Every Friday, like clockwork, I’d give my spelling assessment.
I’d write down the scores.
Highlight the gaps.
Tell myself, “Okay. I’ll reteach this next week.”
But week after week... nothing really changed.
The same students kept struggling.
The same scores kept showing up.
And even though I was drowning in data, the needle wouldn’t budge.
It took me years to realize—
The problem wasn’t the test.
It was that I didn’t know what to do with the results.
Because here’s the truth no one ever taught us in teacher prep:
It’s not enough to collect the data.
You have to know how to respond to it. And that’s the part most of us were left to figure out alone.
It’s like measuring how tall a plant is every week… but never watering it.
The data means nothing if we don’t know how to respond and help it grow.
Inside The Science of Reading Formula, I walk you through exactly how to…
