, I'm so glad that you're here with us today and I'm excited to share with the audience on Ignite your Teaching all about who you are, what your research is and all about the Empower program. I want to give, if you want to take a minute to just introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about who you are, what you do and what your research focuses on.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thank you, patty. Thank you so much for having me on your podcast. This really is a pleasure. I'm an associate professor at Brock University in the Department of Child and Youth Studies. Most of our students there will go on to become primary junior teachers or work with kids in some capacity. I wear kind of two hats there. I teach our department's core course on what is science and why is it important for educators to know about science, and I also teach courses on body-mind diversity and supporting it in a classroom. And then the other hat I wear is the research side. So I co-direct the developmental neuroscience lab where we study how children learn, how they think, how they read, how they control their attention and how we can better understand these by studying the brain.
Speaker 1:Awesome, and you've recently. Just, are you finished the research now?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we recently published a study that was in collaboration with scientists at Sick Kids Hospital in Toronto and the Hamilton Wentworth District School Board, and I'm really excited about these findings.
Speaker 2:So in this project, the Hamilton Wentworth Board has been implementing an evidence-based reading intervention program called Empower Reading for many years now program called Empower Reading for many years now and they had data from kids that received this program 100 kids and they approached us to ask to help analyze the data and what we were.
Speaker 2:What was unique about this is that teachers have been collecting the reading scores from kindergarten all the way through to grade five, and about half of the kids got intervention in grade two and half of it got intervention in grade three, and so, using growth curve modeling, we were able to chart out the learning trajectories of kids and how they came to learn and how the rate of their learning before, during and after Empower, and so the really exciting thing I think of this project is that we've got this program that's been shown in really controlled research studies to improve children's reading skills. But in this project we were able to show that the school board can take it and run with it and can implement it at scale, and it really is a good news story of the good that can come when scientists and educators work together.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, and as somebody who has been in that board and teaching for more years than I want to admit, I have seen firsthand the impact that the Empower program has had on not only our schools and our students, but just as me as a teacher. Anecdotally so, as a teacher, seeing students in my classroom that have the previously to before Empower was coming in into the schools, I would often have students that were reading at a grade one reading level sitting in my grade five class, which is really difficult because those students don't have the really ability to access the program. If they're reading at a grade one level, you can't really access the materials at a grade five level with a grade one reading. What I noticed is the Empower program helped to catch those high needs students up, and so there were still gaps when they arrived in my classroom and junior grades, but the gaps were far less different, so I would get a much smaller gap for students. So when you reached out to me and said you wanted to talk, I was like heck, yes, I want to talk about Empower.
Speaker 1:Not only have I seen as a student, but my son has gone through Empower. We have seen huge gains in his confidence in his reading skills. So I am a big proponent and big advocate for getting kids into a program such as Empower because of the impact that I have seen with my students as well as with my own kids. So I'm very excited that we're going to dig in and talk more about the Empower program. So you said to me before we hit record that more and more boards are coming on board with using the Empower program. So some people may be familiar with it. It may be new to some and I wondered if you could talk a little bit about what is the Empower program and how is it used in schools.
Speaker 2:Sure, I'd be happy to. I'd be happy to. It is actually a series of programs that target either children's decoding and spelling skills, or there's some programs that also tap into higher level language like vocabulary and reading comprehension. The most common program is the grade two to grade five decoding and spelling program. It was developed by a scientist named Maureen Lovett at the Hospital for Sick Children.
Speaker 2:She is a wonderful woman, this meticulous scientist, and she devoted her career to understanding what are the core challenges that face children that struggle with reading and what is the instruction that they need to overcome those challenges. And over 30 years, she's doing very highly controlled, randomized, controlled trials and quasi-experimental studies to see, okay, how do children benefit when they've received this intervention versus this instructional component, versus this instructional component, and that's what led to the development of this program. So, yeah, so one thing that's unique about the program is that differentiates it from others is that it really is based in research. So one of her early findings is that she compared kids that just received decoding and phonological instructions, explicit instruction on letter sound and letter sound combinations, and she compared them to kids who also got strategy training, so learning how to recognize, let's say, the beginnings and endings of words, morphemes, versus if kids get a combination of both of those aspects, and she found that the kids who made the greatest gains were the ones who received this combination, and so that's what is there in the program.
Speaker 1:What are some of the indicators, what was some of the criteria, and how do we tell whether or not a student is someone who is going to be a beneficial recipient of Empower programming?
Speaker 2:That's a really great question. So the Hamilton board has for many years been very well organized and I'd like to speak a little bit more about that in a second too. But so they had a system in place where they were using at that time when we, when the data was collected, it was the developmental reading assessment that they used to be able to at least monitor children's progress over time. So there's many reasons that kids may struggle with reading. Maybe English isn't their first language, or maybe it's behavioral issues are the first, are the first and then reading.
Speaker 1:So this program is an ideal program for children who who have trouble specifically with reading individual words so if I'm a parent or a teacher who has teaching grade four and I've got, I know that the Empower program is available for my students until they're in grade five, and what are some of the things that I should be looking for? As just that they're not reading, or is there some other sort of criteria, just that they're reading significantly below grade level, or are we looking for more? There's a more nuanced sort of criteria, just that they're reading significantly below grade level, or are we looking for more?
Speaker 2:there's a more nuanced sort of criteria here, I think yeah, I think, like what you said with your son, so difficulty with reading and then not wanting to engage with reading and that that feeling of I should but I don't want to. I think that's often a key sign that there is a challenge. Yeah, I'd say slow progress and reluctance to want to read.
Speaker 1:What are some of the things that are happening inside an Empower program? Just most. I know. Most of my teachers are classroom teachers, so what we experience as a classroom teacher is often the reading teacher comes to our room, pulls a group of kids, we say goodbye to them for an hour and then they come back and we're not really ever sure what happened in that room. So what is some of the lessons and the kind of methodology behind some of the instructional practices that are happening during the program?
Speaker 2:Sure, I can definitely speak to that. So kids are learned and which we know from the structured push towards structured literacy. So part of the program is explicitly teaching kids the sounds that letters make and the sounds that letter combinations make, and so they're taught blending strategies to be able to. They're taught that explicitly. So many times, especially in the past, that was missing. So that's a an important piece. But they're also taught other strategies so that they can figure out how to read longer words, because decoding is only going to get you so far in the English language. Yeah, so they're taught one strategy called the peeling off strategy, where they're taught so every week they'll gradually build and learn more and more beginnings and endings of words and they're taught that, just like leaves on a tree, you can peel, you can recognize them and you can peel them off so that you're just left with the core root of the word. They're also taught rhyming strategies. So they're taught some of the most common spelling patterns in English and then, using analogies, they can use what they know to figure out what they don't know. So they can say if I know now, then I know pow and I know cow, and so they're learning through analogy, like that and they're taught then to look for those patterns in longer words. So then they could take a word like empower and rather than it being something that's this long, intimidating word, they've got the peeling off strategy to recognize the er and they can look for the ow sound to be able to how to read that part.
Speaker 2:So they're taught a number of these strategies and they're taught it through this metacognitive game plan. So they say so. If they get up to a really big, long word that they don't know, they're taught to say out loud okay, I'm going to apply this strategy and I'm going to apply this strategy. And then if they're still not able to read the word, it then is not a problem that's with them, it's a problem that they just didn't apply the right strategy. So there's a lot of this in the research world. We call it like attributional retraining, but I think it's really like changing children's sense of self-efficacy and self-esteem around reading. So yeah, it moves the. It really teaches them to become problem solvers and that they can use problem solving skills to figure out long what might've been scary words.
Speaker 1:I do think I I do think that as, seeing that and seeing it in my own son and seeing it in my students, I can see that shift. These are often kids. I can tell you from my son's perspective. He went in to grade two this year just pretty defeated about reading I don't want to read, I'm not interested in reading. But also, and knowing that he knew that there was a bit of gaps, that his friends were reading far higher than he was and they were more skilled at reading than he was, and it was always something that he struggled with and he bounced back and forth between I want to read but I'm not a reader, and that identity piece.
Speaker 1:And I have to say, by the end of the school year, when he comes home and goes, mommy, I found a book in the library. I like, will you buy me more of those books? And I go, my heart just melts because his confidence is there, because he does have those strategies, and he went from a boy who is not confident and stubborn to a boy who is excited about reading and will use those things like oh, I'm going to peel off, I'm. We learned a new strategy today, mom, we did this. So just the confidence that he can decode much bigger words and sometimes he can even decode words that his sisters can't. Because he's got all of these strategies that he has been explicitly taught and things that, because my middle child was grade one and two during the COVID years, we're missing some of those skills. So I definitely see a difference in sort of his mindset towards reading and his confidence that he no longer takes it and goes oh I can't read, so I'm not very smart.
Speaker 2:That you can see how. You can see how, like in the research world we say, reading disabilities are highly comorbid with anxiety, with depression, with ODD, with behavioral issues, and you can just see how those will become secondary to having this, where you know you don't want to be, you don't want to embarrass yourself in front of your friends and you don't want them to know that you can't do something that they seem to be able to do so easily. And so I would imagine that a lot of times behavioral issues will come as a way of hiding what the challenge is. And if we can deal with it early, then we can. I get shivers every time I think about it, but you can really change the course of somebody's whole life, I think.
Speaker 1:No, you absolutely can. I've seen that for students in my classroom and when you say behavioral because they're trying to hide 100%, we see that all the time. That behavior is often used to hide gaps in learning or gaps in skills because they don't want to show others. And I've talked many times before about the idea of one of the strategies for differentiation is being able to hide kids in plain sight. So one of the worst things you can do for low level learners is to hand them something completely different and give them the low level task.
Speaker 1:I remember that as a kid when you had the low readers and the high readers and we were I can't remember if we used birds or something with the books. That is not confidence building building when you give somebody who's already struggling something that very obviously points them out to their peers as the fact that they're struggling. So if we can differentiate by using a universal design approach and allowing kids hide in plain sight in the classroom where they're getting what they need but it's not super obvious, we can reduce some of those behaviors and help to build some of that confidence. So I think that's such an important piece. It's not just giving them the skills, but it's also changing their mindset and having them to tell themselves a different story about who they are as a learner, and that does change the course of their can change the course of their lives? Of course it can.
Speaker 2:I understand that's also one of the benefits that can come with a pullout model where you've got this intensive intervention in a small group setting. Especially in the older years where you've got kids now that have been hiding this and struggling for many years. It can also be very validating to know that there's other other peers that are experiencing the same thing and there's this opportunity to develop this community within that small group where they're learning and they're gaining together.
Speaker 1:Absolutely so. I know you do a ton of research about the brain and how the brain helps us read, so I wondered if you could talk a little bit about the science behind reading and what is actually happening in the brain as kids read, and why we need programs such as Empower to help kids that are struggling. Sure, I'd be happy to.
Speaker 2:I could talk all day about this. The brain really wasn't designed for reading at all. If anything, it was designed more for talking and oral communication and to be able to read. We do this so automatically. We're not even thinking about it, but we have to be able to use our visual system to recognize what the letter and letter combinations look like. We have to then use like our auditory and our phonological system to be able to hear those sounds, and then we have to use a whole other system for them to activate the meaning of words and to be able to contextualize it into the context of what we're reading.
Speaker 2:And those processes happen in very different parts of the brain. To be able to read efficiently, you have to be able to automatically link the processing of these different systems together. We published a paper a couple years ago that showed, when we compare strong readers versus poorer readers, it's not so much about how much activity we see in each of those brain systems, but it's more about how quickly and efficiently they're communicating together. So this is a hard thing. Many of us learn it and it's amazing that so many of us do, but for a large proportion of the society about 10% of the population. This is not this linking of the way the letters look and the way they sound. That linkage is not something that's going to come automatically and it really needs to be explicitly taught and practiced.
Speaker 1:So to get students to draw those connections between those pieces, yeah, that's right.
Speaker 2:Many students will learn to read regardless of how you teach them, but many students will really benefit when.
Speaker 1:This is why this push towards structured literacy is so important that when we're teaching those foundational reading skills explicitly, it's going to allow then those linkages to happen and then with practice they'll become automatic which is really important for us as teachers to remember and I think that's the key is so many times we get ourselves stuck in a bit of a rut to go well, I learned it this way and I was fine, yeah, and the idea that you would have been fine if you were taught by someone who didn't know what they were doing yes.
Speaker 1:There's a portion of us that would have been fine no matter what, and, yes, we learned it that way. But that doesn't necessarily mean that all people are going to learn it the same way, and there will be, as you said, 10% of the population that needs something different. So the idea of what's needed by some is good for all. So if 10% of the population needs it, if 10% of your class needs you to teach in a certain way, the other 90% of the class could learn, no matter which way you taught. Why would we not just teach so that everyone can access that curriculum?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's right. There's been this war between the whole language versus more structured from the whole language. That's the way I was taught, and I was a horrible speller until I was identified and thank you to my learning resource teacher or else I don't know where I would be today who finally recognized that there was a problem. So everybody has things that they're just come naturally to them and things that don't come naturally, and this is is something so many kids so it's estimated about one to three kids in every classroom are at risk for dyslexia, and so those kids are really going to need that explicit instruction so that they can eventually make the links in a more automatic way, and I would estimate that another 30% of the class would 40, 50 would really benefit from it as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I would say as myself as a student, and when you say you're a horrible speller, me too. I can't remember if I was whole language or somewhere in the middle. I don't know what was going on. I was a huge avid reader. I loved reading, but I cannot spell to save my life. But I vividly remember my grade three teacher telling my parents to not worry about the fact that I couldn't spell, because I could read and this idea that it wasn't fully understood. I think the concept of she's reading she's fine. I see that sometimes in my own kids they're reading, so everything is fine. But there's this other component, that's spelling. Yeah, we thought spelling was really tied to writing.
Speaker 2:I think we were maybe similar. I was an avid reader too. I love to read, but for me it would just automatically activate the ideas and the thoughts and I wouldn't put my attention to the individual letters. And I think that attention to the individual letters is really needed, and through writing we can, through spelling practice we can learn that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the idea that I think as teachers we often have always thought about teaching literacy in our classrooms as and very similar with the old curriculum. We had four strands, so we did oral language in one silo, we did reading in one silo, we did writing in one silo, we did reading in one silo, we did writing in a silo and we did media in a silo and where they weren't interconnected, we just started and stopped and we did a writing lesson. Then we stopped and we did a reading lesson. And I think the idea and correct me if I'm wrong, but the idea is that those interconnectedness between those concepts is a really important piece yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2:I think the writing will really reinforce what it is that you're learning and reading, and vice versa. I always tell my students that if you think of and I, any sort of concept is going to be represented in lots of different parts of the brain. And so if we practice writing it, if we practice seeing it, if we practice writing it, if we practice seeing it, if we practice doing it, then we're just going to build more connections and it's going to strengthen all of those systems together you wanted to chat a bit about the organization of and the success that the hamilton board had in implementing this and what some of the key factors in their implementation of this?
Speaker 1:because that I think is a key from what you've been saying is it's not just enough to have a program with great lessons, but there's also that implementation factor is just as important to make sure that the program impacts the way it's designed to, and you had mentioned that the Hamilton board did a really great job at sort of keeping everything organized and supporting it. So I wondered if you could talk a little bit more about some of their successes in their implementation of the program.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thanks for bringing that up. I really do think that's a key piece of it, so ensuring that. So it's up to the board first of all to decide whether they want to invest the money to train the teachers so that teachers have this training in order to implement it effectively, but also to make sure that the program runs smoothly and that kids complete the whole program. So many times, due to staffing issues, shortages, the learning resource teacher is going to get pulled, and if the intervention that they're offering is not seen as sacred time, then it's going to get watered down and that children are not going to have the opportunity to complete the whole program. And if they're not completing the whole program, of course children are not going to have the opportunity to complete the whole program.
Speaker 2:and if they're not completing the whole program, of course they're not going to make the same kind of gains so the Hamilton Wentworth board, I think is really a role model in the logistical sport that they provided, where they made sure that they had somebody who was responsible for all the schools, like a layance between the teachers and the program developers, to make sure that kids were identified early, permission forms went home early, kids started the program in the fall and that they received it with enough of a dosage that they could complete the whole program.
Speaker 2:So an hour a day most days of the week so that they can get through all of the lessons by the end of the year. So that also means thinking about filling in for teachers when they might be sick, filling in for we can't do anything about when students are away. You mentioned that issue. That's going to be a challenge, but we can at least do what we can to make sure that the program is running and I think that's really a key piece that allowed us to find such great gains in in the children that receive the program there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we definitely noticed being there being a shift in protecting that time for our learning resource teachers, who are so often pulled to be coverage teachers and supply teachers. So I think having somebody responsible at the board level to say that time is sacred, don't pull them, for that that's not happening and it's the training, not only in the administration level and the priorities, but also the learning resource teacher to say no to being pulled during that time. Coverage is always difficult to make sure that you have enough people on your supply list or your coverage list that can cover that time, because it can't just be done by anybody. How do the findings of your research? How do they help regular classroom teachers or teachers in general, teachers in the system? How do they help us to advocate for this more research-driven support in our classrooms and for our students in our classrooms?
Speaker 2:I think that this is really needed. We're taught as Canadians just to be quiet and to not rock the boat, but I really think that teachers and parents need to advocate for this. So this program is offered in many school boards across Ontario, but not all of them, and in many times in a town it will be one board maybe the Catholic board, maybe the public board will offer it, but not the other. And that just seems bizarre to me that we have this program that we know from the research is going to move children's reading along and we know from our research is going to move children's reading along. And we know from our research that school boards can effectively scale it and implement it board wide and it can be effective. And so I really think that we all need to be advocates and fight for this, because it sounds so corny, but all kids really do have the right to learn to read. It's so fundamental.
Speaker 1:Absolutely do have the right to learn to read. It's so fundamental. Absolutely, and I know sometimes we as teachers feel a little bit disenfranchised with being able to make any real change in schools. However, I think our role for many of us as parents I think parents in this education system have a lot more power than they think. So what would you say to parents, or to teachers that are parents? How would knowing this information about empower help them to improve the reading for their kids? How can they go ahead and help, advocate and try to force the hand of the makers to get this in? I can tell you my own personal journey was marching into the school and demanding that my son be enrolled and empower whether they thought he was a good candidate or not, because I knew he was a good candidate and really having to push and fight and thankfully I had teachers that were super supportive and said, yeah, we're with you, let's do it Just beyond like fighting or something fighting and yelling and screaming and harrowing are some things we can do.
Speaker 2:I think, until we get to the day where it's universally available across the board. I think that is maybe what's needed, and don't feel shy about doing that, as I think you're a really great role model actually to be able to say that. And maybe it's harder for parents who are not teachers themselves to feel like they know, but I think parents do know a lot. And if you feel like your child is not progressing, you have the right to talk to the teacher and ask them what are they going to do to address it. And if the teacher doesn't have an answer, to talk to the principal. And if the principal doesn't have an answer, you talk to the superintendent and you keep going until there's an answer.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. We have new interventions, new initiatives being thrown at us all of the time. I hope that, as teachers are told, hey, we have this empower program. What I hope after with talking to you is that when they hear we have empower, that this is not something, that teachers go, oh, this is just another program, but they really do see that this does work. It is going to help, especially for junior teachers, to think, if this is happening in your primary division, that these things are happening. It is going to have the trickle up effect when they get to you in grade five and grade six, because you will have less variability and less variation in your classroom dynamics and you'll be able to get through so much more curriculum and be able to focus on a lot more things because you'll have less students that are struggling readers in your classroom, which makes teaching that much easier for you in your grades.
Speaker 2:Yes, I think teachers should know this is a program that's founded in research, so you can trust that it is going to work, and it's been shown now in community schools like yours to also work when it's when the researchers are no longer longer involved and that the school board is implementing it. So we can trust that this is a program to support and that it really can move children's learning along, and especially when kids are identified early, they can make great gains. So that was another finding that we've seen repeatedly in the research and we saw in our study as well, that kids who receive the program early more of the kids will be reading at grade level by grade five if they receive it early compared to if they receive it later.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's.
Speaker 1:I really hope that teachers get excited about the idea of it coming into more and more school boards.
Speaker 1:I hope that those school boards that are on the fence and have not purchased it yet I hope they get off of it like go into it, because it really does.
Speaker 1:It really does make a difference for kids. It does make a difference for learning in a classroom and it makes teachers ability to teach that much easier when we are able to give kids the support that they need in order to succeed in our rooms. I hope that when the Empower teacher comes to your classroom and says, hey, these kids have been flagged for Empower and I want to pull them, I hope that the response from those classroom teachers is that of oh, this is amazing, not another thing, I've got a program around. So I think just having this conversation and talking about the benefits of the program, the impacts that this has, how important it is for those students that are struggling to read, I hope that helps the classroom teachers understand it better and be able to be supportive advocates for the program in their school, because it only has the ripple effect of what's going to happen for students, for their outcomes as well as for your own teaching ease, Thank you so much for having me and thank you so much for all that you do.
Speaker 2:I really do think that you give such a service to the community, so thank you, thank you.
