Early Literacy Key Insights
Explore how high-performing leaders made shifts to their literacy programs to further align with the reading research. These key insights share promising practices, lessons learned, and tools that have helped schools transform their early literacy visions into inspiring, research-based classrooms that are producing meaningful outcomes for students.
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Develop Your Expertise
As we learned from leaders shifting their literacy practices to better align to research, one trend stood out: In the organizations furthest ahead, the senior leaders (CEOs, CAOs, Superintendents, etc.) all pushed themselves to grapple with the research, interrogate their own data and systems, and be intimately involved in setting a new vision for literacy instruction in their network.
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Know Where You’re Going: Developing a Research-Aligned Vision for Literacy Instruction
Educators at all levels know the importance of backwards planning; you need to know where you’re headed before you develop your plan. Literacy leaders stressed the value of taking the time to craft a comprehensive and thoughtful vision around literacy instruction.
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Bringing Your Vision to Life with Curriculum, Assessments and Schedule
Your early literacy model is the cornerstone for bringing your vision to life. Leaders have crafted robust early literacy models that lay out the research-based curriculum, assessments, and instructional minutes that form the foundation of effective literacy instruction.
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Systems & Tools to Support Implementation
The key to unlocking the full potential of your early literacy model lies in effective implementation. By investing in leaders’ ability to coach and provide feedback, schools have equipped teachers with the skills to implement new curricula and instructional practices effectively.
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Unlocking the Power of New Data
As networks adopt new assessment strategies to better align to research, leaders have shared subtle but important shifts to their school-wide data practices to maximize the potential of new foundational skills data and use this data to allocate resources to support their literacy instructional priorities.
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Don’t Wait! Weekly Data Meetings as a Lever for Change
Literacy leaders have empowered teachers to adapt their literacy instruction to meet students’ needs by building systems to frequently analyze data and providing coaching support to ensure action plans lead to the right supports for students.
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Reading Joy! Building a Culture of Literacy
As schools work to evolve their literacy programs to focus on research-aligned literacy practices, leaders also ensure they’re not losing sight of celebrating the joy of reading. In addition to the joy found when students unlock the code, make meaning of text, and feel successful as readers, schools are investing in initiatives that celebrate literacy in classrooms and beyond.
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Supporting Older Students
Leaders are supporting older students’ literacy development by explicitly focusing on language comprehension with grade-level text in core instruction and incorporating additional instruction of word recognition skills, such as phonological awareness, decoding, and sight recognition for students who need it.
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Literacy leaders continue to explore research, share promising practices, and collaborate on common challenges. Some topics this year include writing instruction, supporting multilingual learners, and reading intervention.
Read more here.