Teacher-founded. Texas-built. Classroom-tested for over a decade.
Brittaney McKay started where most educators start: in front of students, figuring out what actually works. She taught Reading and Language Arts across elementary through high school in Texas public schools, then stepped into district curriculum administration — giving her a view of the system from both sides of the classroom door.
What she kept seeing, at every grade level and in every district, was the same problem: students could decode the words and understand the content, but they didn’t know how to think through a test question. They were being taught what to think about.
That gap is what led to the PROVE strategy. Brittaney developed and refined it over years in real classrooms, refining every step based on what students actually did when they got confused, guessed, or gave up. The framework — Preview, Read, Omit, Verify, Explain — is the result of that iteration. It’s not theoretical. It was built one test question at a time.
After years of teachers across Texas asking for her materials and strategy systems, Brittaney launched In Between the Lattes, LLC to make them available at scale. The name is a nod to the reality of teacher life — the work that happens between the coffee and the chaos. The mission is simple: empower Texas RLA teachers with TEKS-aligned, assessment-focused resources and strategies that drive measurable student success.
The PROVE strategy was born out of a specific frustration: students who understood a passage couldn’t explain their thinking when it came to the test question. They could read. They just couldn’t translate what they read into a defensible answer — especially on STAAR, where multiple-choice distractors are designed to catch students who aren’t thinking precisely.
Brittaney mapped out the cognitive steps a skilled reader actually takes when working through a test question and built a repeatable framework around them. The result is five steps that work on any reading comprehension or revising and editing question, at any grade level:
The strategy has been used by teachers across Texas with documented results — 94–100% passing rates, mastery-level scores, and students who walk into test day saying “this is exactly what we’ve been doing.” PROVE it!™ is the platform built to deliver and scale that strategy digitally.
In Between the Lattes began as a single teacher’s response to a real classroom problem. It grew — through word of mouth, teacher communities, conference sessions, and a 12,000-member Facebook group — into one of the most trusted independent RLA resources in Texas.
PROVE it!™ is the next chapter: taking the strategy that’s already working in hundreds of districts and building the technology to deliver it at scale, with data teachers can actually act on.
That mission started in a classroom in Texas, with a teacher who believed students weren’t failing tests because they couldn’t read — they were failing because no one had taught them how to think through a question strategically. PROVE it!™ exists to fix that, one student at a time.