Footsteps 2 Brilliance: Helping Every Student Enjoy a Love of Reading

Hello, everybody,

and welcome to the

TeacherCast Educational Network.

My name is Jeff Bradbury,

and I have a fantastic show

for you today.

Today, we're talking all about literacy.

And of course,

we can't start any podcast

without talking about my edutriplets,

10 years old,

and they're reading every

single thing they can get their hands on.

Today,

I have two amazing guests talking

all about a great program that they've

created to help young

students enjoy a love of literacy.

I want to bring on today

from a great website called

Footsteps to Brilliance, Ms.

Eileen Rosenthal and Kathy Maximoff.

Eileen and Kathy, how are you today?

Welcome to TeacherCast.

Thank you so much.

We're great and really

appreciate being on here with you.

Excited to be here, Jeff.

Well,

let's get started here because I love

talking about reading.

I love talking about literature.

I love watching my kids open up books.

The other day they were at a

library and in an hour,

I think they each went

through like 10 and 11 books.

It is so important that we

have the supports for

students as they are

picking up these literary skills,

especially in the younger grades.

Talk to us a little bit

about what's going on at

Footsteps to Brilliance.

Jeff.

You just said it so well.

Your children have

incredible access to books

and they love literature.

And they're going to grow up

to be incredible readers and thinkers,

really building the tools.

So the problem is that in

the United States,

nearly half of our children

actually enter school

one,

two or three years behind where they

should be.

That's at age five.

And the reason for this is

that they don't have those

resources that your

children do that our children did.

And so the question is,

how do you remedy that?

How do you level the playing field?

And that's why we created

Footsteps to Brilliance.

We were one of the very

first companies to see

mobile technology as a way

to remedy the digital

divide and to provide

parents and their children,

even before they came to school,

with the books, songs,

and games that they needed

in order to be prepared to

succeed academically.

And the beautiful thing is

that when you give access to the books,

songs, and games that parents need,

we leverage their smartphones,

their tablets, their computers,

the children really do

enter kindergarten ready.

So it's very exciting.

We, of course,

also work in the schools

because we want to make

sure that the second benchmark,

reading proficiently at third grade,

is met.

Now,

any parent wants to make sure that

their students are educated

and well literate,

but it's really difficult

sometimes on a busy schedule.

What advice do you have for parents,

especially parents that have many,

many younger kids,

for helping to instill that

love of reading and to get

kids starting just to look

at the books and start to

figure out sounds and sound

letters together?

How can parents start down

this journey to help out their students?

Do you want me to jump in there, Eileen?

I am also a parent,

and I just think that when

we are working with our little ones,

they already have this

inspiration and wonder,

and we just want to

continue on the path of

inspiring their curiosity.

asking questions having

conversations and I think

that's one of the neat

things about the digital

programs that we put

together at footsteps to

brilliance is that we have

a lot of interactivity in

the program that draws the

parent in we also have this

really neat toggle button

that allows the parents to

go from english to spanish

because we know in a lot of

our homes that english is

not the first language and

we want to be sure that

those parents are engaged

everything in the program as

well is just available at a

touch so even parents who

might not have those

literacy skills that they

need or they don't feel

really comfortable and

literate themselves they

may not have that love of

reading themselves they can

still give it to their

child they can still

play these books along.

They can go to the Spanish side,

listen to it in Spanish,

and then read along in English as well.

And it's a really powerful

way to help parents feel

empowered by what they've

got just right there in

their back pocket.

let's talk a little bit

about students picking up

the natural language here

because we know that

there's many different

kinds of reading out there

there's reading the words

there's reading for

comprehension there's

reading to have a deeper

understanding there's

reading to be able to share

what you've known I mean

it's one of the things that

we talk about at the dinner

table here is what are you

reading tell me about the

characters what are the

characters doing meaning

and stuff like that all of

that stuff is translating

throughout their entire you

know life really but mostly

their you know their academic career

How can parents help bring

their students from simple

sounding things out through

those early stages of

actually what are you reading?

What are you understanding?

There is a huge gap right

now in people who can do

that and people who are

still trying to learn that.

What are some of the things

that teachers and parents

can do to make sure that

our students are able to

not only understand what they're saying,

but be able to spit it back at them?

Jeff,

music is one of the marvelous ways to

develop oral language.

And Footsticks to Brilliance

is infused with nursery rhymes,

both English and Spanish,

and lots of music throughout.

So children will learn their

counting through music.

This is a wonderful way to

produce knowledge.

But I have to say that one

of the podcasts that I saw

you do that I loved was

about having children tell

their own stories.

And at Footsteps to Brilliance,

we have something called Create a Book.

And this allows children,

every time they read a book,

to take all of the

characters and the

backgrounds and make a variation of it,

create their own story, if you will.

And this is so exciting that

there are now books

published and in libraries

throughout the United

States written by young

children because they've

been using the Footsteps to

Brilliance platform.

Yeah, I would just add, Jeff,

that that's kind of part of

our collective impact model.

Like we come in and we

partner with our school districts,

we partner with our communities,

and we create these

challenges that the district rolls out,

maybe over spring break,

maybe over the summer,

those times when there's a lull

And they really want to

engage with families and

not have that slide back

from all of the good

learning that's been

happening in the classroom.

And so we'll create a

writing challenge and have

families be reading the books,

writing and submitting

their writing work.

And then the district can

celebrate the amazing work

that's happening.

There are all kinds of like

Eileen was talking about.

They're publishing those

books and putting them out

in libraries and

celebrating the writing that

students are doing.

And when they have a voice,

just like you were talking about,

it really makes a difference in their,

even their motivation to be

a reader if they're an author as well.

Speaking today to Eileen and

Kathy from Footsteps to Brilliance,

you can learn more

information over at

footsteps2brilliance.com.

That's footsteps, the number two,

brilliance.com.

We're going to make sure we

have every single link over

in our show notes over at

Digital Learning Today on

teachercast.net.

Now,

if a school district is looking to

bring this program in,

generally around what grade

does that happen?

What does a school district

need to have in order for

this to be successful and

implemented in the classroom?

So we are a mission-driven company.

And so when we work with school districts,

the school districts

sponsor the children that

are in the school already.

And we actually sponsor for

free the children who are

in the community.

And this means that we can

start at birth working with parents,

showing them how to read, talk,

play with their children.

taking them up through the

foundational skills that

they need to be prepared for kindergarten,

and then going all the way

up until they're really

doing very sophisticated

critical thinking work in the sciences,

in the social sciences,

in all of the work that they need to do.

And so when a teacher is

working with the program,

what does that look like to a parent?

Sure.

So our program is really

easy for a teacher to get started.

We know that teachers right

now are really overwhelmed,

that there's a lot of

pressure happening around

the science of reading, about MTSS,

about doing data-informed instruction.

And so with Footsteps to Brilliance,

we just seamlessly align

with what the schools and

the districts are already doing.

We have pre-curated

alignments of our games and

books and activities and lessons

that align to the core

reading programs that are out there.

So a teacher would go and

look up their program and off they go.

They've got a weekly pacing

guide where students can be working on

the same skills that they're

doing in the classroom,

and then the teacher

automatically gets reports

because our games are like

formative assessment.

So whenever the students are playing,

the teachers are getting

the reports back.

Parents can be interacting

with all of that at home.

So they're getting exactly a

window into what the

teacher is teaching in the classroom,

but it's all interactive.

they don't need to know the

phonic skills they don't

need to know the sounds

even but they just make

sure that the students are

getting the time and that

they can kind of watch over

the shoulder also and

engage and ask questions

and interact with the books

and songs as well so it

sounds like the parents

really are a partner in this program

absolutely absolutely and I

think that's one of the

things that I've loved

about footsteps to

brilliance um coming on

board is that our program

also even from the

fundamentals was built for

parents um when covet came

we were okay in part

because our pro is also

built to be used with wi-fi

or without so even though

we're on mobile devices we

made a clear decision that

we needed to have equity

access for all parents and

in order to do that we have

a totally offline mode and

the teachers and the

districts still get their

data as soon as that device

connects to wi-fi again

that's pretty amazing that

you have that program that

is able to access the you

know like I said with wi-fi

or not could you give us

some examples of a school

district or a program that

you're working with that

you've had a lot of success

with and what does that look like

Oh, you know, we have,

thank you for asking that.

We have really so much success.

I want to tell you maybe two

stories that will really illustrate it.

One is the other day

superintendent Diego Ochoa

from San Mateo Foster City

podcast that he had done.

There was a family that had

moved from Brazil and they

spoke no English and their

young child ended up being

one of the top readers on

the Footsteps to Brilliance platform.

And he has a podcast where he asked the

child, you know,

why did you spend so much time?

And basically she said,

I wanted to learn English

and I learned how to speak

English on the Footsteps to

Brilliance platform in just 30 days.

So that's the kind of thing

that's really exciting.

And the parents were

learning alongside her.

In terms of actual data,

California a few years ago

gave a standardized test,

which was called the California

English language development test.

And this was done throughout California,

but in Napa County,

which was our very first client,

and they're still with us today,

the psychometricians

noticed something really unusual.

Before they could even analyze the data,

there were these outliers

that kept popping up of certain children.

And when they reversed engineered it,

They found out that the

children who on average

tested 31 points higher

than other children had

been the children who were

using footsteps to brilliance.

And that meant that they

were being reclassified

from English learners to

actual English speakers.

Wow.

That's an amazing story.

That's got to make you guys

feel pretty awesome that

this platform is helping so

many students and affecting

so many children.

Thank you.

It does.

It's why we get up every

morning and are

enthusiastic about what we do.

When we're looking ahead here,

what do you see as the

future for Footsteps to Brilliance?

What's on the horizon?

I always ask the question,

where are we going to be in

six to 12 months?

I'll let you answer that.

Where do you see all this

going in the future?

Well,

we have three things that we're

working on right now.

One is generative AI,

how that's gonna be helping teachers,

how it's gonna be

accelerating student learning.

We're really excited about

the work that we're doing in that area.

We're also doing something

that is really transformative.

We're doing a transmedia

program with San Bernardino County,

their PBS station.

And what it's going to do is

turn television from a

passive to a very active

experience for parents and

their children.

And then the even bigger

vision is democratizing

education for the entire world.

We actually have a

partnership right now with

the government of Pakistan

and Teach the World

Foundation where we're

creating micro schools that

children can come and learn English.

And the amazing thing is

that Nielsen did an

evaluation study and they

find that the children who

frankly, for one reason or another,

weren't able to afford even

$2 to get into school,

could come to these micro

schools for a couple of hours a day.

And at the end, they were actually

testing three times higher

on English than their

counterparts were in a

traditional school with

teachers and books and all

the other things that go with it.

So we're really excited

about the future of digital

learning in terms of what

it can do for the world.

That is an amazing story and

a remarkable accomplishment.

Congratulations on putting

all of that together.

I mean, those three things that you said,

those are huge hurdles to

accomplish and it's...

It's inspiring.

I got to tell you, as a parent here,

saying that there are

programs that are out there

that are going to help

students get to where that they need,

whether they are learning English,

whether they are native

English speakers trying to

learn how to read.

There's so many different things here.

And again, Footsteps to Brilliance,

it's just that program

that's going to go out

there and help out.

Tell us a little bit about what we can do.

Where do we go?

How do we reach out to you?

If somebody has a question,

where can they go?

Kathy, do you want to take that one?

Sure.

Yeah.

So we are on footsteps2brilliance.com.

So that's footsteps and the number two,

brilliance.com.

And on our website,

you can find out a lot about us.

And we also are on social media.

And you can follow us on all

of the standard platforms there as well.

We're going to make sure

that we have links to all

their social medias, to their website,

and to all the great

achievements that we've

been talking about today.

Eileen and Kathy,

thank you so much for being

on the show today.

Do me a favor.

Please invite yourself on in the future.

We would love to have you

come back and share some

more great success stories.

Thank you so much, Jeff.

It's really been a pleasure

to be with you today.

That's right.

Thanks, Jeff.

And we hope that you've

enjoyed this episode of

Digital Learning today.

Don't forget to head on over

to teachercast.net.

Check out all the great stuff.

We have our Instructional

Coaches podcast called Ask

the Tech Coach.

And we've also got our Jeff

Bradbury show where we've

been interviewing amazing

educational leaders and

innovators in the world of

educational technology.

And if you're interested in

being on the show,

please feel free to reach

out to us at feedback at teachercast.net.

We would love to feature you

on a future podcast.

And that wraps up this

episode of Digital Learning

today on behalf of Kathy

and Eileen and everybody

here on TeacherCast.

My name is Jeff Bradbury,

reminding you guys to keep

up the great work in your

classrooms and continue

sharing your passions with your students.