Unlocking Literacy Districtwide

No one questions the importance of literacy as an essential foundation for students.

“The levels of literacy that kids need are skyrocketing because of what the world is demanding,” says Lucy Calkins, the Robinson professor in children’s literature at Columbia University Teachers College and founding director of the Reading and Writing Project. “There is no job which doesn’t require high-level literacy skills.” So figuring out how to identify the best strategies to ensure students acquire those skills is the supreme test for school leaders. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 36 percent of 4th graders in 2015 were proficient in reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

The discussion largely has moved beyond the debate between whole language and phonics to a more comprehensive embrace of what literacy means across the K-12 spectrum, including what students should be reading and understanding and how teachers can best support those efforts. Without a one-size-fits-all solution, a 2014 Hanover Research Study for a public school district client identified some approaches that it contends have improved students’ literacy skills. These include instructional models aligned with the Common Core standards in English and language arts; a schoolwide model intended to increase student achievement as a whole rather than targeting only struggling students; and professional development for teachers in this skill area.

Four school districts across North America illustrate the sundry approaches to improving student literacy.

Mounds View, Minn.

Dawn Wiegand, in her fourth year as principal of the Bel Air Elementary School in the Mounds View School District in southern Minnesota, gets great delight when she visits classrooms and asks students, “What’s your learning target for today?” Students’ answers indicate they are responsible for their learning. “They’ve internalized that,” she adds.

Ten elementary school administrators in the 10,000-student school district committed four days to literacy leadership training focused on the Literacy Classroom Model led by Sandi Novak and Bonnie Houck, authors of Literacy Unleashed: Fostering Excellent Reading Instruction Through Classroom Visits. This approach expects teachers and principals to know what a quality literacy program looks like so educators can track areas of strength and weakness during walk-throughs. The basics include a well-balanced classroom library of fiction and nonfiction; displays of student work that reflect progress and development; and opportunities for teachers to work with the whole class, small groups and individual students, where students can explain what they’re doing and why, among others. These visits also are designed to provide information for the building leader to see which areas need more attention.

After doing an assessment and examining the data in her building, Wiegand and her team realized “we weren’t providing enough time for independent reading.”

Depending on the grade, students now have 90- to 120-minute reading blocks, with 30 minutes of independent reading. The classroom library is stocked with 400 books, with a focus on expanding quality nonfiction texts that would appeal to students. Wiegand used federal funds to purchase about 100 nonfiction titles for each teacher’s classroom library. Grades 3-5 also have Chromebooks to access a variety of reading materials. Students learn how to select books that match their interests and abilities, after conferring with their teachers.

“We just want them reading,” says Wiegand. When she makes her classroom visits, she’s pleased to see “kids actually reading and having authentic conversations with their peers versus completing a worksheet.” When the students are in small groups, teachers ask questions to determine the common mistakes that students make and identify strategies to help them improve.

Each building has a part-time literacy coach so that during the course of three years all teachers have exposure to the concepts and practices. There’s also an emphasis on professional development for teachers in balanced literacy, which encompasses whole-group, small-group and independent reading. Even more critical, says Wiegand, is having teachers work collaboratively to “determine the targets for each standard. There’s much more alignment.”

Reading scores in grades 3-5 have improved since the program was implemented two years ago. Reading proficiency increased from 64 percent in 2015 to 68.8 percent in 2016.

Wiegand adds, “The beauty of the framework is that we develop patterns and can target what we need for each school. The district didn’t say, ‘You have to do this.’”

The Mounds View district prefers school leaders develop specific approaches in their own buildings, within an overall narrative that promotes lifelong reading and writing, says Angie Peschel, director of curriculum and instruction. Within that flexibility, however, core instruction is expected to cover phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, comprehension and vocabulary, aligning with the state’s English language arts standards.

Vancouver, Wash.

Three years ago, the 22,100-student Vancouver School District wanted teachers to be able to personalize and differentiate instruction to raise student literacy levels.

The district analyzes student data to drive change in instructional practices in each classroom, Layne Manning, director of curriculum and instruction, says. The focus is on student skills and readiness for specific grade levels.

“Depending on the group profile, it might mean a scaffolding approach for all students prior to beginning the lesson, or it might be introducing the lesson to the whole group and then working with a small group of students who need additional support throughout the lesson,” Manning says.

Literacy instruction occurs in a daily dedicated time block in the elementary schools using Reading Wonders. This program focuses on the foundations of reading skills that result in reading to learn to help students understand academic content. Each teacher has an anthology for students of varying reading abilities, including English language learners. Based on the texts, which include informational and literary selections, students learn specific skills and strategies in literacy.

Vancouver employs a literacy facilitator at each elementary school to coordinate various programs, such as the Learner Assistance Program for Language Learners, assessments and support for highly capable students. One quarter of the coordinator’s time is spent coaching teachers, whether through co-teaching, group demonstrations or embedded professional development.

The Learner Assistance Program uses an intervention teacher to support especially needy students in kindergarten through 4th grade on reading foundations, including fluency and decoding. In turn, the intervention teacher and literacy coordinator receive professional development from Manning’s department.

Once students are in the middle school, the emphasis, Manning says, is on “close reading and argumentative writing” with students reading about current events. Texts include Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser and Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer. Middle school teachers use Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt and Number the Stars by Lois Lowry to introduce students to “meaty, high-quality literature and critical skills,” Manning says. “These are real books that students want to read.”

The Vancouver district also provides iPads to every student in grades 5-12. Teachers use in-the-moment assessments to modify the teaching process in mid-course by adopting routines that support literacy. Through a new digital platform, ThinkCERCA, students work through a structured debate on relevant topics such as whether students ought to use cell phones in class.

While Vancouver is committed to a literacy model that embraces teachers’ ability to differentiate their approach, the district is careful to ensure enough commonality to address its highly mobile student population. With students moving from school to school, literacy programs need to be similar across the district so “it feels familiar and the student knows how to be successful,” Manning says. The routines are the same throughout the district. What changes are text selections.

River East Transcona, Manitoba

As the second largest school district in the Canadian province of Manitoba with 16,500 students and diversity that includes high-need and high-poverty schools, the River East Transcona School Division identified a clear necessity to improve student writing.

So for the past five years, the district has worked with Regie Routman, a literacy educator and author, and her team of specialists to work with all 27 schools that house early grades, says Jason Drysdale, assistant superintendent for educational services and planning in Winnepeg’s River East Transcona District. Using Routman’s Optimal Learning Model, which moves from the teacher demonstrating how to write something to the whole class working together to the individual student crafting his or her own piece, Drysdale says, “We have seen writing pieces of a high caliber.”

This process requires schools to collect student writing samples during the fall and spring to gauge individual as well as class progress. The district took a grade 3 writing sample from June 2011 and compared it to a grade 3 writing sample from June 2015. The hope, says Drysdale, is “this data will show growth in a grade level over the years and that we will also be able to see steep growth between grades over the year and over the years.”

Allyson Matczuk, a trainer and early literacy consultant for the Manitoba Department of Education, observed that children at high-poverty schools who had participated in Reading Recovery, a program operating in the district for more than 14 years, or another daily literacy intervention, performed well on reading at the end of 3rd grade. Then, Matczuk says, “their writing was flat once they left the intervention. Writing instruction wasn’t as clear as reading instruction.” The district had an objective for students to write about math and science as well as literary texts.

There’s also a districtwide initiative to encourage increased collaboration among principals and schools. Each month about 60 principals and vice principals meet for a half-day, where they participate in a joint book study and discuss the application of new instructional ideas in classrooms. 

Rotuman’s team coaches and mentors educators in hub schools, which effectively serve as models for others in the district, allowing up-close observation by principals and teachers from other schools. “It gets us out of our own backyard and into another organization’s culture,” says Drysdale. “We see they are struggling with and working on the same issues.”

Results so far are encouraging, with evidence of increasing complexity in student writing, Drysdale says. “The writing sample of a typical 3rd grader from school to school is remarkably similar. The benchmarks are remarkably similar, and there’s a shared sense of common purpose. As a superintendent, I’ve held up principals at two hub schools as instructional leaders. We want them to be ‘first teachers, teachers of teachers.’”

Charlottesville, Va.

After several years of gains, the Charlottesville, Va., City Schools worried about the slowing progress on the literacy front, so last fall Superintendent Rosa Atkins launched the district’s first literacy intervention with its key components both during and after the school day. Atkins worked with her school board to extend the school day by 90 minutes and to add 27 days to the school calendar for the Extended Bridges to Literacy students.

No longer do Charlottesville educators wait until 3rd grade to target students lagging in their reading and writing abilities. The first intervention comes at the end of 1st grade, so about 270 elementary school students are now getting more vocabulary work, as well as additional reading and writing activities. Roughly 60 students at each school work closely with a teacher. Usually two dedicated staff are at each of the six elementary schools.

“For students who are not quite at grade level,” says Jenifer Davis, head literacy teacher for the 4,200-student system, “we hope they catch up.”

Charlottesville’s Extended Bridges to Literacy program, funded by a $240,000, three-year state grant from the Virginia Department of Education, targets 1st through 5th graders for after-school literacy support. The work offers an “authentic reading and writing experience” to students, Davis says. During an hourlong session, students can be found “listening to good stories [and] doing strategic work with vocabulary,” along with project-based learning that is based on a student’s reading-interest surveys.

The extended school time is compulsory, a continuation of the school day and “not viewed as an extra,” Atkins says.

Through professional learning communities organized by grade level through 4th grade and by content area for 5th through 8th grades, teachers receive the training to address their students’ literacy needs. “We use consistent language across the division about how to help kids,” Davis says. The weekly staff training, running up to 90 minutes, focuses on what students are doing — learning targets, instruction, assessments, writing work, content work — and how they’re making progress in reading and writing.

To ensure the training translates into student growth in the classroom, 11 instructional coaches circulate across the six elementary schools in the Extended Bridges program to support and encourage teachers. Adds Atkins, “The goal of the coach is to enhance instructional practice.”

Every student is expected to publish two pieces of writing each semester. They can satisfy this requirement in any number of ways, including digital blogs. All students have electronic portfolios that are maintained throughout their academic careers in Charlottesville, as well as digital journals.

A robust early intervention program for 3- and 4-year-olds exposes the youngsters to beginning writing and how sounds and letters are formed. “The big picture is that they’re being provided with a structured experience,” says Davis.