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Background & Context
Farnsworth Aerospace Upper sits in St. Paul, Minnesota, where it serves as a magnet school within the district. It's a Title I campus with about 450 students, and its population reflects the diversity of the surrounding community — African American students, and large numbers of students from Hmong, Korean, and Somali families. English learners make up nearly half of the school.
Evelyn Hernandez teaches on the fifth grade team. Last school year, she carried a caseload of 38 English learners, some of whom were dual identified with an IEP. Minnesota had recently passed a new reading law requiring literacy training for teachers across the state, and Hernandez's district was pushing hard on literacy after disappointing test results. She had just finished a year of state-mandated reading training when Connect to Literacy arrived.
“I am a second language learner myself, so I know the waiting period.”
— Evelyn Hernandez, 5th Grade ELL Teacher, Farnsworth Aerospace Upper
The Challenge
Hernandez's fifth grade team had strong data habits. They reviewed incoming students' fourth grade records closely, looking for strengths and needs before the year even started. But knowing the data and closing the gap were two different things — and speaking was where the gap showed up hardest.
Early in the year, Hernandez pulled a small group into her office to take a practice speaking assessment. She gave the instructions and waited for answers. Instead, she was met with silence. She checked that students understood the directions, then waited again. Still nothing.
“Then I said, okay, everybody stop. Please just pause. I asked, are you guys okay? And then I see one of my girls just closing her eyes and taking a deep breath. I asked her, are you anxious? She said yes. Then I asked the rest of the group — are you guys anxious? They all said yes. It was an eye-opening moment for me.”
— Evelyn Hernandez
Her students weren't just struggling with language. They were struggling with fear of speaking out loud into the microphone. Writing posed a different problem: the writing lessons didn't line up neatly with Step Up to Writing, the district's newer writing curriculum, which made independent writing practice feel disconnected for students.
The Search for a Better Solution
The push for a new tool didn't start in Hernandez's classroom — it started at the district level. Minnesota's new reading law and weak literacy scores had put pressure on every campus to find something that worked. The district's MLL director emailed staff that the district was piloting a new program, Connect to Literacy, at nine schools that year.
Hernandez was chosen because of the high number of English learners on her caseload. She didn't know yet how much the program would change her classroom, but she immediately became a fan.
The Solution
Minnesota gives the ACCESS™ test — the state's English proficiency exam — every spring. By the time students reached Hernandez in the fall, months had passed, and she suspected their skills had grown since their last scores were recorded. Rather than upload old ACCESS™ data, she started every student with a fresh pretest inside Connect to Literacy.
That pretest is what first revealed the speaking anxiety. Once she saw it, she built her instruction around fixing it directly. She pulled students in small groups — no more than ten at a time — and practiced speaking with them one-on-one. Before students spoke into the microphone, she had them write out what they wanted to say first in their reader's notebooks, building the words and the confidence before the pressure of the timer.
“I would tell them, you cannot do this during the ACCESS™ test, but for us, it's to practice and gain confidence about what you need to say. That blue button's not all the way down yet — keep talking. Use adjectives.”
— Evelyn Hernandez
Hernandez also used the program's data to run regular goal-setting conferences. After each placement test, students set a goal, reflected on what they'd accomplished, and watched their progress climb on a visual tracker. ClassCade was a hit. Students redeemed their rewards during Fun Fridays and it kept students eager to finish every lesson in every domain — even students who could have stopped early stuck around to see their names on the tracker move up.
One student had recently transferred from a Language Academy school for newcomers and was already literate in Spanish. Hernandez used that strength, building on his home-language skills to accelerate his English growth. He gained a full proficiency level in listening and exited the program by the end of the year — after just three years in the country.
Most Impactful Features
• Diagnostic pretests that replaced months-old spring ACCESS™ scores with current data
• Small-group speaking practice that surfaced and addressed test anxiety directly
• Cross-domain skill connections that helped students see reading, writing, speaking, and listening as one skill set, not four separate ones
• Built-in rewards through ClassCade and a visual progress tracker — that kept students motivated to finish every lesson
• Data reports that powered regular goal-setting conferences with students
Impact & Results
By the end of the year, 44% of Hernandez's 38 students exited ELL status outright. Three more students scored 4.4 out of the 4.5 needed to exit — just one step short. Counting those near-exits, 52% of her caseload reached or nearly reached the finish line in a single year.
The shift wasn't only academic. Students who had once gone silent during speaking tests were, by spring, describing speaking as their favorite language domain.
“A lot of those students, their favorite domain to do in Summit K12 was speaking.”
— Evelyn Hernandez
Hernandez also pointed to a student with an IEP who chose to sit beside her desk to work through lessons, and a girl who carried her reader's notebook everywhere to practice finding keywords for her speaking and writing responses — and who exited the program by year's end.
“This program was used with fidelity. They knew that I was checking (their progress), and they knew that I would meet with them.”
— Evelyn Hernandez
Plans for the Future
Farnsworth Aerospace Upper is continuing with Connect to Literacy again this year. Hernandez plans to lean further into the writing domain, using what she learned about how skills overlap across domains to help students see writing practice as an extension of the same speaking and reading skills they'd already built confidence in.
“It's my third year at this school, and this is the first time I've seen results like this.”
— Evelyn Hernandez, 5th Grade ELL Teacher, Farnsworth Aerospace Upper
