Ep 59. Why reading became a human rights issue in Canada with George Georgiou
This transcript was created with speech-to-text software. It was reviewed before posting but may contain errors. Credit to Canadian Podcasting Productions.
In this episode, Anna talks with Dr. George Georgiou, an educational psychologist and professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Alberta, whose work focuses on preventing and remediating reading difficulties. The episode explores recent Human Rights Commission investigations in Canadian provinces that examined why students haven’t been taught to read using effective, evidence-based, methods––what the inquiries uncovered, and how the situation deteriorated to this point.
They also discuss George’s research on reading difficulties and his eye-opening study that revealed the gaps in pre-service teachers’ knowledge of language and literacy. They talk about recent reforms in Alberta, including the rollout of universal literacy screening––what the results have shown so far, and how parents and schools are responding. This conversation really highlights what’s possible when research, policy, and practice come together. As always, Anna advocates that math deserves the same attention as reading. It’s a must-listen for educators and policymakers worldwide.
This episode is also available in video at www.youtube.com/@chalktalk-stokke
Supporting the Right to Read in Manitoba (Manitoba Human Rights Commission, 2025) https://www.manitobahumanrights.ca/education/pdf/public-consultations/supportingrighttoread.pdf
TIMESTAMPS
[00:00:22] Introduction [00:01:09] Findings from the Manitoba Human Rights Commission [00:06:02] George Georgiou’s research background [00:08:02] The Right to Read Human Rights Reports in Canada [00:12:11] Thoughts on the Right to Read reports [00:16:26] Similarities with math [00:17:07] Good curriculum that focuses on foundational skills [00:19:31] The study: Pre-service Teachers' Knowledge of Language and Literacy Concepts [00:27:39] Results of the Human Rights Report in post-secondary education [00:29:46] Reaction to the study: Pre-service Teachers' Knowledge of Language and Literacy Concepts [00:30:39] The Alberta English Language Arts curriculum[00:32:56] Is the new curriculum working? [00:37:31] What is universal screening? [00:44:50] What are the free assessments? [00:48:46] Findings of the assessments [00:53:38] Communicating the results to parents [00:54:34] Criticism on the screening process and results [01:00:40] Reading intervention programs [01:05:33] Final Thoughts: The future of early screening and intervention in Canada [01:09:02] Final Thoughts: What role should universities play in preparing teachers?
[00:00:00] Anna Stokke: Welcome to Chalk & Talk, a podcast about education and math. I'm Anna Stokke, a math professor and your host. Welcome back to another episode of Chalk & Talk.
You'll notice some new intro music today. I've been refreshing a few elements of the show, and I hope you like it. Along those lines, a lot of my episodes, including this one, are now available in both audio and video.
I'll put a link to my YouTube channel in the show notes so you can check out the video. And please do give the show a follow on YouTube. I've got a great episode today with Dr. George Giorgio, an educational psychologist and professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Alberta. He also worked with the Government of Alberta on reading reforms which we’ll hear about in the episode.
One of the things we talked about in this episode were Human Rights Commission's right to read reports in Canada from Ontario and Saskatchewan. And at the time I recorded this episode, we were waiting for the release of a similar report in Manitoba, which is my home province. Now that report was released on October 30th, and I attended an event hosted by Dyslexia Canada on that day to hear from the investigators who wrote the report.
And I thought I'd share some of the findings with you. So here are some quotes from the Manitoba Human Rights Commission. Some of the instructional approaches currently in place across Manitoba do not align with the evidence on how students learn to read.
Here's another one. While some school divisions, schools, and individual educators have attempted to implement a direct, systematic, and explicit approach in their schools, we lack a comprehensive and consistent approach to teaching foundational reading skills in Manitoba. Here's another one.
Throughout our survey responses and consultations, we heard repeatedly that educators did not feel they acquired the skills they feel they need to effectively teach students to read during their pre-service teacher education. And I bet we'd hear the same findings in many places across Canada or the U.S. And I do want to note that the data bears this out. Teacher-reported data reveals that only 45% of grade 3 students in Manitoba are meeting expectations in reading.
And I have to say that the results are worse for math. And I want to note this quote from the Human Rights Commission. Poorly developed word-reading skills act like a bottleneck for reading comprehension.
And this mirrors a lot of what we've talked about on this podcast for math. And I couldn't help but think that while I'm glad that as a society, we're waking up about poor reading instruction, at least I hope, I wish the Human Rights Commission had looked into math too. But I'm going to post a link to the Human Rights Commission's report on the resource page for this episode.
My hope is that by looking closely at what's happening in literacy, we can take away some lessons that might help us move math forward too. Now, in my conversation with George, we discussed his research on reading difficulties and his eye-opening study that revealed what pre-service teachers know or don't know about language and literacy. We also talk about Alberta's new English language arts curriculum, the rollout of universal literacy screening in Alberta, what the results have shown so far, and how parents and schools are responding.
Finally, we consider what other jurisdictions can learn from Alberta's experience. This conversation really highlights what's possible when research, policy, and practice come together, and the lessons extend beyond Canada. So wherever you're joining me from, whether Canada, the U.S., Australia, or beyond, I think there's a lot to take away from this episode. Now, on with the show. It is a pleasure to be joined today by Dr. George Giorgio and he is joining me from Alberta. He is an educational psychologist and a full professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Alberta.
He is also the director of the J.P. Das Center on Developmental and Learning Disabilities. His research focuses on the prevention and remediation of reading difficulties, and he's won several awards for his research, for instance, because of the positive impact of his research on society. He received the Queen Elizabeth II Jubilee Platinum Medal and the King Charles III Coronation Medal.
So, congratulations on that. And he has also worked with the government of Alberta to develop the new English language arts curriculum and to help with the standardization of the literacy screeners. And I am really looking forward to hearing all about that today.
So welcome, George. Welcome to the podcast.
[00:05:20] George Georgiou: Thank you, Anna, for inviting me to be part of these wonderful episodes that you have with your audience. And I have been listening to many or as many as I can, and I found them to be extremely informative and valuable for teachers, practitioners, policymakers.
[00:05:41] Anna Stokke: Well, thank you for that. And I'm really excited to hear about your work. So, you are an educational psychologist, and your research focuses on the prevention and remediation of reading difficulties.
So first of all, for listeners who may not be familiar with this area, can you tell us a bit about your research?
[00:06:02] George Georgiou: Yes. So, I'm looking basically into the factors that contribute or impede normal reading development or acquisition in different languages. And if at the event that children develop reading difficulties, then what can we do about it? So, are there any things that we can do early on in ideally in kindergarten or beginning of grade one to prevent reading difficulties from happening? And if they happen, then are there any reading interventions programs that we can use to help the kids who manifest reading difficulties? And we have been very successful in both areas.
[00:06:53] Anna Stokke: OK, so it's mainly sort of identifying when problems occur and then coming up with interventions to help with those problems. Does that sound right?
[00:07:03] George Georgiou: Correct. So, and as early as possible.
[00:07:06] Anna Stokke: As early as possible. OK, so those are the main kinds of questions you look to answer in your research. Is there anything else?
[00:07:13] George Georgiou: We also look more broadly into the factors that also contribute to children's performance that are outside of the classroom.
For example, the role of home literacy environment. So, what parents do at home that can help the children to read and also whether these factors manifest or demonstrate a different impact in reading performance across cultures. So are the Chinese, for example, having a different impact on their children's reading performance than Canadian parents? And we look at cultural, environmental factors that may contribute or impede reading performance.
[00:08:02] Anna Stokke: Let's start by talking about right to read reports in Canada, because there's a lot of media about that. I think we have one coming out in Manitoba very soon. Maybe even by the time this podcast is published, we might have that report.
So, to give some background to listeners, these investigations were conducted by human rights commissions in various provinces. So why was there a need for human rights investigations into reading in the first place? Like it seems rather extreme and serious. So why was there this need? And which provinces have actually published right to read reports so far?
[00:08:44] George Georgiou: There has been a disconnect between what researchers have known for a long time, even before early 2000, like 1990.
Like they have conducted several studies, and they have come to the same conclusion about the role of some of these foundational literacy skills or the role of early assessment and early intervention. Yet there has been this knowledge hasn't made it to the schools. It's knowledge that we have been sharing with public, we have been sharing with school divisions, teachers, but they have never really been done in a systematic basis across provinces in Canada.
So, some parent organizations, some other associations like Dyslexia Canada have inquired or brought to the forefront to the Human Rights Commission. It started in Ontario in 2022. And since that time, I know that there has been another Human Rights Commission report for the right to read in Saskatchewan.
And there is one more coming up in Manitoba. And they all conclude the same thing that we have to provide early assessment as early as possible, ideally in kindergarten, to prevent reading difficulties from happening. We also need to provide intervention as soon as possible for the children who are identified as being at risk for reading difficulties.
And we need to do a much better job with the curriculum. So, update some of the curricula in different provinces that date back to the early 2000. Obviously, things have changed since that time.
And also engage universities, and this is where we come in, to provide better training for their future teachers, which is a huge topic right now. I'm sure we'll talk about it later on because we have conducted a very interesting study across Canada on pre-service teachers' knowledge. But this Human Rights Commission reports for the right to read had essentially created awareness on the topic that it's a human right to provide good instruction to children.
And if we were to repeat these inquiries in all the provinces in Canada, I bet we would conclude exactly the same thing. We could copy and paste the Ontario Human Rights Commission report in every province, and it would have applied perfectly. Now, in Alberta, we are in a bit of a better place, if I may say, because in 2022, when we mandated early screening in schools.
So, we acted proactively to prevent, if I may say that a Human Rights Commission report in Alberta. And the results are there and they show that it is producing good results.
[00:12:08] Anna Stokke: What are your thoughts on the right to read reports?
[00:12:11] George Georgiou: I will say that they have served as a way of pushing governments, a way of pushing universities, way of pushing school divisions to think about their practices.
Either curricula, which is something that governments are responsible for, or assessments that school divisions are using, or how do universities prepare their undergraduate students for the task of teaching reading. You may recall that the Human Rights Commission report for the right to read in Ontario was very critical of one of the most prominent approaches in teaching reading, the three-cueing system, that says, look at the word, what's the first sound, look at the context, are there pictures that can help you guess what the word is. In other words, they are not teaching them explicit letter sound correspondences.
Which we know, it's more effective, and we know this since early 2000. But it hasn't been enforced into schools as a practice. Therefore, the Human Rights Commission report supports this change and reinforces what researchers have been saying for so many years.
Now, whether the schools are doing it or governments respond to this, this is a different story. Because in 2024, there was also a new report evaluating the steps that governments, school divisions, and universities have taken after the release of the Ontario Human Rights Commission report in 2022. And they said there was a lot of progress in many areas, like new curricula, Ontario got a new one in English language arts.
Mandating screening, they did it. However, universities did not change a single thing in what they have been doing. In a scale from zero to five, and that's what the rating scale they were using to evaluate the different points in that report, the universities, or whatever was related to universities, got a zero or one out of five.
Meaning they haven't really made any changes to their programs.
[00:14:43] Anna Stokke: I mean, I wish I could say I was surprised, but I guess I'm not. So, I mean, one thing with universities, people have a lot of autonomy.
They'll say academic freedom and things like that. And in many situations, that's really good. So, for instance, I have academic freedom, so I can have this podcast, and I can talk about some tough topics and I'm not going to get in trouble from my employer, right? So, there are good situations where academic freedom is really helpful.
But when it comes to something like this, and pre-service teachers are not being taught the right ways or the effective ways for students to teach their children that they're going to teach to read, no, academic freedom is unhelpful there, OK? If people are crying academic freedom to avoid teaching research-based methods for kids to read, that to me seems rather unacceptable.
[00:15:44] George Georgiou: I agree with you. And this was one of the conclusions that we drew in that recently accepted paper across Canada, that perhaps if universities are not taking the right steps to improve this situation, then maybe someone else needs to tell them to do this.
And maybe like certification bodies of teachers or governments in different places should be asking universities to get along and change their practices to make sure that they align with what science says is an effective way of teaching reading.
[00:16:26] Anna Stokke: So, you talked about the right to read reports and some of the things that came out of that. So, one would be early screening, like early assessment to catch the problems.
Preventative, really. You want things to be preventative. You want to prevent things before they get worse.
I think that should also apply to math.
[00:16:34] George Georgiou: Absolutely.
[00:16:35] Anna Stokke: Exactly.
OK, then the second thing, having good curriculum that focuses on foundational skills so that kids are set up for later success. That should also apply to math. And teaching teachers the best ways, the most effective ways to teach that are based on research, that should also apply to math.
Would you agree?
[00:17:07] George Georgiou: A hundred percent. I would say it's the flip side of the same coin. And that's partly why in Alberta, when we were asked to develop early literacy screeners, I had mentioned to Alberta Education and the minister back in 2020 that we should not be looking at reading alone.
We should be looking also at mathematics. And that is why they created assessments, early math screeners, early math interventions for our students in Alberta. And when the schools are testing the kids, they are testing them in both reading and mathematics in the grade levels that they have to test them.
And we can talk about them later on. But I totally agree with you. We could have had the same inquiry in human rights commissions for mathematics. We would probably end up with the same recommendations as in reading.
[00:18:08] Anna Stokke: I am quite certain of it. And it would be nice if we didn't have to have a right to learn math report.
These things should kind of be clear. And thank you for advocating for math, too. I'll say that.
[00:18:22] George Georgiou: Yeah, it has been. I have included math as part of some of my research studies because it gives you an interesting perspective when you look at the factors that relate to reading versus mathematics and the factors that relate to both. And there are like skills that predict both skills.
So, it's important to acknowledge the math component as well.
[00:18:50] Anna Stokke: OK, so we should talk about your study on pre-service teacher knowledge. I'm really curious about this.
And I think I actually saw it on the CBC maybe a year ago or something. It was maybe featured on CBC. But it's a rather recent paper you have.
And it's called Pre-service Teachers' Knowledge of Language and Literacy Concepts. The Skeleton in Canada's Closet. So, kind of a provocative title, I have to say. But it sounds very interesting. So, let's talk about that study. OK, who were the participants in the study? So, did this involve pre-service teachers from every Canadian province?
[00:19:31] George Georgiou: Yeah, before I get to that, Anna, I think I should refer to the motivation behind this study.
And for many years we have, I did mention in previous interviews that the source of the problem that we see in schools today, like even the pushback from teachers regarding the new curriculum or the mandatory assessments, is because they are lacking the required knowledge to understand why do we have to prevent reading difficulties, how can we do that, when should that happen, like in grade three, which is the current practice, or in kindergarten. And so, I did say that the source of all these problems are the universities. And that was actually caught many people by surprise because they thought that the universities are producing good teachers.
And that's fine. I don't disagree with that. But I'm saying that perhaps, as the Human Rights Commission report indicated, we need to align our practices with what science and current research shows.
So how would we show what our teachers know, what undergraduate teachers know, if we don’t have a study on them? So how about we go and measure what our teachers know when they are about to graduate from their B.Ed. program, and they are about to get hired in schools. So, the assumption here is that if the universities are doing a fantastic job preparing the undergraduate students for the job of teaching reading or mathematics, they should, our undergraduate students, should be getting really good scores on surveys, measuring their knowledge in language and literacy skills. And you can repeat the same study in mathematics.
That would be very neat because I haven't seen many on that. So, we went and we checked this. So, we got an accepted survey, one that has been used since 1994 in more than 200 studies across the world.
The one by Louisa Moats. And then it was later on modified by Erin Washburn and other colleagues in the States. So, an established survey asking teachers or pre-service or in-service about some very basic foundational knowledge in language arts.
So, the assumption is that if the students have finished their required course in language arts, they should know all about these things. The previous study that was conducted in Canada and included Canada was in 2015. And it showed that it was one university in Ontario and showed that the teachers had limited understanding of the basic concepts.
The average scores were about 50% correct answers in the area of phonological awareness in phonics, 35% in the area of morphology. So, we decided with some colleagues when we got together in a conference, how about we use the same survey in all of these universities across Canada and see what we will find. We had almost 900 undergraduate students across 11 universities in seven provinces.
So, including Manitoba. In some provinces, we had more than one university. Like Alberta was represented with two universities.
Ontario had three universities. And we tried to recruit from the main university in each province. So, we didn't really go to a college or like a small university that is producing teachers.
We went to the main university in each province. The results did not change whatsoever since 2015, the previous study. So, we had about, on average, across all the items, the knowledge was 54% correct across all these students and all these universities.
Now some universities were doing a little bit better than others. But I can tell you that the performance was low, relatively low across the board. And if you're thinking of selecting your medical doctor and you review the like the scores that they have online, would you like to, would you select a doctor that has that knows 54% of his topic? Probably not.
And so, this is what previous colleagues had said. Teachers that have 54% knowledge of something, they will not likely teach that concept. And in the area of morphology, which is understanding the structure of words, how the words are built.
Let's say that the word unhelpful has a prefix un, a base help, and ful then is the suffix. They were like 37% correct. So, they got one in three questions correct.
How can you teach that concept if you don't know it? You cannot. And if these are foundational skills, this means that the students, when they graduate and they go to teach the kids in schools, they don't have that knowledge. And they often do not even teach it.
And what they end up doing is they rely on existing programs, which is another issue here, big issue. And I think this is true also in mathematics. Like what are some programs that are used that we can flip through page by page and then think that we teach our students without really differentiating instruction and without re-understanding what our students can do or cannot do.
So, I think that that study across Canada will help the people in different governments to and different universities to start some discussions about what we are really doing in university.
[00:26:26] Anna Stokke: Oh, I agree. And you could do this study in math, and you might find that the results are worse.
That would be my guess. As I always say, you can't teach what you don't know. But even in addition to that, the programs are very poor that teachers get to use, that they’re generally recommended to use.
So, we have almost like a witch's brew in some sense, like all the factors in place to make things quite as bad as they could be. So, I think a lot of people would be really surprised about the reading, though, that the pre-service teachers had gone through their education programs. And this was at the end of those programs.
This is at the point where these teachers are going to go out into the schools and teach students that they really are not prepared to do that. That in reading, you know, it is like everybody needs to know how to read, right? This is a really important skill. You're not going to get by in life if you cannot read.
And we expect our teachers to be able to teach reading. It's not fair to the students and it's not fair to the teachers.
[00:27:39] George Georgiou: Well, it makes sense if you start putting the pieces of the puzzle together. So, the Human Rights Commission report, they did their investigation. They said universities are not really doing a good job training undergraduate students on the foundational skills.
So that's piece number one. We know that the percentage of struggling readers in Alberta, and it's true also in other provinces, has been rising. Why has it been rising? It's not just all of a sudden large immigration of newcomers into the province and therefore they don't speak English, and the reading difficulties have increased.
It's also reflecting that they don't get the instruction that they need. And also, it's manifested through the PISA studies, the PERL studies, the international studies, and their provincial achievement test that they show that the percentage of children reaching an acceptable level or standards of excellence has gone down. So, all of these pieces together, they show that there must be something in common linking all this.
And we know that from the work we have done with different school divisions, and I bet this is that's something you are also doing, when you go to the school divisions and you train the teachers on foundational skills, on what research says they should be doing, and you measure their students' performance, all of a sudden starts going up, struggling readers are reduced. And so, you have all these pieces of evidence that point to the fact that we don't train our undergraduate students the way they should be trained.
[00:29:36] Anna Stokke: I'm just curious, what was the reaction to your study? I mean, were the faculties of education, were they receptive at all?
[00:29:46] George Georgiou: I can speak to the University of Alberta.
I know that we have a committee right now looking at the undergraduate program of studies, and they are planning to do some revisions, and I'm hoping that part of these revisions will be the addition of a course on language and literacy as a second course to cover some of these concepts in more detail, or to better prepare our undergraduate students. I don't know about the other universities in the other provinces, but I assume they are dealing with something similar.
[00:30:26] Anna Stokke: Let's shift to the English Language Arts curriculum. So, my understanding is that you developed the new ELA curriculum in Alberta. So, can you tell us a bit about it?
[00:30:39] George Georgiou: Yes, in 2019 or early 2020, I was seconded to Alberta Education to oversee the development of the new English Language Arts curriculum.
And at that time, the first thing I did was to review all the curricula in Canada to see what other provinces have in place, identify commonalities, identify areas that they differ, see how they are reporting the goals in each grade level, what is developmentally appropriate, what is not developmentally appropriate. What has changed since the time these curricula were put in place? What new research has shown? And then after creating the content for each grade level in the area of reading, focusing on the foundational literacy skills like phonological awareness, phonics, reading fluency, vocabulary, reading comprehension, etc. I think this is the key.
The turning point is that I reached out to international experts in each field. So, we reached out to a person who is known to be the top researcher in reading fluency, and we gave that person only the pages related to reading fluency. We got feedback.
We revised. And then we went back to these colleagues who graciously offered their time and expertise. Like we didn't pay anybody anything.
They just said, yeah, we're happy to help. We'll do that. We'll support you, George, in this very important work. And we got a product that I think it's covering all the main areas of language and literacy. It's developmentally appropriate. And it's in line with what research says kids should be taught.
[00:32:47] Anna Stokke: Which grades did you work on?
[00:32:49] George Georgiou: On kindergarten to grade six.
[00:32:52] Anna Stokke: How about evidence? Do you have any evidence yet whether it's working in classrooms?
[00:32:56] George Georgiou: That's a very good question. I can tell you on the basis of the reports that school divisions have generated that it seems that they have decreased the number of struggling readers they have.
For example, in 2024, the Calgary Board of Education, which is the largest board in school division in Alberta, in their annual report, they said they went down from 32% to 17%. So, this, we do have some evidence. And particularly since the mandatory literacy screeners, that the number of struggling kids that the school divisions are reporting has gone down.
So that's one piece of information. The other piece of information I have, based on the interactions with the teachers that I visit in different school divisions across Alberta, is that they are enthusiastic with the content, the explicitness of the goals, the appropriateness of the goals over time. And so, I am very hopeful that this will start producing very good results in the near future.
[00:34:15] Anna Stokke: So, do Alberta schools still use Reading Recovery or Fountas and Pinnell?
[00:34:20] George Georgiou: They do. Unfortunately, they do. And partly the government, Alberta Education, issued the mandatory screening and created an unauthorized list of assessments.
For this reason, they wanted to make sure that inappropriate assessments are not used. So, in other words, a naïve school division decides that they want to use FNP and test all of their kids, and they later on submit their scores to Alberta Education. Alberta Education will not accept the scores and will ask the school division to assess their kids, either on the free provincial assessments or one of the norm-referenced assessments from the list of authorized assessments that they provided to schools.
[00:35:16] Anna Stokke: OK, so they're trying to maybe get the schools to quit using some of those ineffective programs.
[00:35:24] George Georgiou: And I can tell you that some schools, they are not willing to give up on some of these bad assessments or bad poor intervention programs. And I think it has to do with the fact that they invested millions of dollars.
So how would they justify later on to parents or school boards that they have invested so much money on programs that they're not working? So, they choose to use them knowing that they're not as effective instead of saying, we made a mistake, everybody makes mistakes, let's move on.
[00:36:06] Anna Stokke: It's the sunken cost fallacy, that one, right?
[00:36:09] George Georgiou: Yes.
[00:36:10] Anna Stokke: Yeah.
If you've invested a lot in something, it's hard to let that go. But I think it would be better in this case to let it go.
[00:36:19] George Georgiou: Absolutely.
And it's very important to have the government on top of things. So, like if the government was to say, well, you cannot, and this is related to discussions that are happening right now in Manitoba in BC. If the government says you can use whatever you want, as long as you test the kids in kindergarten or grade one or grade two, guess what will happen? They will all go back to what they have been using.
And they already know how to use. They're not going to say, oh, well, everybody says this is ineffective. Let's get rid of it.
Let's use something else, which requires more training for teachers, more money for new resources and new assessments. They will all go back to what they were doing. And where will this lead us to? Nowhere.
[00:37:16] Anna Stokke: So, you've mentioned screening a few times. So, let's pick up on that and let's talk about universal screening. OK, so just a quick sort of background on that. What exactly do you mean when you mention screening? Like what is universal screening?
[00:37:31] George Georgiou: Yeah. When people think about the response to intervention model, which says that there are three tiers of instruction, the bottom is the whole classroom instruction and then small group instruction and then individualized instruction. At the very bottom of that pyramid, there is a separate layer that says universal screening, meaning we need to screen all the children in our schools, no exceptions, on some assessments that are capturing what the students should know, either about reading or about mathematics, on the most foundational skills.
And on the basis of these, of the results that we'll get, then we can make decisions about who are the kids who are at risk for future reading or mathematics difficulties, as well as if we test these kids’ multiple times throughout the year, we can also monitor the progress of the students over time. So universal screening applies to all the children across provinces, across grade levels.
[00:38:43] Anna Stokke: OK.
And so, it's kind of a preventative measure, right? Like it's a test where you'd look for to see if there are students at risk and then try to intervene so that this doesn't progress, right?
[00:38:57] George Georgiou: Exactly. We don't do it to evaluate teachers' knowledge or ability in teaching because I have heard this multiple times from teachers that this could be evaluative and it's a sticky point that they often used to object to this. I look at it from the point of view that if you do the screening, it will help identify the kids who need help and also identify the areas in which they need help with.
Assuming you're measuring the area of reading, let's say, reading accuracy, reading fluency, reading comprehension, then some kids might be OK in accuracy, but they may be struggling in fluency. So, your instructions should target fluency for these kids. If kids are OK in arithmetic calculations, but they have problems with problem solving, then you can direct your attention and use strategies to help their problem solving instead of wasting your time on simple calculation.
[00:40:07] Anna Stokke: My understanding is that the Alberta government mandated universal screening in 2022. In fact, in both literacy and numeracy. In fact, this was the first province in Canada to do this, right? So, had you been advocating for a long time for screening before that?
[00:40:29] George Georgiou: For 15 years.
[00:40:32] Anna Stokke: 15 years. OK.
[00:40:36] George Georgiou: We had... I remember when I went to visit the current minister that I brought with me the letter, like a handwritten type of letter that we had sent to the minister of education 15 years ago, asking for the same thing.
It took 15 years, but we finally made it. And I have to say I'm very proud of the work that has been done. Many people have been working on this.
It's not just me. Many of our colleagues around the world have come together. They shared their assessments for free.
So, they can be used in Alberta for this purpose. And the government of Alberta has also a whole department of statisticians. People that are writing policy and they look at the instructions in these assessments.
People that are in computing science and they are responsible for setting up the online portal for teachers to go and upload their scores. There is a lot of work that is happening behind the scenes to allow this to happen.
[00:41:40] Anna Stokke: Wow. So, congratulations on finally getting this to happen. So, I guess maybe the lesson is here. Perseverance, right?
[00:41:50] George Georgiou: Absolutely.
And again, you need to have a minister who will back up science. And in this case, I think that the minister we have right now has been very explicit in his communication with us that he is looking into research evidence. And if research supports something, then we will do it.
And I think this is the right way of approaching things. So, all of this work required a massive amount of effort from different people, university colleagues, students, and the government.
[00:42:33] Anna Stokke: And other provinces could use that work, like you're willing to share, right?
[00:42:38] George Georgiou: We were willing to share. I can tell you that for some reason, I think governments think to present to their teachers that they are creating their own assessments or they don't want to be borrowing from other provinces as if the assessments, you know, are different. And that would save them about four to five years’ worth of work.
[00:43:04] Anna Stokke: You mentioned there is like a list of screeners that the schools in Alberta could use. So, they're not all using the same screener. Is that right?
[00:43:13] George Georgiou: Correct.
So, because some school divisions have had really good practices in place, for example, they were using norm-referenced assessments for maybe seven, eight years now, there was no way. Why would we tell them to change something that they have already been using properly, and it gives them very good data? So, we acknowledged that fact and we said, if you are using a norm-referenced assessment that is part of this list, keep using it if you want to use it. But we also created or shared with schools for free these locally developed, locally normed assessments.
So that would save school divisions and schools thousands of dollars that they would otherwise pay to publishing companies. And by having local norms, it's giving you an additional advantage. You don't have to compare the performance of your students in Manitoba to the norms that they were created in Texas.
So, most of the school divisions in Alberta are using the free assessments. However, a few school divisions, they choose to continue using their norm-referenced assessments that they have been using for some years. And that's perfectly fine.
[00:44:47] Anna Stokke: So, what are the free assessments? Do you mind sharing?
[00:44:50] George Georgiou: Yeah, the free assessments for kindergarten, we have been giving to schools the letter name and sound knowledge task, the phonological awareness screening task, which is the acronym is PAST. And that was developed by Dr. David Kilpatrick. And it's freely available online too.
So, David shared it with us. We normed it here and we are using it. And also, the rapid automatized naming, the run tasks, the run digits.
Actually, we use these three in mid-kindergarten and beginning grade one. And we can predict nine out of 10 kids who develop later on reading difficulty. Accurately, nine out of 10.
This is fantastic, because you can prevent gain reading difficulties from happening if you know the kid scores, either in kindergarten or beginning grade one. And we do begin grade one because some kids don't go to kindergarten in Alberta. Then from mid-grade one until the end of grade three, we are using the CASELS and COLTHART, the third edition.
So, the acronym is CC3. And we have also given to schools some complementary assessments of reading fluency, like the word chains task that John Kirby created and shared with us. And also, the sentence picture matching, which is a measure of reading comprehension that Dr. Alain Desrochers developed and shared with us.
I should add here that the assessments are not only developed in English, but we have developed and normed in French. So, we have different norms for French immersion and Francophone schools in Alberta. So, imagine the length of this work from kindergarten all the way to grade three. And this year, we are piloting and preparing the grade four and five assessments that they will be in place in schools as of September 2026.
[00:47:12] Anna Stokke: Who is doing the screening? Like who's administering these tests? Is it the resource teachers, the classroom teachers, or someone else?
[00:47:20] George Georgiou: Ideally, it should be the classroom teacher. Why? Because we want the teachers to take ownership of their data.
It's the teachers who make, who teach the kids. So, the instruction and the assessments should inform their teaching.
The intention is to get teachers to assess their students, to inform their instruction. However, in some schools, I know that principals may be recruiting some special education teachers, some other staff to help in the process. So, they may have substitute teachers going into the classroom so that the classroom teacher can take kids outside and test them.
[00:48:10] Anna Stokke: And when you first started screening, were a lot of children being identified as at risk?
[00:48:18] George Georgiou: Yes, we did have perhaps a larger number of kids being identified. And for many school divisions, that was a surprise because they had never tested their kids on actual norm-referenced assessments. But fortunately, for the last three years, we have seen a decrease in the number of students that are identified.
And this is, I think, the result of the intervention that takes place in schools as soon as they identify who is at risk. We have developed also reading interventions and mathematics interventions that we have given to the schools for free to use. And some of them, at least I can speak about the reading intervention, we had tested it multiple times in Alberta against control groups, against alternative programs, and they were found to be highly effective, much more effective than the average effect sizes of meta-analytic studies in early literacy.
And that speaks to the effects that we see in our schools today. There are schools, I can tell you, I went this year to test because we have a research project, and some schools grade two classes, they did not have any struggling kids that needed intervention.
[00:49:46] Anna Stokke: It makes sense, right? I mean, if you are assessing students, you can't fix what you can't see, right? So, if you're not actually measuring, you may not know that children are at risk.
You start measuring, you're going to start identifying students who need help, and then you're going to give them help if you have a good intervention. So, you're going to have fewer students at risk as you move up the grades. It makes perfect sense.
[00:50:10] George Georgiou: We use the more lenient cutoff score in grade one and grade two, because we know that if, let's say, your standard score in reading or mathematics is 91 or 89, well, how different is this from 85? It might be one or two more words that you are able to read. That doesn't make you a really strong reader. So, if we have the ability to help more kids, we do it.
[00:50:40] Anna Stokke: Yes. And I should ask about the numeracy screeners as well. So, the numeracy screening, is it also taking place in K-3, is that right?
[00:50:51] George Georgiou: Correct. Yes.
[00:50:53] Anna Stokke: Okay. Every year? And is this happening twice a year, the screening?
[00:50:57] George Georgiou: In kindergarten, it's happening once, and this is in January of kindergarten.
In grades one to three, it happens twice in September and in January. And there is a third measurement point for the kids who were receiving intervention as of January to see whether they made it or they continue to struggle, et cetera, after getting intervention. From grades four and up, there will be only one assessment in September.
I think we learned through these five years of doing this work, we learned many things that other provinces would benefit from our experiences using these assessments. We have heard over and over like teachers' reactions to them. We have seen what kind of technological glitches we may experience when thousands of teachers go online at the same time to plug in their scores.
We have looked into what the reports should look like. So, after they generate, like they insert all of their scores, what are you doing with the scores? We have to generate the reports. So, we generate reports for superintendents, for principals, for classroom teachers, for parents.
So, all of this work, you can imagine it did not happen the first year. We were still thinking about what we should assess the kids on. All of this has evolved over time and through trial and error sometimes, but we got to a point right now that the system is working fantastically well.
It's there are no errors in the system. The teachers get the information, the principals get their information, and now we look into like what parents can access so that they know whether their kid is at risk. Because the other thing is that in many schools with no assessments, the parents had no idea whether their child is at risk or not and should be getting intervention.
So, if they don't know, they don't ask.
[00:53:17] Anna Stokke: And if they don't know, they can't advocate. They can't help, right? So that's another reason that assessment is really important.
It's important because parents need to know how their kids are doing. Because they don't, right? You would have no way of knowing. I wanted to ask a bit more about that.
How do you communicate the results to parents?
[00:53:38] George Georgiou: Once the teachers upload their students' scores, there is a report for every child on reading and a report on numeracy. And so, they can print that out, share it with the parents. And you can imagine, let's say, we have, let's say, simple calculation tasks.
And we know that the cutoff score is, let's say, 10. There is a bar that goes from zero all the way to the maximum score. And there is a cutoff score, like a line, vertical line, showing where the cutoff score is that indicates risk or no risk.
On that whole continuum, we put the child's score somewhere, depending on what the child performed. And there is a description of the task. There is a description of the child's performance based on the actual child's score.
[00:54:34] Anna Stokke: Did you face any criticisms about screening?
[00:54:37] George Georgiou: A lot. I don't think it's a surprise to anybody that when you are changing some practices, you necessarily have to also address the criticism and the concerns that, like, this new policy will bring about.
And some of the comments is that the kindergarten children do not need to be assessed. While we know that the earliest you get this information from children, the more time you have to intervene. Or that some children may experience, they might be crying in kindergarten for doing these assessments.
I can tell you we tested more than 600 students in kindergarten. And my students had to report, take notes, about everything. Maybe two children out of these 600 were experiencing some kind of stressful situations.
And they discontinued the testing immediately. So, I would rather save the 598 kids than worry about the two kids that are maybe experiencing some stressful conditions. Because these kids probably experience the same emotions in other situations.
Not only when they are assessed.
[00:56:02] Anna Stokke: And it would help maybe if people could think of education a little more like health. You take your children to the doctor to get assessed.
We all do that. And we know it's important because we want to make sure that if there's anything wrong with our child, that the doctor catches it and they can do something about it. And education is just as important, really.
It can have negative impact on the children's well-being later on if they're going to struggle in school. And we're just trying to prevent these things from happening.
[00:56:35] George Georgiou: Absolutely. Because reading or reading difficulties are associated with more mental health issues later on. They are associated with higher dropout rates, higher incarceration, and all these other negative things.
So, don't you want to act quickly to help your child if the child will be experiencing reading difficulties? And the opposite thing is that if we can, we have the evidence that if we identify these kids early, we have really good chances to help them. So, don't you want your child to be helped and be a successful reader and do well at school and later on in his life?
[00:57:22] Anna Stokke: I would imagine you also would have faced some criticism, maybe, that this would be taking up teacher's time. AG.
[00:57:29] George Georgiou: Correct. We do. And that was also one of the main arguments of Alberta Teachers Association, that it takes so many hours of testing and takes away from instructional time.
I think what we are missing here is that assessment is part of instruction. When I hear these arguments, it sends me the message that they perceive assessment as an add-on, as something additional on their already busy schedule and busy plate of different things that they have to do at school. But in fact, in many countries, they do spend a whole week assessing their kids because the information they will get will inform what they will be doing with their kids, their students later on.
It saves them a lot of time from figuring out what's going on with the kids when you can get that information quickly, even if it takes you a week to do assessments. And I can tell you that the assessments we have given to the schools, because we tested them over and over again, they take about 10 minutes per child, if they are given correctly. And 10 minutes per child, I think it's not a large amount of time to invest.
[00:58:57] Anna Stokke: I like your argument that assessment is part of instruction, right? So, in other words, this is part of your job. If we are worried about working conditions, I mean, if you have fewer students struggling, you’re going to have fewer gaps in the classroom, and it's going to be easier to do your job, right? So long term, it should improve working conditions, if that's the issue.
[00:59:18] George Georgiou: I haven't also seen any teachers complaining, or the Alberta Teachers Association complaining about the number of days that are spent on other things, like crazy hair day, the photo day, the field trips here and there.
All of these other things, I can tell you right now, we were trying to get to schools to test for our research. There were two or three days in a week that the kids were not at school. They were all away for different reasons.
But nobody has really complained about all these other things. It's not lost time, but assessing kids, it's lost time. I don't get it.
[01:00:05] Anna Stokke: Yes, I noticed the same thing. Particularly when my kids were in elementary school, there were a lot of these extra activities that seemed to take a lot of extra time. And you're right, it's surprising.
Although parents in the schools that my kids went to actually did complain about that, the amount of extra time spent on those things. But you're right, you don't really hear a lot of complaining about it generally. So, you also created a reading intervention program.
Can you tell us a bit about that? What are its main components?
[01:00:40] George Georgiou: The reading intervention was created as part of a collaborative program with Dr. Robert Savage from York University and Dr. Rauno Parilla from Australian Catholic University. We had a project back in 2020 with grade two struggling readers. And we had noticed that the effect sizes were extremely high, like higher than 1.0. We were getting into, in some outcomes, 1.2. So really positive effects.
And at that time, COVID happened, schools closed. And the Minister of Education in Alberta had asked me, what can we do about the kids who are behind in reading? Understanding that reading is their most critical skill. So, we said, well, we have, there are multiple options, like you can pay for existing intervention programs online.
And that would cost millions of dollars. But we also just finished piloting a study with really fantastic results. And we would be happy to share with Alberta Education.
And the minister said that they would be very eager to look at it. And we presented it to them. We explained how it works.
We rewrote several sections so that even parents could take that intervention program and deliver it to their children. And it ended up being now shared with all the schools across Alberta. There are school divisions also outside of Alberta, but like one school division in Manitoba, a few school divisions in British Columbia and Saskatchewan that are using that as well.
And in all cases with similar effect sizes. So, it helps about 80% of the students who get it in grade two. The remaining 20%, they need additional intervention. But this 20%, they would need it anyway. Like it's not uncommon. And I bet it's the same thing in mathematics.
It consists of three elements. One is the teaching of phonological awareness, which is a foundational literacy skill. The ability to identify and manipulate the sounds of our oral language.
It also consists of phonics, 10 minutes of phonics instruction, where children are taught correspondences between letters and the sounds that they make, and how to blend them together to decode words. It also has shared book reading. So, we created some passages that they are reading, the kids are asked to read with the interventionist to get extra practice with the words that they were trying to read during the phonics session.
So, these three pieces together with about four- or five-months’ worth of intervention, four times a week, 30 minutes each time, it produces fantastic results. And that intervention is, I should add here that that intervention was shared as well with the permission of Alberta Education with the government of Belize. And because in Belize right after COVID, the schools closed and the kids when they came back, they were experiencing severe reading difficulties.
So, the whole country of Belize is using our reading intervention program. About 30,000 children have been receiving this intervention. Program with similar results, also in Belize.
And now we also have some slum schools in India that are using it. And now we will be expanding this work in Uganda with the help of a superintendent from British Columbia, Pamela Gilbert, that we admire her work and what she's doing in her school division. She also received this year's Dyslexia Canada Excellence Award, which speaks to the work that they do in that school division and how they envision helping others outside of their school division and outside of Canada.
[01:05:22] Anna Stokke: Maybe I'll ask two final questions. So, here's the first one. What is your vision for the future of early screening and intervention in Canada?
[01:05:33] George Georgiou: Knowing that the work we have done in Alberta is producing fantastic results, to the point that some school divisions no longer experience reading difficulties past grade two.
They have classes that they don't have struggling kids. The same approach has been used in the Good Spirit School Division in Saskatchewan. I was there last week checking their grade two scores, because we want to include them in a reading intervention project.
Two of their schools did not have any kids that were qualifying. In BC with the CIS and D school division, similar results. So, what this tells us is that we have here, we have identified or set up a very powerful system of helping to reduce the number of struggling readers, giving teachers what they need, so they can do their work more efficiently, and supporting the governments in providing evidence-based assessment and intervention.
So, I would like my vision would be to see this approach used across Canada. And I have to say that I am quite concerned, Anna, with what I see in some school, in some provinces, that they mandate screening without really telling school divisions what assessments to use, or they recommend assessments that are quite costly to buy, and also, they are based on American North. Essentially, they are aware that these assessments, we don't compare apples to apples, but apples to oranges, and yet they continue to support this.
And they put forward this kind of recommendation when they have an alternative that is locally normed and gold standard of assessment and free. It would save them thousands of dollars that could be then diverted for reading intervention. And that's what we do here in Alberta, and we do it successfully.
And not only in Alberta, but I also already mentioned at least two school divisions outside of Alberta and other provinces that are doing the same thing, and they have similar results.
[01:08:10] Anna Stokke: So, we started off at the beginning talking about the right to read reports. And I asked you why there were even the need for these human rights investigations. And you mentioned that the real issue here is a disconnect, a disconnect between the research evidence, what works to teach reading, and what was being communicated or what was being done in the schools.
So, that is really the underlying issue. So, let's end with this final question. So, what role should universities and perhaps teacher preparation programs in particular what roles should they play in ensuring that future teachers have the knowledge and the skills to support early screening and intervention effectively?
[01:09:02] George Georgiou: That is a million-dollar question.
I really like the question because it allows me to address perhaps what I have called earlier the source of the problems that we see in the schools. So, walking into schools and not seeing teachers that are very well prepared to teach reading. I think that at the university level, we need to go back to the drawing board and see what research has shown to be effective, what has to be taught, and make sure that these skills are taught and we have well-prepared undergraduate students.
Now, research also shows that those who associate or accompany the knowledge that they gain through lectures with actual practical experience.
So, they go to schools, and they implement reading interventions themselves or they implement reading instruction, they have better mastery of these skills and better teaching ability than ones that they are just learning this concept through lectures. So, I'm hoping that in the future, we will be able to isolate what are the key areas that we want our teachers to know, let's say, reading and mathematics.
And for these areas, we not only teach them what are the foundational skills, but we also send the undergraduate students to the classrooms, to schools, to work with kids that have reading difficulties or mathematics difficulties to get that additional experience. We know nowadays that many teachers after the first five years leave the profession. That's partly why, if you're not prepared, you don't have the toolkits to address the needs of the students you have in your class.
And what are you going to do? It's easier to leave the profession than stay and learn it. So, we have a very important role at the university to change things around for the better of our students and our teachers.
[01:11:31] Anna Stokke: I think that was a good place to end.
And you're certainly doing your part. And I really appreciate you coming on and talking to me about all your great work. It was great to hear about it.
And it's nice to hear that there is progress being made in reading. And we're going to look for progress to happen in math soon, too.
Well, thank you so much. It was great to talk to you today and we'll meet soon.
[01:11:58] George Georgiou: Thank you, Anna. It was nice meeting you.
[01:12:00] Anna Stokke: If you enjoy this podcast, please consider showing your support by leaving a five-star review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
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This podcast received funding through University of Winnipeg Knowledge Mobilization and Community Impact Grant, funded through the Anthony Swaity Knowledge Impact Fund.