Calgary Reads partners with Innoweave

September 11, 2014

By Aditya Banerjee (Director of Research at Calgary Reads).

Calgary Reads creates positive change in literacy outcomes for children by mobilizing business, education, and community to care and act together with ingenuity. In recent years, we have diversified from offering one tutor program to over 18 programs and initiatives that help schools, parents, and communities create literacy-rich learning environments.

Grants from two of Innoweave’s modules, Developmental Evaluation and Scaling Impact, have helped us begin to address two of our biggest challenges: identifying the essential components of Calgary Reads’ work, which is in turn informed by identifying the essential conditions that create confident and joyful readers; and learning how to scale these core components across other jurisdictions. We are running an 18-month prototype, called Reading Places, in five high-needs Calgary Schools, to test the conditions that create a community of readers.

Under the direction of our coach, we are in the process of asking developmental questions to help us to more clearly define a Reading Place – to understand the “it” that we are testing. These questions have guided the first phase of our work. Additional outcome questions will help us to understand what difference a Reading Place makes (the “so what”) and if the model is worthy of scaling.

These questions, along with on-going learning and reflection, will guide our work through and beyond the pilot process.

In short, the twin grants from Innoweave will allow us to scale down to determine the essence of our work, before scaling those core components up and out across new territories.