District and School Leader Webinar

RAPID is a project that aims to accelerate reading skills. In this webinar for district and school leaders, they will focus on deepening literacy content knowledge, developing a supportive culture, evaluating instructional materials, and creating an assessment plan. They will also cover designing professional development and monitoring curriculum implementation. The webinar introduces the simple view of reading and the reading rope models to understand the components of effective literacy instruction. They will explore concepts of print, alphabet knowledge, the alphabetic principle, phonology, and orthography. The goal is to help students develop strong orthographic processing skills to improve reading fluency and comprehension. Welcome to RAPID, the Reading Acceleration Professionally Integrated Project. This webinar will be for district and school leaders. Here are our objectives for today's webinar. We will be deepening our literacy content knowledge, exploring how to develop a culture that supports the shift in instructional practice, learning how to evaluate instructional materials, and develop a comprehensive assessment plan. Learn how to design an aligned professional development plan, and learn how to monitor curriculum implementation and effectiveness. Here is our palette that will have all resources and materials shared in our sessions. On the top of the palette, you will see the session headers. I will also reference the session resources as well. This palette can be shared and saved for future use and reference. It might be helpful to share with additional staff members that are not at the training as well. All resources are free and do not expire. Designing a System that Supports Effective Literacy Instruction Today we are going to start with Section 1, the Introduction to Foundational Literacy. We will explore the five main components of literacy and how they affect reading development. In this section, we will explore essential components of effective literacy instruction, including reading models and development of literacy skills. The first model we will be looking at is the simple view of reading. In 1986, two cognitive scientists, Philip Goh and William Tunmer, wrote an article that proposed the SVR. It was a short paper and it was referenced over 650 times in the research literature. Goh and Tunmer wrote this article to address the educational debate over the role that decoding played in skilled reading comprehension. Their view was that decoding was central for skilled reading comprehension. Learning to read consists of developing skills in two areas, decoding and comprehension. The SVR involved the complex integration of skills. Proficient readers seemed to make the process look effortless, but reading instruction for all students requires systematic instruction in both word reading and comprehension. For students in the early stages of reading, or for those who struggle, reading is particularly difficult and requires careful instruction and intervention. Problem areas must be determined and instruction and intervention to address these areas must be carefully planned and delivered. Now we move on to the reading road. Some of you may have seen this model before, some of you may not have. The reading rope adds onto the work of the SVR, but adds specific components of each strand. For example, the language comprehension includes background knowledge, vocabulary, structures, verbal reasoning, and literacy knowledge. It is important to identify the areas within language comprehension and word recognition. Dr. Hollis Starborough created the reading rope that highlights the many strands woven into skilled reading. The reading rope is another literacy acquisition model that identifies and highlights the skills needed for learning how to read. The reading rope extends the simple view of reading by identifying the subskills in both comprehension and word recognition. The reading rope consists of lower and upper strands. The word recognition strands, which are phonological awareness, decoding, and sight recognition of familiar words, work together as the reader becomes accurate, fluent, and increasingly automatic with repetition and practice. Concurrently, the language comprehension strands, which include background knowledge, vocabulary, language structures, verbal reasoning, and literacy knowledge, reinforce one another and then weave together with the word recognition strands to produce a skilled reader. Here we're going to show a video that you can access through our website. Please see the link below. The video shows the reading rope, and it's also linked in the Padlet for your reference as well. Our next section, Emergent Literacy Development, will cover these five areas. Concepts of Print, Alphabet Knowledge, Alphabetic Principle, Phonology, and Orthography. We will see how these components of literacy development are intertwined and connected. Our background knowledge will also grow as we continue throughout our series. Emergent Literacy begins developing prior to kindergarten and continues to develop thereafter through explicit instruction on Concepts of Print, Alphabet Knowledge, Alphabetic Principle, Phonology, and Orthographic Processing. We're going to go through each of these components together. Children with print awareness understand that print has different functions and purposes depending on the context. For example, a book tells a story, a sign can give directions or information, menus have choices for food, etc. Concepts of Print, or Print Awareness, is understanding that print is organized and structured in certain ways. We know that we read from left to right, and we start at the top and end at the bottom. Concepts of Print include understanding that words are made up of letters, like building blocks, that there are spaces between words, that print has meaning, that print can be used for different reasons and purposes, for example, a book tells a story, a sign can give us directions or information, that words are separated by spaces, that punctuation signals the end of a sentence, that books have front covers, back covers, title pages, etc., and directionality, that we read from left to right. Moving to our next component, Alphabet Knowledge. Alphabet Knowledge involves recognizing, naming, writing, and identifying the sounds of letters. Alphabet Knowledge begins to develop before children enter school. This is a very important skill, and we will continue to learn about this skill in the series and beyond as it relates to other areas of literacy development. Now that we have developed Alphabet Knowledge, we want to think about the Alphabet Principle. That means that students are connecting the letters with their sounds. For example, a child who knows that the written letter N makes the N sound is demonstrating the Alphabetic Principle. In order to master Alphabetic Principle, students must have phonological awareness skills and be able to recognize individual sounds in spoken words. We will discuss Phonological Awareness more in our next session as we see how the Alphabetic Principle and Phonological Awareness are connected. The Alphabetic Principle has two parts. Alphabetic Understanding is knowing that words are made up of letters that represent the sounds of speech. Phonological Recoding is knowing how to translate the letters and printed words into the sounds that they make to read and pronounce the words accurately. Again, we will continue to learn about this throughout the session today with Phonological Awareness in our next session. While this is a very important principle for students, it can be challenging. There are many letters that students need to learn, and some letters have more than one sound, which can make it challenging for students. In our next section, we will talk about the letters and the sounds more in-depth. Understanding these challenges can help with our instruction. As we are learning about the sounds and letters, we also need to think about phonology. Phonology is the sound structures of speech and the perception, recognition, and production of speech sounds. Phonological aspects of language include intonation, stress, and timing, as well as words, symbols, and phonemes. Orthography is the last component we are going to discuss. Every word has three forms – it's meaning, it's sound, and it's spelling. Again, we need to understand how these components of early literacy come together. Students who have strong orthographic processing skills will become better and better at recognizing written words. That will, in turn, help them to read and write fluently. Again, these components are not isolated. Strong orthographic processing skills will support students with recognizing written words, which helps with fluency, which also supports comprehension. Orthographic mapping is how a student instantly retrieves words from their memory. Research says that we can scan every single letter of every single word as we read. Our brains use what we know about letter-sound relationships, plus our understanding of speech, to map letter patterns and words together as units. These units are stored in our long-term memory. This is how students go from sounding out every printed word to knowing sight words. So, how do children turn a printed word into a sight word? Creating a sight word involves forming permanent connections between words' letters, its pronunciation, and its meaning into memory. To read a word, a connection between a word's spelling and letter-sound is key. A reader must notice the sentence of letters or spelling, pronounce the word, map the spoken sounds to the letters through reading and writing the word a few times to secure it into memory. This process of orthographic mapping forms the glue that bonds words in memory. Once a reader has a strong alphabetic mapping system in place, sight word learning will occur quickly and easily. Here is an example from Kilpatrick. If the student knows the spoken word, bed, its pronunciation is stored in long-term memory. He knows what it means and what it sounds like. If he has good phonemic awareness skills, he can pull the word apart into its individual sounds or phonemes, b, e, d. Those sounds become the anchoring points for the word's printed sequence. The student can then attach each phoneme to its corresponding letter or spelling. The student is using the power of what he knows, the pronunciation, and attaching it like superglue to the printed word, bed. This example has all single-letter correspondences. Here is an additional graphic to help us see this important process. Again, orthographic mapping uses a lot of skills we will continue to discuss throughout this session. We will see that once a reader has a strong alphabetic mapping system in place, sight word learning will occur quickly and easily. Where did the big ideas in beginning reading come from? In 1997, Congress asked the NICHD, along with the U.S. Department of Education, to form the National Reading Panel to review research on how children learn to read and determine which methods of teaching reading are most effective based on the research evidence. The panel included members from different backgrounds, including school administrators, working teachers, and scientists involved with reading research. Why was the National Reading Panel formed? Many of the nation's children have problems learning to read. If they don't get the help they need, these children will fall behind in school and struggle with reading throughout their lives. Although parents, teachers, and school officials work hard to help kids learn to read, there have been many different ideas about what ways of teaching reading works the best, and some ideas contradicted each other. Congress asked the NICHD and the U.S. Department of Education to form the National Reading Panel to evaluate existing research about reading and, based on evidence, determine what methods work best for teaching children to read. So, what did the National Reading Panel do? Specifically, Congress asked the panel to review all research available, more than 100,000 reading studies, on how children learn to read, determine the most effective evidence-based methods for teaching children to read, describe which methods of reading instruction are ready for use in the classroom and recommend ways of getting this information into schools, suggest a plan for additional research and reading development and instruction. In addition, the National Reading Panel held public hearings where people could give their opinions on what topics the panel should study. So, what were the findings from the National Reading Panel? The National Reading Panel's analysis made it clear that the best approach to reading instruction is one that incorporates explicit instruction and phonemic awareness, systematic phonics instruction, methods to improve fluency, and ways to enhance comprehension. Phonological awareness is a critical early literacy skill that helps kids recognize and work with the sounds of spoken language. Phonological awareness is made up of a group of skills. Examples include being able to identify words that rhyme, counting the number of syllables in a name, recognizing alliteration, segmenting a sentence into words, and identifying the syllables in a word. The most sophisticated and last to develop is called phonemic awareness. Phonemic awareness is the ability to notice, think about, and work with the individual sounds or phonemes in spoken words. Manipulating the sounds into words includes blending, stretching, or otherwise changing words. Children can demonstrate phonemic awareness in several ways, including recognizing which words in a set of words begin with the same sound, like bell, bike, and boy all have the same sound, isolating and saying the first or last sound in a word, so the beginning of dog is d, the end sound in sit is t, combining or blending the separate sounds in a word to say the word, m, a, p, map, breaking or segmenting a word into its separate sounds, up would be u, p. This diagram explains the relationship between phonological awareness and phonemic awareness. We move from less complex to more complex. Here's another image that helps us see the relationship between phonological and phonemic awareness. Phonological awareness also includes the recognition of smaller, more abstract sounds in words, the individual sounds in words known as phonemes. This is called phonemic awareness, which is a subset of phonological awareness. It is the ability to isolate, blend, and segment the smallest units of individual sounds, which are phonemes. It is now recognized that children can begin learning to hear and say phonemes without first practicing syllables and words. Therefore, it is important to begin with and stay focused on developing phonemic awareness more than other aspects of phonological awareness. Two important points that we want to highlight. Phonemic awareness is not phonics. Second, phonemic awareness is auditory and does not involve print. Again, this is how it is different from phonics. It is an auditory skill. This is also helpful because some students with auditory processing difficulties may have struggles with phonemic awareness. We need phonemic awareness first. Young children vary greatly in the ability to hear the individual sounds within words, and this variation led some scientists to hypothesize that phonemic awareness might be an essential early reading skill. The question was whether children with well-developed ability to hear the sounds within words would be better equipped to learn how these sounds match the letters. English is an alphabetic language, meaning that the letters in the written language refer to or correspond to the sounds in spoken language. A child who cannot perceive the separable sounds within the words is at a disadvantage when it is time to match these sounds with letters while learning to read. Phonemic awareness is not the same as phonics. So, phonics refers to the instruction in how letters and sounds correspond to each other and how these sound-letter correspondences can be used to decode or pronounce words in text. Decoding means the analysis of the letters in a word to determine its pronunciation, to translate from one form of message to another, such as from printed text to pronunciation. Phonemic awareness is not about how sounds and letters match or how to sound out letters to form words. It is only about hearing and thinking about or manipulating the individual sounds within words. Students need phonemic instruction before phonics. We need to show students that we can have a different number of phonemes in letters. Remember, phonemes are the smallest unit of sound. Phonemic awareness is the awareness of sounds, not letters. So, for example, the word cat, three phonemes, three letters. The word bike, three phonemes, four letters. The word bike has four letters, but we only hear three phonemes when the word is spoken. For most adults, dividing words like cat or bike into constituent sounds is easy. But for young children, the task can be formidable. Words seem to explode out as if it's one big word, cat, rather than a collection of smaller sounds. Phonological awareness is the ability to recognize and work with sounds in spoken language. Phonological awareness is a broad term used to refer to a student's awareness of how spoken words consist of individual sounds. It is an auditory skill. It includes being able to hear distinct words, syllables, and sounds, as well as being able to segment, blend, and manipulate those sounds. Phonological awareness is a foundational skill for learning how to read and write. Phonics is critical to reading development. It underlies a child's ability to read and write words. Phonics is connected to other areas of literacy as well. The goal of phonics is to decode and encode words to read, write, and spell. The National Reading Panel found 38 studies in which children were given a special emphasis on phonics instruction to evaluate the value of this type of teaching. The summary of these studies has led to a definite conclusion that systematic phonics instruction gave children a faster start in learning to read than responsive instruction or no phonics instruction. Phonics instruction improved kindergarten and first grade children's word recognition and spelling skills and had a positive impact on their reading comprehension. Phonics for second grade students also improved their word recognition skills, but without any measured improvement in reading comprehension. After the report was published, some researchers questioned whether these results were correct, and they reworked the entire phonics section of the report, searching for articles again, recoding the variables, and providing some very different analyses of these data. Despite all of these changes, the value of phonics instruction was still evident, though the positive impact was smaller than reported by the panel. Systematic phonics instruction needs to be provided beyond that only for struggling readers, though more proficient learners still can benefit from the occasional reviews and with help in founding out more complex words and with spelling patterns not common until these grade levels, such as shun, are able. Students in grades K-2 and older remedial readers all benefit from being taught how to use letter sounds and spelling patterns to decode words. The use of systematic approaches or programs of phonics instruction were found to be more effective than more opportunistic or responsive approaches. Activities like dictation or invented spelling, in which students try to write or spell words based on the sounds, have been found to help children learn phonics. These are four guiding principles for phonics instruction. They must follow a research-based sequence, should happen with words in isolation and words in text, they should support individual children's needs, and they should be connecting reading and writing. The quality writing instruction can support phonics acquisitions. Vocabulary consists of knowledge about its meaning, its uses, and the pronunciation of words. All of these components are important for vocabulary instruction and must be included. Vocabulary is key to reading comprehension. Readers cannot be taught how to read and write in phonics instructions. They must be taught how to read and write in phonics instructions. Vocabulary is key to reading comprehension. Readers cannot understand what they are reading without knowing what most of the words mean. As children learn to read more advanced text, they must learn the meaning of new words that are not part of their oral vocabulary. The scientific research on vocabulary instruction reveals that most vocabulary is learned indirectly and that some vocabulary must be taught directly. Thus, research supports using a combination of both indirect and direct approaches. Knowing vocabulary words is key to reading comprehension. The more words a child knows, the better he or she will understand the text. Teachers can teach vocabulary directly and indirectly using a variety of effective methods that will increase the student's ability to learn new words. Words help to shape a child's identity and experiences, and they are the mechanism for which they express themselves. Children bring a rich repertoire of words with them as they enter our classrooms. Words that come from their families, experiences, cultures, communities, and languages. By affirming the words children already know and utilizing the think of words in the classroom, we honor the words that we have all that have already been used in the classroom. we honor the words that we have all that have already shaped who they are. This helps us understand vocabulary learning as additive. We are adding on to children's banks of words when we are exposing them to and teaching words they may be less commonly used in speaking and more prevalent in text. The overall difference in the number of words in the children's vocabulary is one key factor in the equation of academic success. The more words they know, the better they can express themselves and realize their full capacities as readers and writers. The importance of vocabulary is beyond doubt. Knowledge of word meaning is even assessed as a fundamental component of intelligence or general cognitive functioning. Such knowledge is important to any activities that involve language, and psychologists have shown how vocabulary is more than a list of word meanings in the mind, but actually functions as an index of much richer and harder to measure constellation of understanding and experiences. Someone who knows a lot about horses may develop an awareness of many horse-related words. For example, saddle, bridle, hoof, palomino, but they will also usually know many kinds of other related information like animal behavior or how to care for pets, what are stables, barns, corrals. So however valuable the individual words may be, an understanding of them usually includes more than simple dictionary definitions and carries an awareness of much associated knowledge and appreciations. It is not surprising that vocabulary is so important in any language activity. Just as there is no dispute about the importance of vocabulary in reading, there is no disagreement about the idea that children learn many words without any obvious formal instruction. Incidental learning of vocabulary from language interactions with others, media, reading, and so on, is both obvious and impressive. Scholars have not been able to agree upon the proper estimate of the number of new words children add to their memories each year, but all agree that the number is large and that it outstrips the numbers of words taught in school. Creating and answering questions in cooperative learning helps to improve reading outcomes. This is a quote from the National Reading Panel. Comprehension is critically important to the development of children's reading skills and therefore their ability to obtain an education. Indeed, reading comprehension has to be viewed as the essence of reading, essential not only to academic learning but to lifelong learning. We know that without comprehension, our students are not making meaning. If they are not making meaning, we are missing a crucial component of reading or the essence of reading. Our goal is to have our students understand the text and the world around them. If we think back to the models we looked at at the beginning of the session, we will see that comprehension is an essential part of all reader models. Comprehension is also one of the five pillars of reading. Strong readers think actively as they read. They use their experiences and knowledge of the world, morphology, vocabulary, language structure, and reading strategies to make sense of the text and to know how to get the most out of it. They think about the text structure as they read. They know when they have problems with understanding and what thinking strategies to use to resolve these problems when they pop up. They also know when they have problems with understanding and what thinking strategies to use to resolve these problems when they pop up. These elements enable a skilled reader to create a mental model of the text as they read. Teachers play a pivotal role in reading instruction. Research shows that strong instruction can help students understand and remember more of what they read, and it can also help them communicate with others, verbally and in writing, about their reading. Reading comprehension relies on the development of reading foundational skills. Fundamentally, reading comprehension is based on the ability to read and understand. Phonological awareness, print awareness, phonics, and word recognition instruction. We see how the previous sessions in our series support the use of comprehension work. These elements are all connected. In order to comprehend a text that a student is reading, they need to have print awareness, phonological awareness, phonics, and word recognition. Reading comprehension instruction should be taught simultaneously with reading foundational skills instruction to bridge the skills. Comprehension instruction should begin early and should happen alongside phonics and other important foundational skills. We also want to teach students how to monitor for meaning as they read. Comprehension monitoring. For example, comprehension monitoring provides a form of feedback to readers as to whether they have read a word accurately. While reading the sentence, I can get a dog, a young reader might understandably pronounce get as in jet, pronouncing the G as in gem rather than the G as in got. It is comprehension monitoring that would alert readers that jet is not correct, so they may reread, try a different sound for G, and thus be left with a correct orthographic mapping for the word. Some students monitor comprehension as they read without instructional support, but others do not. And the researchers have long concluded that teaching comprehension monitoring is effective. The relation between word reading instruction and reading comprehension instruction is more synergistic than competitive. We want and need students to be motivated to read. Here are some ideas of how we can support this as leaders. We can go to classes and read to students. We can use theme days, launch units and genres, dress up. Another way is to let students to come into our office to read. We can visit classes and praise success. We can also read books that students are interested in and have conversations with them. We can run and support reading-related special events, and we can challenge students to read and set reading goals. Another idea is to model for students and show them how you are reading during an independent reading time. All of these ideas can help encourage students to feel motivated and to see how important reading is. It's activity time. Feel free to take 10 minutes by pausing your recording to review the choice board and see all the different activities that are inside the choice board. Now we'll be moving on to section two, the culture of effective literacy instruction. One that supports the shift in instructional practice. Reading is not a natural ability, but a complex skill that we are taught over time. Children learn to read through a combination of explicit instruction, practice, seeing models, and exposure to a rich variety of print. Reading development is also influenced by other factors such as motivation, background knowledge, vocabulary, and cognitive skills. In early reading development, children begin with the alphabet. They start with letter names, sounds, and formation alongside language play that fosters awareness of speech sounds. Children apply this knowledge to read printed words. With instruction and practice, they become more fluent and develop a core of sight words and a lexicon of sounds, patterns, and morphemes needed to unlock unfamiliar words and texts. Once children become proficient at word recognition, their further growth as readers tends to revolve more around language comprehension than word reading. For typical readers, the shift usually occurs around fourth grade, when typical readers have developed accurate and relatively automatic word recognition. At this point, children can focus more of their attention on reading for meaning. They can begin to use reading as a tool for learning in content-area subjects such as history and science. Further growth in reading becomes more about developing higher-level comprehension abilities than about improving word recognition, although some growth in word reading still occurs. Gene Tall referred to this shift as the one from learning to read to reading to learn. Of course, struggling readers may continue to have difficulties with word recognition well beyond third grade. Three organizing principles for getting beginning reading success. First, earlier rather than later, prevention and early intervention are supremely more efficient and effective than later intervention and remediation for ensuring reading success. Schools, not just programs. Prevention and early intervention must be anchored to the school and the host environment and the primary context for improving student reading performance. And third is evidence, not opinion. Prevention and early intervention pedagogy programs and procedures should be based on trustworthy scientific evidence. Improving literacy in your school as an administrator. School administrators provide the structure, framework, and support for all teaching activities. As an administrator, you can plan, develop, and implement strategies designed to improve student literacy and resulting test scores. Given that early literacy is critical for academic success, starting literacy initiatives as early as possible is crucial. Start with a school-wide action plan. With the implementation of New Jersey state standards, literacy no longer falls solely under the language art category. Reading and writing skills must be incorporated into math, science, history, and enrichment courses. By creating an action plan, you offer guidance to teachers who may never have incorporated literacy skills into their lesson plans. You also help ensure that all instructors, teachers, and administrators have the same You also help ensure that all instructors are on the same page and know how to meet the expectations. When planning, incorporate data collection, strategy implementation, and result gathering as part of the process. This lets you isolate potential problems early, implement trial solutions, and assess those solutions for success. And then elements of a comprehensive action plan. A literacy action plan incorporates several elements, including strengthening development in all classes, creating and implementing interventions for struggling students, revamping policies and culture to support literacy efforts, developing a shared leadership foundation, and offering instructional support for teachers. Each of these areas forms part of the foundation necessary for implementing a comprehensive plan of attack on low literacy levels. Schools as host environments. Improving the reading trajectories of students takes place in a complex host environment of classrooms and schools that involve professionals, policies, programs, and practices that interact in complex ways. Teaching reading is the integration of two complex systems. The two systems, symbolic and organizational, must be linked together and depicted in this graphic in order for effective reading instruction to take place. Developing literacy skills. Researchers agree that the successful development of literacy skills impacts student learning and achievement in a profound and direct relationship. The integration of language and content should and must relate language learning, content learning, and the development of thinking in a continuous spiral of rigor and application. Research also describes the necessary conditions for this implementation. First, have student-centered classrooms. Literacy builds engagement central to learning content. Students read, write, talk, and reflect on facts, concepts, and applications. Students regularly collaborate and where learning is visible and accountable. Have knowledge-centered classrooms. Students understand not only what is being taught, but why it is being taught, and teachers deliberately build on prior knowledge to help students understand what is being taught. To help students understand the connections of content to the world and lives. Have assessment-centered classrooms. Classrooms built around ongoing formative assessment that informs instructional practice, guides learning, and is linked to pre-designed summative assessments. And also have reflection-centered classrooms. Research-based literacy skills and study skills are explicitly taught and nurtured as students learn how to learn in all content areas. The four pillars of an effective reading program are as follows. To have valid and reliable assessments. An effective reading program will utilize valid and reliable assessment that help teachers know what skills students have acquired, which students are experiencing difficulty, and how much progress students have made. This is accomplished through the use of screening, diagnostics, progress monitoring, and outcome assessments. These assessments are ongoing and include both formal, which are standardized and quantitative, and informal measures of students' reading skills that guide the teacher in planning and evaluating instruction. Instructional programs and aligned materials. Effective instructional programs and materials emphasize the five essential components of effective reading instruction – phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. These programs and materials provide instruction on how to read, how to write, and how to write. Instruction in the five components that is explicit, so it's focused, clear, and involves much modeling of how to use each skill, and systematic, so it's precisely planned, sequenced, and comprehensive. They provide ample time for students to learn, practice, and apply the skills they have been taught in reading meaningful text. They're aligned to professional development. So strong professional development helps teachers understand and use instructional practices that reliably foster student achievement. They also have to support the specific instructional program teachers are using, as well as the academic standards adopted by the state level. The learning experience gives teachers time to acquire new knowledge of how to assess and teach the five essential components, support for putting this new knowledge into practice with students, and feedback on how well teachers use what they have learned. And then there's also dynamic instructional leadership. Instructional leaders play a critical role in effective reading program. Each role requires a strong, active commitment to supporting improved reading instruction and the implementation of evidence-based reading research in the classroom. Instructional leaders provide coaching and support and are responsible for establishing and communicating clear goals and expectations for student learning. Administrators at the district and building levels must be ready to provide the resources needed to ensure that schools are making adequate progress. We want to think about best practices in literacy and the research that supports them. Here are some best practices that we should consider and support educators around. Teach reading for authentic meaning-making literacy experiences. Use high-quality literature. Integrate a comprehensive word study phonics program. Use multiple texts that link and expand concepts. They balance teacher- and student-led discussions. Support and build background knowledge. They use small groups. Provide plenty of time to read in class. Direct instruction in decoding and comprehension strategies. They balance direct, guided instruction and independent learning. And they use a variety of assessment techniques. There are many approaches to teaching the five essential components. These approaches differ in how much guidance or direction teachers provide us. Their students are learning new skills. How clearly and directly teachers explain new skills. Whether they demonstrate exactly how to use a specific skill. And whether the skills are taught in a thoughtful sequence. Research reviewed by the National Reading Panel revealed that these different approaches or methods of teaching the five essential components are not equally effective. The most reliably effective approach is called systematic and explicit instruction. Systematic instruction reflects several important characteristics. Skills and concepts are taught in a planned, logically progressive sequence. For example, certain sounds, those that are easier to learn, or those that are used more often in words students will read, are taught before other sounds. Lessons focus on clearly defined objectives that are stated in terms of what students will do. There's multiple practices, multiple practice activities are scheduled purposely to help students master and retain new skills. Students will work on carefully designed tasks that give them opportunities to apply what they have been taught. Assessments are designed and used in a timely fashion to monitor skill acquisition, as well as students' ability to apply new skills, to retain them over time, and to use them independently. Explicit instruction means that the teacher states clearly what is being taught and models effectively how to use it by a skilled reader. For example, in demonstrating how to blend sounds to pronounce an unfamiliar word, explicit instruction might sound like this. I'll show you how to sound out this word. Listen carefully. I'll say the sound for each letter without stopping between sounds. Explicit instruction ensures students' attention is drawn to important features in an example or demonstration. Additionally, explicit instruction is evidence-based practice for teaching students with learning disabilities. Meta-analysis results show the explicit instruction was favored for the learning of fundamental skills in reading and writing for students at risk for failure at the elementary level. One reason for this is that explicit instruction reduces the cognitive load. Fondness instruction should be explicit and systematic. We will go over what those two words mean and examples. Explicit means that the initial introduction of a letter-sound relationship or phonics skills is directly stated to students. For example, we will tell students that the sound is represented by the letter S. This is more effective than the discovery method because it does not rely on a prerequisite skill that some students might not have. Being explicit, however, does not mean that the students cannot play with the letters and sounds during the introduction of a letter or phonics skill. In fact, word-awareness activities like word-building and word-source allow students to become flexible in their knowledge of sound spellings and solidifies that learning. Being systematic means that we follow a continuum from easy to more complex skills, slowly introducing each new skill. Systematic instruction includes a review and repetition cycle to achieve mastery and goes from the known to the new in a way that makes it easier for students from the known to the new in a way that makes the new learning more obvious and easier for students to grasp. For example, after students learn to read simple short vowel CVC words like run, cat, and hop, they are often introduced to the skill final E as in the words hate and hope. Here are some ways that we can support our educators in reading instruction. We can conduct classroom walk-throughs to regularly gauge the strengths and needs of our teachers and their reading instruction. We can talk to teachers about the teaching and learning process related to reading. We can give feedback, praise, and encouragement to our teachers about their instruction. We can provide further training, support grouping of students for reading lessons, provide enough time for reading instruction. And lastly, think about our support for outcomes over processes. Now it's activity time again. Go ahead and go into the Padlet and look for the three lead your literacy memos from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Read the first three lead for literacy memos from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and then answer these questions. Can your school relate to any of the common pitfalls? If so, what can you do to make the shift that is needed to create an impact on literacy? In part three, we're going to be talking about high-quality instructional materials. We will learn how to evaluate instructional materials to ensure the inclusion of explicit and systematic instruction in the five essential components of reading instruction on a daily basis and that there are an appropriate level, duration, and content. There's a need for rigorous review of instructional materials. Teaching is an integration of a teacher's instructional strategies, classroom instructional materials, and students. Recently, the importance of instructional materials has been overlooked. And the pedagogical connection between lesson objectives and instructional materials is rarely coherent. Most publishers have revised reading language arts curriculum materials to support implementation of contemporary state standards. For elements of instructional design, understanding how a curriculum is created is important. That is, it is imperative that the program review team understands how to identify a systematic scope and sequence, how goals and objectives are related, what the elements of an organized lesson are, and how to align materials and how to embed formative assessments. The content is what is taught during reading language arts instruction, such as phonics, spelling, comprehension, and writing. Pedagogy is how the content is taught, such as explicitly using routines or differentiated instruction. Differentiated instruction materials include activities that address both intervention for students with special learning needs and extension or enrichment for students ready for further work. Important features of instructional design, reading language arts content, and pedagogy all show in this graphic. When reviewing a program, ask the following questions. Do materials and program, first, teach comprehension strategies directly and explicitly? Second, do they incorporate multiple strategies? Third, do they use strategies in a variety of contexts and contents? Fourth, do they teach the strategy in text students can work with, simplifying the task? Five, do they teach students to become strategic? When to use their strategy, why to use it, and how to use it? And, six, do they provide enough practice and examples to learn and apply the strategy? Materials and programs should explicitly teach listening and reading comprehension strategies, provide a range of examples for initial teaching and practice, provide independent practice activities that are relevant to each student, provide independent practice activities that parallel requirements of instruction, begin with pictures and simple sentence to teach comprehension before moving to paragraphs and longer text passages, use text passages in which the main idea or comprehension unit is explicitly stated, clear, and which ideas follow a logical order. They use familiar vocabulary and passages at an appropriate readability level for the learners. They use familiar topics during initial learning. They use both narrative and expository text, progress to more complex structures in which the main ideas are not explicit and passages are longer. They insert questions at strategic intervals to reduce memory load for learners. They teach skills or strategy with the aid of carefully designed examples and practice. They continue skill or strategy instruction across several instructional sessions to illustrate the applicability and utility of the skill or strategy. They connect previously taught skills and strategies with new content and text and cumulatively build the repertoire of skills and strategies that are introduced, applied, and integrated with appropriate text for authentic purposes over the course of the year. The International Reading Association recommends teachers and administrators ask the following questions when considering professional development. Does this program or instructional approach provide systematic and explicit instruction in the particular strategies that have been proven to relate to high rates of achievement in reading and writing for the children I teach? Does the program or instructional approach provide flexibility for youth with the range of learners in the various classrooms where it will be used? Are there a variety of strategies and activities that are consistent with diverse learning needs? Does the program or instructional approach advocate the use of high-quality literacy materials that are diverse in level of difficulty, genre, topic, and cultural representation to meet the individual needs and interests of the children with whom it will be used? Evidence-based instruction or EBI is the idea that the classroom practices should be based on the best available scientific evidence rather than personal judgment, tradition, social media trends, or other influence. EBI are the practices consistently associated with positive learning outcomes. Evidence-based means that at least one peer-reviewed high-quality study, hopefully more, suggests using a specific method, tool, or practice. The term evidence-based, when used with respect to a state, district, or school activity, means an activity, strategy, or intervention that first demonstrates a statistically significant effect on improving student outcomes or other relevant outcomes based on strong evidence from at least one well-designed and well-implemented experimental study, second, a moderate evidence from at least one well-designed and well-implemented quasi-experimental study, or three, promising evidence from at least one well-designed and well-implemented correlational study with statistical controls for selection bias, or that demonstrates a rationale based on high-quality research findings or positive evaluation that such activity, strategy, or intervention is likely to improve student outcomes or other relevant outcomes and includes ongoing efforts to examine the effects of such activity, strategy, or intervention. Evidence-based instructional strategies are aligned with how children learn to read, write, and spell. The evidence base for reading instruction constantly evolves and changes. This means that educators need ongoing professional development and access to authoritative, unbiased sources on the current science in order to base their teaching decisions on data rather than opinion and assumptions. To improve the quality of instruction students receive and the outcomes that students achieve, the field of education has been making great efforts for a number of years to implement evidence-based practices or programs. In general, an EBT is one whose effectiveness is supported by rigorous research. In other words, research shows that the practice or program works. The following chart shows the progression from an emerging EBT to an emerging EBT. This chart shows the progression from an emerging practice to an evidence-based practice. The U.S. Department of Education and other agencies and organizations maintain websites and databases with information on evidence-based practices in the field of education. One of the best resources out there is What Works Clearinghouse. It is housed at the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences. What Works Clearinghouse produces practice guides and reports with recommendations for schools on interventions in various topic areas. Now we will think about how we can support educators in terms of the reading curriculum. We can do this by knowing the criteria for selecting a strong core reading program. We can make sure the reading program we are selecting is strong enough to help with most students succeeding. Know how your program reflects the five big ideas in reading. We also need to help staff select supplemental and intervention and programs that have been shown to work. We want to support staff in developing and using grade-level plans that specify which core supplemental and intervention programs will be taught and for how long. We also want to make sure that we know the curriculum. This might look like us learning the curriculum with the teachers. This investment and involvement will ensure that we are all on the same page and can guide and support our staff with our students. It's activity time again. Go ahead and look at the curriculum support guide. This is on the Padlet that you guys utilized in the beginning of this session. And take a few minutes to go through the checklist and determine where to focus your efforts at your school site and to see where you can begin working with some supplemental materials. So, we will now be exploring different reader models, learning about emergent literacy development, defining core early literacy concepts, and identifying strategies to teach core early literacy concepts. So, we will learn how the development of a comprehensive assessment plan includes interim and diagnostic assessments that are valid and reliable and produce actionable data. These are the types of assessments used in reading. Each assessment has a purpose. Anyone who has worked as an elementary school teacher or principal understands the value of reliable and valid assessment of early reading progress. Timely assessments are important because they help students understand the value of early reading progress. Understands the value of reliable and valid assessment of early reading progress. Timely reliable assessments indicate which children are falling behind in critical reading skills so teachers can help them make greater progress in learning to read. Reliable and valid assessments also help monitor the effectiveness of instruction for all children. Without regularly assessing children's progress and learning to read, we cannot know which children need more help and which are likely to make good progress without extra help. Because scientific studies have repeatedly demonstrated the value of regularly assessing reading progress, a comprehensive assessment plan is a critical element of an effective school-level plan for all students and for preventing reading difficulties. So, rather than specify the personnel required to implement a comprehensive assessment plan, it seems more helpful to identify the essential tasks required to implement such a plan. Schools can assign the tasks as their circumstances and resources permit. The following tasks must be routinely accomplished each year. One, a master's testing schedule should specify the requirements for each assessment. One, a master's testing schedule should specify the weeks during which screening, progress monitoring, and outcome assessments will be administered. Assessments should be given at a reasonably uniform time to all students to facilitate the use of data in instructional decision-making and planning. Two, all testing materials must be ordered or reproduced in time to reach those who will be doing the testing. Three, all teachers or members of the school-level assessment team need to receive adequate training in administering their tests. It is important to remember that teachers may not be used to administering tests according to standard guidelines, yet these standard guidelines make the test data interpretable across students and across testing intervals. Four, one person needs to be designated to do the necessary follow-up and coordination to ensure that the testing is accomplished by all teachers or across all students during the time period specified in the master testing schedule. Five, a plan for scoring all tests must be developed and executed. And then six, a plan for entering and summarizing test data is necessary. Typically, individual student scores will need to be transferred into a classroom, a grade level, or a school file. We need to lead the way in reading assessment. We can do that by learning as much as we can about the formative assessments used in our school, learning how to collect data and help to collect the data periodically, learning how to use and interpret these reports to guide instruction, using these reports to guide grade-level planning meetings, and by talking to teachers and staff regularly about the data of their students' reading performances. So here's another activity. In the Padlet, you can go to the Read the Assessment Study Agenda and Assessment Purpose Template for an assessment study with your group. Go ahead and answer some of those questions. And then afterwards, how can this help you to develop a comprehensive assessment plan at your school site? In this section, we will explore how to design and align professional development plans for principals and teachers. With job-embedded professional development, research shows when teachers receive well-designed professional development, an average of 49 hours spread over 6 to 12 months, they can increase student achievement by as much as 21 percentile points. On the other hand, one-time or fragmented workshops lasting 14 hours or less show no statistically significant effect on student learning. Above all, it is important to remember that Above all, it is important to remember that effective professional development programs are job-embedded and provide teachers with five critical elements. One, collaborative learning. Teachers have opportunities to learn in a supportive community that organizes curriculum across grade levels and subjects. When teachers and schools engage in high-quality collaboration, it leads to better achievement gains in math and reading for students. In addition, teachers improve at greater rates when they work in schools with better collaboration quality. Two, links between curriculum assessment and professional learning decisions in the context of teaching-specific content. Particularly for math and science professional development programs, research has emphasized the importance of developing math and science content knowledge as well as pedagogical techniques for the content area. Three, active learning. Teachers apply new knowledge and receive feedback with ongoing data to reflect how teaching practices influence student learning over time. Four, deeper knowledge of content and how to teach it. Training teachers solely in new techniques and behaviors will not work. And five, sustained learning over multiple days and weeks. Professional development efforts that engage teachers in 30 to 100 hours of learning over six months to one year have been shown to increase student achievement. Professional learning communities, or networks, or PLNs, are groups of teachers that share and critically interrogate their practices in an ongoing, reflective, collaborative, inclusive, learning-oriented, and growth-promoting way to mutually enhance teacher and student learning. PLCs go a step beyond professional development by providing teachers with not just skills and knowledge to improve their teaching practices, but also an out – an ongoing community that values each teacher's experiences in their own classroom and uses those experiences to guide teaching practices and improve student learning. Professional development sessions are not just a series of events. Rather, they are parts of a coherent, focused program designed to elicit a specific outcome. Whether at the district or school level, a coherent professional development program prepares teachers at the beginning of the year to teach core reading and intervention programs and use all supplemental materials, provides training on the administration of assessment and use of assessment data to inform instruction, includes follow-up sessions and ongoing support for classroom implementation through the year, is coordinated among the state, district, and local levels, and provides training for administrators, instructional leaders, reading coaches, and teachers – coherent, focused program design to elicit a specific outcome. Here's a sample framework for a professional development plan that spans over two years. Teachers are more likely to implement new practices well if they receive support while trying them in their classroom. Again, here's another activity time. Go ahead and, looking at the Padlet, read the Key Questions and Effective Professional Development Checklist. After you've read that, reflect on how you can use this guide to develop a professional development plan for literacy. Part 6. In this section, we will learn how to monitor curriculum implementation and effectiveness using assessment data and customizing instruction and interventions in response to student data. School improvement may be conceptualized as a process in which the use of data plays an important role. As school improvement should start with clearly defined, specific, and measurable goals, several models of data use emphasizes the importance of goal setting. With goal setting playing a crucial role, all the other steps in the school improvement process need to take these goals into account. Data collection needs to be related to the goals. Sensemaking should revolve around the goals. Action should be directed towards these goals. And the evaluation should focus on whether or not the goals were achieved. The data that are collected to achieve these goals can be of different types. It may be systematically collected data, such as assessment results, surveys, and systematic classroom observations. Once different types of data have been collected, the process of sensemaking has to start. Some key questions are, how can the collected data be analyzed and interpreted? What does the data mean in relation to the goals? This process of sensemaking can lead to the implementation of concrete improvement actions that the outcomes of which subsequently need to be evaluated based on data to determine whether the previously set goals were achieved. Goal setting is placed at the top of this graphic. This draws attention to the notion that data use does not start with data. Rather, data is just one of those tools that schools can use in their school improvement process. This means that data use needs to start with certain goals, often connected to improving the quality of teaching and learning. These goals need to be concrete and measurable. At the student and classroom level, they need to pertain, for example, to student learning goals. At the school level, they may relate to certain aggregated achievement goals that involve the whole school. And at the district level, the goals may be benchmarks set by the local school evaluation bodies and or educational standards set by policy. These goals are often a result of deliberation, negotiation, and debate between different stakeholders. Data-driven decision-making or data-informed decision-making is defined as the process of systematically analyzing existing data sources within the school, applying the outcomes of analyses in order to innovate teaching, curricula, and school performance and implementing and evaluating these innovations. After data has been collected, the users must engage in a sense-making process. The data needs to be analyzed and interpreted to identify problems when users are not meeting the agreed goals and possible causes of these problems. During the sense-making process, the information needs to be combined with local expertise, understanding, and experience to turn it into knowledge that can be used in the improvement process. This leads to conclusions and an action plan. The outcomes of the sense-making process can lead to different types of improvement actions. For example, it may lead to curriculum change and to changes in instruction. It also may lead to changes in the assessment practices of a school, such as the implementation of more formative assessments over reliance on summative assessments. Data use should be framed as a continuous school improvement process and not as an activity to meet accountability demands. Critical dialogue between different stakeholders is crucial here. And it is important that data use does not focus solely on achievement and the deficits of student capabilities, but that it also focuses on student strengths. Furthermore, school leaders need to distribute leadership so that teachers are empowered in the data process and feel like they can take action based on their strengths. And finally, school leaders need to facilitate the use of data by providing access to data and providing time for data use, including professional development. So here are some suggestions for professional development to support teachers in data-driven decision-making. Before the first administration of the early reading assessments outlined in the district or school plan, train the faculty and staff to use the assessment protocol and to understand how to record the data. After initial data are collected, provide teachers with in-service sessions on interpreting the results and using that information to inform instructional decisions. Work sessions facilitated by the reading coach can help teachers analyze the data, identify struggling readers, and plan instruction that targets students' learning needs. These sessions will need to address both program-specific assessments and other early reading assessments. Teachers need both structured and less-structured assessments Teachers need both structured and less-structured training on data-driven decision-making. For example, after the initial presentation on general guidelines for using assessment data to inform instruction, teachers will need time to work collaboratively with their peers and school leaders using real data to solve real problems. Next, they will need to prepare to administer assessments, record the data, and use results to inform instruction. When planning opportunities to learn more about data-driven decision-making, consider the different levels and uses of assessment data, which include using student or classroom-level data to inform instructional decisions, examining classroom, school, or district data to answer implementation questions, and analyzing school or district-level data to inform programmatic and systematic decisions. Program-specific training for selected intervention programs also should be – should address the issue of using assessment data to group students and differentiate instruction. Evidence-based education can be described as the use of the current best evidence in making decisions about the quality of education and learning of students. We need to focus on how to make data use an organizational routine that leads to sustainable improvement for all of the stakeholders involved. A crucial stakeholder in the whole data use process in the school is the school leader. It is necessary for the school leaders to use data literacy skills so that they can monitor, model, scaffold, guide, and encourage the use of data. To build a data use culture, school leaders need to recognize that a compliance orientation towards data use will not lead to an authentic or sustained data use. There are several features of effective in-service professional development in the use of data. Those features are creating structures and protocols to develop data use, providing professional development over a longer period of time, and making the link between data and instruction explicit. We discussed developing a comprehensive assessment plan earlier. Managing data effectively is just as important as gathering the data. This enables us to accurately monitor student progress and make decisions based on student data. We can then customize instruction and interventions based on student data. Managing data effectively. In order to use testing data most effectively, a school-level comprehensive assessment plan needs a school-level data management plan or resource. Although teachers can certainly use the data they obtain from testing their students without a formal data management plan resource, monitoring student performance over time and making school-level decisions are greatly facilitated by an efficient data management plan. A number of web-based data management resources allow schools to enter data locally and provide data summaries and individual student charting that are helpful for interpreting test data. These services typically charge a small fee, but they add significantly to the ease with which student data can guide both classroom and school-level decisions. Some school districts have a district-level data management program that they can offer to schools, or individual schools have developed their own resources using programs like Excel. Another approach is to use free resources such as the Data Management Program Chart Dog 16 to manage and summarize student data. The larger point is that finding an efficient way to manage and use the data from a comprehensive assessment plan is as important as gathering the data in the first place. In order to make important instructional decisions such as does the student need school-level intervention resources or does the teacher need an extra 14 support or professional development given in a given area, one person will need access to student data and reports. Some decisions can be made or based on individual student data, but others may require summaries of data at the classroom or grade level. Investing in an efficient data management tool is crucial to the long-term success of a comprehensive assessment plan. Implementing an action plan based on data is not an easy task for teachers and school leaders. In order for this to happen, there is a need for teachers to connect the data to their own instruction. Black and William refer to this content to profound changes in the way in which teachers view their own role and considerable changes in their daily practices in the classroom. Studies have shown that the availability of data does not ensure the actual use of data to make changes in the instructional practices that happen in the classroom. It is important to evaluate the process of data use in a school. Pertinent questions include, were the action plans implemented? Did they lead to the desired effects among the different stakeholders? Was the goal as set by the school to meet the needs of the students? Was the goal as stated in the beginning of the process reached? This graphic shows the process of assessment and teaching. Teachers typically follow a core reading curriculum to guide instruction in whole and small group settings. Small group instruction should be differentiated to reflect the instructional needs of the students. Individual student needs are determined by formal screening, progress monitoring assessments, classroom assessments, and teacher observations. The goal is to use information from multiple sources to group students in a way that makes instruction and critical reading skills most efficient. There are five concrete recommendations for helping elementary schools ensure that all students in the primary grades learn to read. There are many ways to orchestrate this process, and implementing this system entails involvement of school personnel on many levels. One, screen all students for potential reading problems at the beginning of the year and again in the middle of the year. Regularly monitor the progress of students at risk for developing reading disabilities. Two, provide time for differentiated reading instruction for all students based on assessments of students' current reading level. Three, provide intensive systematic instruction on up to three foundational reading skills in small groups to students who score below the benchmark score on universal screening. Four, monitor the progress of students receiving intervention at least once a month. Use this data to determine whether students still require intervention. For those students still making insufficient progress, schoolwide teams should design an intervention plan. Five, provide intensive instruction that promotes the development of various components of reading proficiency. To students who show minimal progress after a reasonable time in small-group instruction. Why is progress monitoring important? Students vary in response to instruction intervention. Progress monitoring will tell when a child is doing well. Progress monitoring will tell when a child is still struggling. And frequent progress monitoring and regrouping need to occur in order for students to make progress to grade level by the end of the school year. We want to support our teachers in monitoring students' literacy progress. We can do this by finding an effective way to store and manage data so that it is accessible to all stakeholders, providing professional development and data analysis and application over a long period of time, empowering teachers in the use of data and framing data as a continuous school improvement process rather than an activity to meet accountability demands. It's time for our last activity. Go into the Padlet and read Best Practices in Progress Monitoring. After you're done reading that, reflect on what you already are doing well and what you can improve upon with this process.