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This post is based on an interview conducted by Read Naturally marketing associate Madeline Waters with Crest Middle School faculty Jennifer Melton, media specialist and Tier 3 reading interventionist.

Jennifer Melton had been a 6th-grade ELA teacher at Crest Middle School for 19 years when she took on a new challenge last year. Moving up to run the school library, she also became responsible for leading the Tier 3 reading intervention group—a significant transition that required her to juggle multiple new responsibilities. “I was learning how to run new clubs that I was responsible for, I was learning how to do this reading intervention group, so I was wearing a lot of new hats and I was changing them constantly,” she recalled.

Jennifer began the year using a different reading intervention program. Midway through the first semester, Jennifer felt that her students weren’t responding to the intervention as she had hoped. That’s when she switched to Read Live, which became a turning point for both her and her students in her lab, which she named the Dragon Reading Mastery Lab. “When I started using Read Live, I felt like, OK, this is something that was easy for me to learn, and I was really having success with the kids, so it was boosting my confidence.” It boosted her students’ confidence, too.

For Jennifer, one of the most rewarding aspects of the program was witnessing how the students responded to seeing their progress in real-time. “I really enjoyed watching the kids when that bar graph went up. When they saw the cold score versus the hot score and their faces lit up.” She added, “I think the structure of the program makes sense to them. They read it for the first time with me and then they work on it, work on it, work on it, and then they can see that bar graph and that improvement. And I think that’s their favorite part.”

Jennifer found that Read Live fit perfectly into the demanding schedule of a middle school environment. “We have students on multiple different levels and some students are getting phonics, fluency, or reading comprehension instruction.” She explained, “It's more flexible, especially in a middle school when we have 700 to 900 kids and we're trying to figure out what each kid needs.”

Jennifer was also grateful for the support she received from other adults in the school as she implemented Read Live. “Last year, when I got some more adults in here helping me, they responded to the training really well and said, ‘OK, well now this makes sense.’ The lady that was with me three days a week repeatedly said, ‘This is so much better than...’ well, I won’t name the other program.”

“I really am thankful that I had that program last year,” Jennifer said. In the end, the impact was clear. “This year, when we went to decide who was going to be in my lab, I noticed that I didn’t have a lot of repeats. So the students that I worked with last year showed growth to the point of not needing it this year. That was great to see!”