Thousands of Kentucky teachers have been trained on a new way to teach reading.

And a new report says student literacy outcomes are improving as a result.

The Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling, or Letters for Short training is part of the Kentucky Reading Academies, created by the Read to Succeed Act back in 2022.

Educators say the training has transformed how they teach reading in the classroom.

More on this and our education news segments.

We have been very excited to have over 7000 Kentucky educators and administrators to join.

Register for letters training.

And what that does is it focuses on the science of reading, how you learn, and how the brain processes language, and how to teach key components of reading.

It is a heavy lift.

It's two years for letters for educators, which is for the teachers component.

And that training kind of consist of asynchronous learning and, and we follow up with virtual sessions with a person, a trainer, to kind of go over the key components.

Sometimes it would be a video clip of a teacher working with a student to show you exactly how that strategy could be implemented.

Sometimes it was a video of a researcher sharing the latest knowledge that they had found through their research studies.

It is very transformative, I think, in the way that we approach reading for students, because I think that it really gives us a true lens of the research.

And this is this is the way our brains, you know, work and this is the way our brains learn to read.

We have to be explicit with it and we have to be systematic.

And so I think to have the tools and the training, to understand that, has really just helped me to transform that in my classrooms.

If you notice, to, if a child is maybe not having success, letters equipped us with a lot of tools and strategies because of the what and the why and the how to be able to reteach with those students or to really drill down to what they need.

You know, we.

We really had two different rounds of evaluation at this point.

And the first was through our third party evaluator, ICF.

And they showed that initially we were seeing gains for students who had had letters training teachers in consecutive years at fourth and fifth grade.

And so that was very encouraging.

It was exciting that in that that data translated to students who were Exceptionals were also students who may have, individualized education plans.

And so, you know, those are some of the students that we want to provide the absolute best supports for in terms of access to high quality reading instruction.

Now, we can say that that there is significant growth in proficient students for schools that have over 10% of their teachers trained.

Not only did we see more students moving toward the proficient level, but schools in districts with higher percentages of letters trained teachers also saw a reduction in the novice reading level.

So that's a celebration that that we're seeing that reduction in novice, but also an increase in proficiency.

You know, I had been in the classroom for 18 years when I started letters.

So this is my 20th year in education, and it has inspired me.

It has fueled me.

It has enabled me to feel confident when I am with my students.

It has enabled me to feel confident when I'm talking with their parents about their, reading and their writing and their speaking and their thinking.

And I just think that it is so valuable.

Early literacy to me is the foundation for everything.

We want our students to love reading.

We want them to be confident as readers, you know, if they are strong readers when they leave us in those early years, then that's only going to continue to build for them.

So.