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KindlED | The Prenda Podcast
The KindlED Podcast explores the science of nurturing children's potential and creating empowering learning environments through microschooling. Powered by Prenda, each episode offers actionable insights to help you ignite your child's love of learning. We'll dive into evidence-based tools and techniques that kindle curiosity, motivation, and well-being in young learners. Do you have a question, topic, or story you'd like to share with us? Get in touch at podcast@prenda.com.
KindlED | The Prenda Podcast
Episode 77: The Power of Project Read. A Conversation with Vivek Ramakrishnan.
We explore why reading scores have fallen, what the Science of Reading actually demands in classrooms, and how AI can scale productive practice without replacing human connection. Vivek Ramakrishnan shares data, bright spots from states like Mississippi, and a grounded look at tutoring tech that helps kids decode for real.
• national reading trends and why they predate the pandemic
• foundations beneath fourth-grade comprehension scores
• what the Science of Reading supports and what it rejects
• bright spots in Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama
• why early literacy beats late remediation
• explicit instruction, decodables and fluency development
• differences between math rules and English patterns
• how AI scales individualized practice and feedback
• classroom constraints, noise and practical setup
• empowered learners and the moment self-correction clicks
About our guest
Vivek Ramakrishnan is the CEO and Co-Founder of Project Read AI, an AI-powered literacy platform for educators and students alike. Project Read's Science of Reading tool suite allows teachers to generate personalized decodable texts, fluency passages and more, while its AI Tutor delivers personalized, 1-1 early literacy tutoring using speech recognition. Through its bottoms-up, teacher-driven approach, Project Read's AI tools have been adopted by educators in over 50% of US elementary schools. Viv previously was an award-winning teacher at Freedom Preparatory Charter Schools in Memphis and Co-Founder of One City Schools in Madison, Wisconsin. He holds an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he received the Stanford Social Impact Founder fellowship to help start Project Read.
Connect with Vivek
Project Read AI
One City Schools
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About the podcast
The KindlED Podcast explores the science of nurturing children's potential and creating empowering learning environments.
Powered by Prenda Microschools, each episode offers actionable insights to help you ignite your child's love of learning. We'll dive into evidence-based tools and techniques that kindle young learners' curiosity, motivation, and well-being.
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We're all ears! If you have a question or topic you'd love our hosts to tackle, please send it to podcast@prenda.com. Let's dive into the conversation together!
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What I think we are doing is trying to use technology to fill a huge gap, which is that even the best first grade teacher that has 30 lovely little kids running around cannot simultaneously give each of them the amount of personalized productive practice that they need.
SPEAKER_02:Hi, welcome to the Prenda Podcast. I'm Kelly Smith, your host for today, and we'll be talking to Viv Ramakrishnan. Viv's the CEO and co-founder of Project Read AI, an AI-powered literacy platform for educators and students alike. Project Read's Science of Reading Tools suite allows teachers to generate personalized, decodable texts, fluency passages, and more, while its AI Tutor delivers personalized one-on-one early literacy, tutoring, using speech recognition. Through its bottoms-up teacher-driven approach, Project Read AI's tools have been adopted by educators in over 50% of U.S. elementary schools. Viv was previously an award-winning teacher at Freedom Preparatory Charter Schools in Memphis and co-founder of One City Schools in Madison, Wisconsin. He holds an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he received the Stanford Social Impact Founder Fellowship to help start Project Read. I'm excited to be talking to Viv. We're going to geek out on all things science of reading and how kids actually learn to read. You'll see that he's a person with great heart for the work and uh a connection to kids. And he's very much in line with our goal of kindling fire for young people and helping them become empowered learners. So with that, let's get to it. I'm excited to introduce Viv Ramakrishnan from Project Read AI. Viv, hello, welcome to the Prend Podcast. Thanks, Kelly, for having me. I'm looking forward to it. You bet. Well, let's dive right into this. I want to talk a little bit about reading and we we have a problem. I think everybody in education is talking about this. The NAPE scores national assessment that's called the nation's report card. We just got this back and found that kids in America are not reading. In fact, we're kind of at record lows. Here's something from Ed Week. I'll just read this. More eighth graders than ever are scoring below NAPE basic. Basic is the lowest benchmark on the test. So that's one third of eighth graders in the United States that are not reading at basic level. Uh, 40% of fourth graders falling below basic. So we have fourth graders and eighth graders. That's the pace that we test them. That's just basic. So that's a third, 40%. Uh, I know the numbers are even much, much lower when you think of proficient, which is like what we would call a functional reader. And those numbers are even lower. Can you just share a little bit about what's going on and what are we seeing in the results? And you know, we'll we'll get into why this is a problem.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, there's there's a lot to unpack there, Kelly. I think there's a couple trends you see from that data, one of which is that the pandemic exacerbated trends, but it did not start them. And we're not, we haven't seen the rebound that you might expect. So that's true for both math and reading. It's particularly true for reading. So that's where we have been focused on and where I have really dove in the most. And it's interesting because when you look at fourth grade reading, at the point that that's assessed, they're typically looking at comprehension against a given passage. Now, there's a whole lot of skills that a student needs to have developed to be able to get to that point. And if they're not all sufficiently in place for any reason, they are not going to be able to comprehend, make meaning, answer questions related to that passage. So that's where this term, you know, the science of reading comes in, and I know we're going to jump into that. But there's a lot of things that need to happen in the first years of a child's life that lead up to that data that we see that is really, you know, jaw-dropping for all the Rome Blue Sans.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, a lot of stuff going on. Well, I know you this is personal for you. Can you share a little bit about your background at story and when you started thinking about this question of reading?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, it's it's a great question. I think my deep interest and passion for educational opportunity goes all the way back to high school. I went to a really diverse public high school in Madison, Wisconsin. And in short, I was the like lone kid on the hockey team that was not white. I was one of the few kids on the football team that was not African American. I just found myself as literally and figuratively the brown guy in the middle and saw very different paths unfolding for my friends based on, you know, kind of their background and in ways that didn't quite feel fair to me. And so I was feeling that like throughout my adolescence, but had an opportunity to actually, I think, kind of act on that when my high school football coach was like, hey, we have so many students that are not eligible or are at risk of not being eligible to play on Friday nights because they have a failing grade in a given class on their progress report. The teacher needs to sign off, say that they're eligible to play, et cetera, each week. And so he asked me to start an internal tutoring program for teammates that were at risk of not being eligible to play. And that just lit the spark. I loved doing it. I loved working with my friends, I loved like understanding what some of these gaps were. And it just it made me deeply passionate about education. So that's kind of what lit the spark. Now, since then, you know, when I went to college, I did a lot of stuff at the intersection of economics and education. I did a lot of tutoring. I think all of it kind of with an eye towards maybe going to education policy long term and certainly with an eye towards like how do we create more opportunities for folks that are typically short on that. And that journey has now involved a couple different steps since college as well. It involved starting a preschool while I was in college as second co-founder and and staying involved from afar as we as we built that in my hometown of Madison. It involved teaching high school in Memphis, Tennessee. It involved coming back to Madison and wearing all sorts of hats to help grow that school from teaching to facilities to finance to everything under the sun. I was effectively our COO, but also long-term teacher, long-term custodian, all those, all those fun tasks. So and then as you sort of reflect on all of your experiences, I I love teaching high school, but I also recognize that it's too late in many cases to move the needle for a given student as much as you would want. And that needs to happen in elementary school, if not before then. My experiences, you know, in that setting were really formative. And I really came to believe that early literacy is one of, if not the highest impact level we have to moving long-term outcomes for students.
SPEAKER_02:Wow. That's a dramatic statement. So I want to just pause there and drill into it a little bit that too late. I mean, I've I've actually said the same thing. We apprend a microschools cover K through eight. So we spend time with the younger kids, and people always ask me, you know, what about high school? What about these high school kids? Say, yeah, I think you can do a lot for high school, but it's almost like if the mindsets and the approach, this is really the the non-cognitive side, if those things are set up already and they're they're baked in, then, you know, there's only so much that an educator, despite the level of passion and connection and all the great things that you would want to bring, can really do to deprogram or un unwire or rewire some of those things. Is that what you're talking about when you say too late in high school? Or are you talking about other kind of foundational academic and cognitive things?
SPEAKER_01:I think it's funny. I totally hear you. And I think that I had more movement on the side of like relationship building, having hard conversations with students about, you know, what paths they were on or considering. And where I had less success was not in moving instructional outcomes, like I think we, you know, moved ACT outcomes in math in under my my class like quite a bit. But it was more on some foundational skills that I was just like, yeah, these are not in place. I'm not going to be able to, we are not going to be able to get them to where they need to be this year. So one kind of glass half full way of looking at this was I I also taught personal finance. It's a required class in Tennessee to graduate high school. And I loved teaching it because even my students that didn't understand what an exponential function really was or how, you know, to manipulate an exponential function given a word word problem. If I could explain to them conceptually and and show them the impact of taking out a payday loan, what 460% APR does, and we could, you know, walk around the community and see all these stores that offered quick cash or title loans or whatever have you. Like that was a battle one and set kids up to make decisions that were in their better interests down the line. So I really loved teaching that because it scratched that itch of like, how can I do right by you, even with, you know, 11, 12 years of of education up till that point that, you know, are already baked in.
SPEAKER_02:Right. You were able to make a connection between some sort of purpose, some sort of reason for learning. You know, that's one of the things that even as a student, I remember in high school just looking around and saying, we're here because we have to be. There's, you know, if you were to push harder on that, there's a very loose link, I think, for a lot of high school students between what you're doing day day by day and you know, what you want in the rest of your life. I'm sure they could rattle off some sort of thing. But you see this in the engagement data, right? The reason for only 30% of high school seniors being engaged in school is partly that. It's it's disconnected. And I think part of that is, you know, bad information. It's actually knowing at least how a payday loan interest rate will work is going to protect you from making some really devastating decisions for your personal finances. But some of it is that the students are right in this, right? They're they're kind of calling BS on a long history of, you know, requirements and hoops and arbitrary things that that in the end don't matter, right? And I think it's it's hard to get at what's the truth there. Students are all kids are just so good detectors of actual authenticity and honesty. So, you know, I I think I hear them, I guess, is is what I'm saying.
SPEAKER_01:No, but I mean they're they're not they're not irrational actors by any means, right? Like you engage with things that one, you either just happen to have an interest in, you know, you you love this particular video game, or you engage in things that even if it's not your like deep passion, you see how it connects to real value for you. And like, so students, most of my students worked part-time. They would file during the second semester of the course, they would file their taxes in my class, 1040 easy by hand and all that good stuff. And they would see that, hey, they saved 200 or 50% of their return that they would have by not going to, you know, a middleman.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, that's amazing, right? That's a that's a life lesson right there. Well, let's talk a little bit about the other side of that. So we're talking here about kind of non-cognitive or just engaging in learning, having the mindset of, you know, the tenacity to stick with it, the belief that you can figure this out. I'm sure you've run into this as a high school teacher, and you probably even saw some of it in preschool, you know, where you have you have beliefs about yourself that actually prevent you from putting in any effort, which then is a self-fulfilling prophecy, right? You'll never learn to read if you believe you can't read and then you don't put any work into reading, and similar with math and and anything else. So, yeah, can you talk a little bit about what's how can we sort of unwire that and and is there a way to do it through through pedagogy? I mean, there's been a lot of talk. You mentioned science of reading already. This is, you know, I guess let's before we get to science of reading, I guess what I'd like to do is drill into what happened, right? There's this sold a story kind of narrative, this idea that, you know, maybe reading was done wrong. And can you just kind of share your version of what you saw going on? And I know it's not the whole the whole story, the whole picture. As you mentioned, there's things happening before kids even get to kindergarten. So give me your your take on, you know, why is it so bad and why are we struggling so much?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, it's a fair question. And I think that, you know, long before I was born, long before I was thinking about any of this stuff, these debates about how to teach reading have been going on for a long time. National Reading Panel, which people still look to, for example, of or you know, what works came out in, you know, the early 2000s, and we're still having the same conversations. So this has been an ongoing conversation for a long time, and Soldist Story did a really beautiful job of putting it into focus with a point of view that was backed up by real data and evidence, right? From from my vantage point, I think we need to acknowledge the importance of systemic factors, poverty, things like this that shape opportunity. And like the way I would put it is that I think those things put kids at risk very early on, but it's things within our control as educators practice that cements that risk, right? Or mitigates it. Right. And historically, I think it's cemented it with practices that are not shown to work for so many students that need it, whether it's students that have dyslexia, whether it's students that just are further behind in their reading journey based on opportunity gaps. And then on the flip side, like there's really good reasons to see from even the nape data, the bright spots in the nape data suggest that like poverty is not destiny, right? That even states with highly variable poverty rates, and even when you control for demography, you see that certain places, states, not just little towns or cities or school districts, are doing better by their kids in ways that you cannot ignore.
SPEAKER_02:Let's talk a little bit about that. Because you you brought this up last time we talked, we were geeking out on spreadsheets, and you were specifically focused on Wisconsin, where you grew up, and this is home for you. I actually used to live in Wisconsin too, so we have that connection. And then we were talking about Mississippi, which I think most people would point to as one of these bright states that people will say the Mississippi miracle. There's been growth in reading in Mississippi. So we were talking specifically about the nape reading scores for fourth graders who are black. And I think that that group alone. Can you share a little bit about what you were seeing? And it kind of reinforces this point you're making.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, totally. And I think the the data was, and I might be one or two percent off, but it was like 7% or 8% of black fourth graders in Wisconsin could read proficiently. And in Mississippi, it was more like three times that. It was like, you know, 20, 21%. And mind you, there's also a much higher child poverty rate in Mississippi, right? So it's not like if you omit that variable that could explain it. No, in fact, it's in the face of a higher poverty rate in Mississippi, even for black students than in Wisconsin. And so there's something that is happening in Mississippi, and it's not just Mississippi. The Mississippi Miracle, I think, has gained traction. There's other bright spots in that data. Louisiana is another one, Alabama's another one, right? So like it's actually a bunch of southern states that I think we've historically dismissed as being, you know, oh, you know, making jokes about that education system in Mississippi. It's like, no, jokes on us. They figured this out. Yeah. They figured out I don't think they would say that they're happy with one-fifth of black students reading proficiently, but when that's, you know, twice the national average and three times higher than places that have lower poverty rates, like we have to acknowledge that there's a lot for us to learn from what's happening in some of these southern states. So what did they do? So the the backstory here is they have invested now not just, you know, in the last year or two, but going back years, meaning like, you know, better part of a decade, in high quality teacher training around the science of reading, getting all their folks trained in not, you know, a one or two hour kickoff about this, but actually like deep coursework around the why, the how to implement evidence-based practices, how the brain actually acquires knowledge in the domain of reading, right? And so they've invested a ton in their teachers with upfront training and then an implementation at the state level, with state DOE having a robust system of coaches, et cetera, that are actually going out into the field, visiting these schools, working hand in glove with principals to make sure that what happened in initial training is actually being implemented effectively in classrooms and not just one or two years, but over and over and over again, year after year after year, and that compounds. Right. So the other thing that I think is helpful there is like there is teacher mobility between districts in the profession. Like it's hard to, you know, invest a ton in a teacher and then they leave, and then somebody else comes in who did not have the same training or background that that person does. And like, not that statewide training and and real commitment to that solves that completely, but you can imagine that you generally have a pool of educators moving between schools that have shared background knowledge and deep training, and that that would be helpful rather than districts kind of figuring out things one-off.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, that's amazing. I would love to dive in all the way to that moment where you have an adult sitting with a kid who's literally working it out in their brain and struggling to do the basics of reading. I will just say personally, this never happened for me. So I was one of the lucky ones, I think, that learned by osmosis, so to speak. I was around, I mean, my my parents had books in the home. We were very middle class. I didn't have tutors or anything, but it was definitely a sense of like reading was part of my life, even before I I went to kindergarten and I was already a decent reader before I even got to kindergarten. I don't actually remember ever learning, you know, phonics, grammar, rules. Like, in fact, I was sitting there in, I think, German class as a junior in high school, learning what a direct object was and uh, you know, some of the the pieces of a sentence that, you know, I think some people learn that explicitly. I don't remember ever getting that in my I I also went to, you know, public schools out here in Arizona. But um yeah, can you can you give a little picture of Mississippi is training all their teachers? They're training them and Alabama and Louisiana, they're training them to do to do what? You know, what does that actually look like? The evidence-based practices. Can you give us kind of a a snapshot into what that looks like?
SPEAKER_01:It's as much about what to do versus what not to do. Okay. For example, yeah, I also never got really systematic explicit phonics instruction, and I am, you know, one of the 30 to 50% of kids, depending on the estimates you look at, that don't need that and can figure it out with enough reps and pattern matching that we do implicitly. But you know, the so on what to do, it's really important that teachers have a sense of how fluency is developed, right? You l go from learning the most granular units of language, letter sound correspondencies, the letter C can make a k sound, right? Like in the word cat. And building a progressive sequence of skills that kids are introduced to that build on one another and allow them to then start to put together words. Right. So you can think about if the first few letter correspondencies that you explicitly teach to a student are they oftentimes called a sat pin. S makes the short A sound, uh t uh, like all the like words that you can start to make like pin, pat, sat, mat, right? I sat on the mat. And we teach them I as a standalone irregular word for the time being, right? So you start to help kids not just get all this information at once about all the possible letter sound correspondencies, hundreds of them, giving them piecemeal introductions and then opportunities to put that to practice, right? In the form of actual words they are trying to put together and read. Then eventually more words with different patterns, then eventually phrases, then eventually sentences, passages, etc. And not expecting mastery um from the jump, but understanding that it's it is a continual process. So that's like some of the building blocks about what to do. Now it's interesting. There's kind of a debate in the field, and I would say that the evidence base points one way more than the other. Even amongst folks in the science of reading field, like there are discrepancies. Historically, phonological awareness, like all this stuff just around, or phonemic awareness more specifically, around, you know, rhyming, for example, but with not putting like teaching kids how to rhyme, different patterns of how sounds come together, but divorced from letters with phonics, was was something standalone phonemic awareness has been something in the field for a long time. Folks are actually kind of starting to move away from that because there's not a bunch of evidence that it actually is additive relative to just starting to put letter sound correspondences into play from the beginning. So even there, there is like some disagreement around how folks, even in the world of structured literacy or science of reading, have approached this. What they all agree on, and what the evidence is is overwhelming on, is that teaching students to look for context clues as their crutch for decoding is not helpful. So a lot of books that were learned to read books historically have been very predictable books. It's been like I sat on the mat. Okay, cool, it sounds good. And there's a picture of a mat. Then it's the next page is I sat on the cat. And I mean, I'm jokes on me, but you know, kid sitting on a cat. And it's like, it's like they're not actually decoding the words, they're simply swapping out and figuring out what that word is based on the picture clues, right? And what that does is obscures the signal on what a student can actually do when those crutches are removed.
SPEAKER_02:Hmm. Yeah, it's fascinating. I think I did a lot of that as a kid. And of course, you know, Dr. Seuss books come to mind where it's just all these crazy things. But um yeah, part of that is I want to talk a little bit about the role of technology. In this case, the technology is the book, right? Somebody wrote a book that, you know, is predictable or has a picture, or you know, there's things like that. And um, and then the other half of that is the role of the person that's sitting next to this child that's that's learning, right? So you can imagine that person giving guidance, like, well, let's look at the letters and let's make the sounds of the letters and then let's blend them together. So if the you know the word is, I don't know, I'm trying to think of a weird word that rhymes with cat and mat, but it's, you know. Yeah, yeah. So it's like, okay, then then what is that first letter? And then we we sound it out together. Yeah, it and I guess the interplay between those two things matters, right? It's the material itself matters because it we're making it possible for kids to I I I don't know, like sneak through, I guess, like slip through themselves. They're gonna find the path of least resistance, and everybody's looking at me, and I don't want to be that kid that doesn't know how to read. And so I'm gonna guess my way through it. And I think you see that happening in some of the data where you have these kids that aren't proficient readers, but part of what's going on is they're actually functioning okay because they're able to, right? The the pictures get them enough and they can guess based on maybe the first letter or or something like that. And then the other half of it is what are we doing instructionally, pedagogically to to you know help them really get to the the core of it. Um am I getting that right? I mean, is that are those kind of the the two pieces of it that you think about as you have you've now given your life to this uh to this question. So I, you know, I I'm not an expert here.
SPEAKER_01:I think No, I think you framed it pretty well. As and so there were things to recap, there were things we have historically been doing in many cases, not everyone, but many schools, including the ones that I went to growing up, were doing that were obscuring signal on who could actually decode, who was actually building the skills they needed to become a fluent and skilled reader. And we're kind of diluting ourselves as adults by thinking that far more kids could do it than could actually do it because we wanted to, we wanted it to be true, not because, you know, of anything nefarious. I think everybody wants the same thing for kids, which is for them to like prosper, have all the skills they need to prosper, et cetera. But we were doing things that were obscuring our way to soberly assess that. Now, you know, this is a process of development. Just because you can decode a word doesn't mean you can do so automatically. It might be a super labored process. You know, it's not, it's not linear. You just because you can now decode words automatically doesn't mean that you can decode phrases well at all. Maybe you can make, or maybe on the other hand, you can decode phrases, but you're still not automatic at the word level, right? So like there's all these messy ways that that fluency development, like, you know, is still individual to understanding what's happening with that student in front of you. But ultimately, yeah, you want to go from students understanding the basic letter sound correspondences to being able to read any given word, then read those words in continuation in the form of a phrase, a sentence, and ultimately a passage with prosody. Because if I read every word like this, it's different than reading a story with you know almost implicit understanding and the prosody of, you know, Kelly and Viv went to this store on one fine day, which is very then very different from Kelly and Viv went to this door on one day. And like there's just something that that probably implies about how much you that passage is is landing with you, right? Um so it's it's a process. And then it's even beyond that, because even if you are a fluent reader, it does not mean that you have the comprehension abilities that are needed to show up on that nape data in fourth grade. So there's all sorts of ways that phonics is not the you know, be all end all. In parallel, there's all sorts of things that early elementary school teachers even can and should be doing to build those skills related to comprehension. Read alouds, talking to kids, building background knowledge, vocab lessons, right? So there's all sorts of ways that in parallel, it's not just a step function thing of phonics, then comprehension, that like these strands of the reading rope, as they say, kind of commingle and need to from the beginning.
SPEAKER_02:This is maybe going to be a stretch, and I know we're talking about reading right now, but it sounds like you and I have both done math tutoring. In in math, especially for older kids, you know, high school age kids, and they I will get a kid at the desk that I'm looking at, I'm, you know, working through homework assignments with them. And I they can they they have sort of a set of rules that they've memorized and they can kind of apply the rules, but it's like conceptually what's going on, it's clearly missing. Like there, there's a a base layer and then a higher layer. And I think years and years of grade level material and having to sort of keep up with the class, they've found ways to cope and they'll they'll get 70% of the problems right, even. But one of the things that I find myself doing as a math tutor, and I wonder if there's something similar here with really good reading tutoring, is to, in some ways, it's like a medic, you know, that's like tearing you open more because they they don't like it. I I'm sort of pushing them on the the parts where they don't, they don't fully understand so that we can get that cleared up. And it's like once you understand this, I find myself saying these words to the kid, once you understand this, everything's gonna make more sense because every step in this problem should be like clearly defensible in your mind and you you can like stand by it. Like I would put money on this, that if I add three to this side of the equation, I have to add three to the other side of the equation. Like every time that's true. And then you challenge them, like, does are you confident on that? Are you sure? And they look at me like I'm used to sort of guessing based on what the adult is doing. It's like, like I'm sort of cheering you on and nudging you forward. It's like, no, don't use me as a resource. This needs to exist solidly in your own brain. I'm I'm giving this an example. Just from having spent this time one-on-one with kids in math. I I think I've told you this. I did not have any reading expertise at all when I started Prenda. And at first I started with older kids, fifth grade, sixth grade, seventh grade, probably needed reading even then. But then as things expanded, we started opening the doors to younger kids. And I was very lucky and grateful to find Katie Broadbent, who had spent a lot of her life thinking about literacy and very strong advocate of phonics. And she explained the whole thing to me. And we ended up building a self-paced, kind of student-led version of what we're talking about that Prenda supports and by the way, gives away for free if you go to treasure hunt reading at Prenda. People will download this and use it for homeschool or for traditional education. But, you know, all of this to learn that and to say what's going on in in those moments, you know, how how can we understand what the building blocks are, find the one that's missing? It's it's a tall order, I guess. It's maybe what I'm saying. It's it's hard to do. You're not wrong.
SPEAKER_01:You're not wrong. So a couple ways where I think this is similar to math, and then one where it's not. On one hand, yes, there's many cases when especially you're working with an older student, where you're gonna have to go back to blending drills, where you have three cards in front of you and it's C, A, and T, and have them read the word cat, and then you take the little blending board and you um remove the C and you swap in an M and you ask them, you know, you just start doing these these drills where you're swapping and making chains of words and making them truly like go back to the stages of understanding how these letters sound correspondences that they probably know in a vacuum if they're older at that point, but not understanding how to like automatically put them together. You're going back to the base layer, similar to what you talked about. Now, that being said, um the English language is far less rules based than math is. Math is rules based. The English language has all sorts of nooks and crannies and departures from patterns that we would have taught kids. So, like in parallel, what most scopes and sequences do for phonics is they are also teaching them irregular words during each. Lesson that will show up in stories that are decodable. So, like, like that example of the word I, I sat on the mat. Like I might not be a letter sound correspondence they've learned yet. And if they do learn it, they're going to learn it as the short I first, like in the word sit, not the long I sound, right? So we teach that as an irregular word or a partially irregular word, depending on, you know, how your scope and sequence ends up unfolding. But all of which is to say is that I don't think the goal can be or is even possible to teach kids all of the possible letter sound correspondencies in a way that they get to some sort of predefined bar of mastery. I think the goal instead is to give them a really strong foundation with the most commonly occurring patterns in a really progressive way, like with that scope and sequence that cumulatively builds upon itself that has opportunities for review and practice of the concepts that were previously introduced, all with the goal towards giving them escape velocity to figure it out on their own. Right. And it's giving them the tools to figure it out on their own. Again, I think similar to math, it's just those tools are not always rules-based reading in an English language.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, you're right. I mean English. I'm picturing those boards where you have O-U-G-H and you put T on the front. It's like, well, that word is tough, you know? It's like that. And then you put D on it and it's like, oh, that word is dough. You know?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And and so you could go through, and what you could do, Kelly, is you could teach a lesson on the O U G H pattern, and you could show them both O and you know, like all the all the variants that you're talking about off, right? Yeah. Or, and and some programs will do that because there's enough words that meet that pattern that it might be worth it. But many programs will say, hey, that's an obscure enough pattern that you know, we're not gonna explicitly teach that.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. No, this is helpful for me because I felt deficient in not knowing the rules. So um I know that it is irregular and there's uh there's exceptions. And English beautifully pulls from so many different linguistic traditions. So how could it possibly be? But yeah, no, that's uh that makes a lot of sense. Okay, so given that that it's hard, given that we need to pull kids back to the base layer, which involves both some science in terms of knowing what they understand, what they don't understand, and where to focus, given that we also need to know when it's a rule and when it's an irregularity, that this whole thing is done in the context of a human being who's gonna get frustrated, disappointed, maybe feel like a loser because they're, you know, 14 and looking at cat, right? So, like all of the psychological elements to this, um, yeah, what I mean, what do you say, right, like to an adult who's who's responsible for this? And I I'm saying this with all sort of understanding and empathy for teachers who are trying to do this and to trying to do this at scale. Um, and I'm also trying to get us to maybe a foray in the conversation to talk about technology and talk about your current project, which I think is is really trying to step in and help here and support.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, good good questions all. I, you know, I think that we ourselves have contended with the question of maybe less so what we're actually doing, to some degree what we're doing in the product, but certainly how we think about it, how we frame it, between like an all-knowing, patient, infinite AI tutor versus like repeated fluency and decoding practice with real-time feedback on overdrive. Like that second one is way less catchy, but I think is also probably true to how we think about it, which is like I don't think our AI tutor, which we call it still, is like deeply conversational and like the high-level conversations we're having about chatbots that like engage a student's interest and develop content for them on the fly. Like, we're not doing any of that. We're talking about kids learning how to decode and read words. But what I think we are doing is trying to use technology to fill a huge gap, which is that even the best first grade teacher that has 30 lovely little kids running around cannot simultaneously give each of them the amount of personalized productive practice that they need. Right. And so kids might be silently reading, which in the early stages of of learning to read is not actually very effective if you can't already do it. There's really bad evidence on silent sustained reading, actually. But you logistically can't meet with all the kids you would want to individually to hear them read out loud. So then you start doing things like small groups, which is really what you should be doing, given all the constraints you have on your time, all the other things you have to get to. But what we know is that students, like some students, need hundreds of practice opportunities on the same phonic skill for that to actually start to become automatic. Right. And that typically then is supplemented either at home or with tutors. And that is logistically and cost-wise quite difficult. And so we have thought about filling this gap in what high quality practice with real-time feedback looks like as an extension of what we know works and what teachers can't quite do, even the best of them.
SPEAKER_02:Right. Yeah. Give walk me through what that is and what that looks like. I know you've shared some examples of the product in action, both the AI tutor product and your, like you said, your your AI-powered, uh personalized drill instructor that keeps feeding the appropriate opportunities.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I went on that whole soliloquy about practice as opposed to infinite, uh infinite patiently tutors, but we're still calling it an elegant.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Well, I we know what what you mean. Yeah, it's not, it's not trying to be the human in the room. In fact, I'm skeptical. Like I think that's going to be later, if ever, you know, where you can really because what a kid's looking for is something that they understand from birth, right? This is like pre-verbal, it's not about words on the screen.
SPEAKER_01:It's pre-chatbot fundamentally. So we're talking about these chatbot tutors, or maybe there's some voice components on top of it. It's like our kids are that we're serving currently are not ready for that at all, definitionally.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, ours either. I mean, they need that adult in the room. Thankfully, a microschool, it's 10 kids. So you you're closer to the ability to have that personal connection to each. But even with 10, I mean, if you had to really do this manually, it would be a lot, which is why I've been glad to pilot some of the work you guys are doing and and plan to do uh do more of it just using the tools that can really unlock this because we want each of these kids to really learn how to read.
SPEAKER_01:Well, you asked for the example, so I'll try to describe it as best I can. And this goes all the way through your typical phonic scope and sequence, um, you know, which gets into affixes, some of these, you know, more complex patterns, but let's just keep using this example of cat that we started with. So a student sees the word on screen. Teacher sets up the student, they either set them at you know lesson one, which is you know the short A makes ah, or they set they move them further down if they know they're ready for a bit more. Um, but they see, you know, sentence level practice as well as word level practice, whatever mode the teacher wants to set them to. But let's say that um they set them to word level practice and it's lesson 14 where C makes a k is introduced, and the first word they see and are asked to practice is cat. So you have the word cat on screen. And the tutor says, Can you try reading this word for me? And the kid goes, What it's gonna do is it's gonna break that word into three boxes, Alkonin boxes as we call them, where one letter sound correspondence is in each box. So later down the line you might have multiple letters in the same box, but for right now we just have C in one box, A in one box, T in another box. And what it's gonna do is it's gonna put the A and the T in green boxes and give them a little check mark because it wants to indicate you actually said that part of the word right. And then what it's gonna do for the first letter, the box in which C is, is it's gonna, you know, outline it in red and have like a little X and it's gonna give them some feedback and say, hey, can the letter C actually makes a sound like in the word, you know, whatever, might give it an example. Um then the student can tap on the box and a little mouth will pop up and it will show them in a video how to make that that articulatory gesture that produces that sound. And so then the student starts tapping successively on the boxes and they say, they wait a couple seconds. And ideally what happens is the student's able to self-correct at that point and go cat and we say, Great job, and we move them on to the next word that also is maybe now cob because we've already taught them the short O and we've taught them uh, you know, B makes b, right? That's the next word we they move on to. But if they don't get that, or they could have missed it for two reasons. They could have said mat again or sob or whatever, right? Or they might have said k at that's common, where kids can name the letter sound correspondencies, but they can't continuously blend the word. The thing we just released is another scaffold or layer of support for these students where they can run their finger over the word cat and see the letters and sounds play and light up and sync so they understand how they blend together. So I'm really excited about that feature. We spent a ton of time on the ground working with kids to go from really like hacky prototype on my phone that I would hold up like as they were missing words to like have them try it. And now it's like a fully functioning feature where if that student still needs support, they can run their finger over the words and see how it's blended and then try again. And if they try again, they get it right. That's awesome. And if they don't, you know, they'll get something really kind of like, hey, that word was actually cap, a great effort. We're gonna keep working on it, right? And then they they move on to that better word cop.
SPEAKER_02:I love the interplay. Like I can picture that caring adult right next to the student that's sort of driving the the tool, but it's not, you know, it it's like let's get through this together, let's learn this thing and and I'm here to support you in it. You know, one of the things we've tried to, we've tried to really focus on when we design the microschool environment is we want that relationship to be first and foremost a very connective, supportive relationship to the point where we've said we don't want the the adult to be in the business of evaluating, right? So even just that feeling of like, no, sorry, it's it's cannot like that. You get these little moments that's um it's you know, depending on where the child's at in their development and emotionally and psychologically, that can feel like this person doesn't like me, right? Or this like this person's not on my team, where it's nice that now you're getting that feedback from a different avenue, and the the adult saying, like, it's okay, you know, like we got that now. We know it's like let's look at the next one and let's read the additional word. Yeah, I'm picturing that that all play out, and I I love the picture of it.
SPEAKER_01:And that's the very techno-optimistic version of it, and that's typically how it works. And then there's the version which is like you have 30 kids doing this at once in a classroom, none of whom have headphones, even though if they did have headphones, it'd make all the difference, especially headphones like with a built-in mic. And then it picks up background noise from one of the other 30 kids screaming, you know, mm, you know, cot. And it's like great effort, but this word was cat, is like, that's what I said, right? And that's like so there's all these ways where like the realities of being in a classroom do not always mesh with how like our view of how this would be built. Like, I think that folks who are going direct to parent, like with an app that's on an iPad that has, you know, all of that and no background noise, and a parent who's setting them up and checking in on them, like it's just so fundamentally different than building something for like large-scale classroom use. And it's harder, but I think like those are the breakthroughs we need to have in order to reach the kids we want to reach.
SPEAKER_02:Well, just like with kids, I mean, I think parents have their own questions about all this, right? And and there's a confidence gap that I think what you you can do is help them through and say, look, if you can be consistently available to your child and supportive and loving, that's not true for everybody, but if you can do that, you have the time to be there with them. I mean, I don't even know how much time you would need to spend. It's not like you need seven hours a day of doing this, you would need some short amount of time on a regular basis. And your kid will learn how to read. I mean, I think there's there was a big uh increase in sales of this book. I think I have it right up here. The teach your child to read in 100 easy lessons. You know this book. And during COVID, parents were buying this book because they're like, I don't know how to teach my child to read, but 100 easy lessons, it's you know, you're basically taking this to the next level because the 100 easy lessons couldn't listen to the child say the word and find where the the gaps are and adapt and and kind of personalize or tailor, tailor the experience. That's right. Wonderful. Well, let's talk a little bit just as we wrap up, because I know you have there's some videos on your website, and I'd encourage everybody to check this out. We'll we'll put it in the show notes, but just these moments where you can see a child kind of tentatively struggling through, and there's some some learning gaps, and then there's these breakthrough moments. And one of the things we talk about at Prenda is the empowered learner. There's a desire to learn and a confidence and a swagger in it that I can do this. And every time I see that, I just rejoice because it's basically my favorite thing and it transfers. It, you know, you can do that in the context of reading and then go approach your math differently or even sports differently or friendships differently. Like there's there's just a way of being in the world, which is it's the sense of like, I'm gonna figure this out, I can do this. I've seen that, you know, in some of the work you guys are doing. Can you share a little bit? Just paint a picture for our listeners and our viewers who are, I think like me, very geeked out on this question of empowered learners.
SPEAKER_01:Oh yeah, that's that's the magic moment right there, which is like a student that labors through their own self-correcting, right? And then they see the fruits of that labor at the end. And when you see those moments, it's magical. And I think that there's something really powerful about a student that arrives at a conclusion or or makes growth that's truly driven by them, where they've put those points on the board as opposed to being spoon-fed. And like we got to give them the context and the initial, you know, direction or instruction to give them that opportunity. So, you know, they're they're not out there without without any tools to work with. But when you see them apply it and work through it and figure it out, it's really cool. So I think the example you're talking about is a girl who, you know, looked at the word pages and like guessed that was like progress or something like that. And then it lit up the boxes and color-coded them based on which parts were correct, which parts were wrong. And she's like tapping on the boxes, she's decoding out loud pag. And then she's she starts piecing it together over the course of like a minute, 90 seconds, giving her the space and time to explore the anatomy of the word. And she's like, pages, pages, pages. And then, you know, she gets in, it's like it's lovely, right? Yeah. Ah, it's the best. Yeah, those are the magic money moments.
SPEAKER_02:I love that story so much. And I applaud you for the work you're doing and the support you're you're giving to educators everywhere who I think, like you said earlier, want the same thing. We want kids to not only get the basic building blocks of the skill of reading, but the confidence that comes with what you just described for that, for that girl in particular. And so let's keep it up. I I appreciate you taking the time to share with us a little bit about science of reading and how kids learn to read. And I'm excited about what's possible. Let's drive that proficiency level up. I would love to see, you know, in another two, four, six years, I'd love to see those numbers looking much, much better as more and more kids learn how to read.
SPEAKER_01:Totally. Well, I appreciate the time. And yeah, it's it's a funny topic because it's just the intersection of two very buzzy terms, right? One artificial intelligence and two science of reading. Yeah. And I think like the task for for folks like me who are building at that intersection is to go from these really lofty movements, language, et cetera, and make that very concrete for the students that we want to serve.
SPEAKER_02:I can tell you're doing it. Vivek Ramakrishna, thank you for being here today. Thanks for having me, Kelly.
SPEAKER_00:The Kindled Podcast is brought to you by Prenda. Prenda makes it easy to start and run an amazing microschool based on all the ideas we talk about here on the Kindled Podcast. Don't forget to follow us on social media at Prenda Learn. And if you'd like more information about starting a microschool, just go to Prenda.com. Thanks for listening and remember to keep Kindling. Bye.
