51萝莉

A rural Georgia district serves systemic instructional reading support to high schoolers most seriously in need

This scenario took place just last year in one of our offices: An 11th grader, whom we will call Michael, had just been informed that we were placing him in a literacy support class for the remainder of the school year. His reaction was not what we expected. He slammed the office door on his way out, muttering under his breath that he would not participate in any such class.

The episode had us questioning our work.

We realized our school district鈥檚 data aligned with national trends on illiteracy suggesting that more than 50 percent of adults read below a 6th-grade level. We were compelled to close literacy gaps among our students to ensure college and career readiness prior to graduation. At the secondary level, we did not have much time.

Despite the sense of urgency we felt, we did not anticipate the adverse response from Michael and other high schoolers being assigned to literacy support. We should have, right? Learning to read at the high school level is embarrassing. In Michael鈥檚 case, we figured a phone conversation with his father was the logical next step.

We shared with the dad our concerns that Michael was reading at an elementary level, which would significantly impact his long-term trajectory. Michael鈥檚 father paused before he recalled an educator trying to have the same conversation with him in high school. He wished he had listened back then because his destination would not be where he is now. He agreed to talk to Michael 鈥� and this began the journey to bring equity in instruction for our secondary school students by tackling the root cause tied to literacy. We had to change the trajectory.

Data-Driven Action

In an initial review of student achievement data tied to high-stakes assessments driven by school administrators, high school teachers in our rural, south Georgia district responded to a series of questions guiding our team to draw conclusions about next steps for literacy support. We leveraged the ATLAS protocol (available on the School Reform Initiative website) to guide our questioning to support teachers in making objective observations about the percentage of students reading below grade level across subgroups, which led to implications for practice without placing blame.

This process enabled us to discover that for those secondary students with reading proficiency significantly below grade level, any demonstration of content mastery was unlikely. Without an ability to demonstrate content mastery, it was unlikely these students would earn the credits necessary for graduation.

Worse yet, these students might earn the requisite credits but exit high school without the basic literacy skills necessary for long-term success.

With this stark realization, teachers began to ask: If these data are indicative of our current context, does our work truly align with our vision to ensure that students graduate with a +1 goal (i.e., graduation plus a postsecondary focus) to be enrolled, employed or enlisted following graduation? Thus began our work toward collective teacher efficacy behind an initiative we labeled our Strategic Literacy Implementation Plan, or SLIP. It paved the steps our district would take to tackle illiteracy trends at the secondary school level.

Gaining Buy-In

The administrative team at our single high school was aware of the science of reading research suggesting that literacy instruction must be explicit and systematic. Where would we find the time to provide this to students in a content-driven environment? How would we train the faculty?

We recruited a leadership team, including cross-disciplinary teachers, to train on both the theory and practice of structured literacy. Our team understood the cumulative nature of the literacy continuum. If students do not understand less-complex word structure, they cannot build to a more-complex word structure, which is characteristic in high-level, academic texts at the high school level.

Our team further understood that students had to 鈥渓earn by doing鈥� the work of manipulating letters and sounds to be able to apply this knowledge across reading and writing. These teachers redelivered this information to their respective departments and provided brief strategies that subject-area teachers could use to better equip students to access content in complex texts.

For example, if students knew how to use digraphs (e.g., ch, sh), teachers might consider prompting a skill scan of a class text where students looked for unfamiliar words that included digraphs.

This seemed easy enough. We had to position the strategies in ways that were easy and quick to implement while being worthwhile to the learning objectives of content-area teachers. Going a step further, the leadership team explained to departmental teams that, if they would place texts being used in their classes into shared Google folders, we would use those texts during periods of time where students received structured literacy support as an intervention. It didn鈥檛 matter what these literacy learners transferred to, as long as they were transferring the learned basic skills in reading and/or writing.

As we asked content teachers to support literacy, we offered reciprocity. If you scratch our back (by transferring literacy learning skills into your content class), we will scratch yours (by exposing students to nonfiction texts that include your content).

The 5 Questions

To initiate our Strategic Literacy Implementation Plan, our first obstacle required finding the right students for intervention when we had such a large percentage who would benefit from the structured literacy support. Our initial review of data from the Lexile Framework for Reading suggested we had roughly 50 percent of secondary students reading below grade level. With a student population of 2,500, how could we ensure all students received equitable access to the structured literacy intervention?

We implemented a strategic selection process. First, we organized our Lexile data by student, from lowest to highest. For our literacy intervention class, which we housed in a remedial, credit-bearing English section, we looked at our bottom-performing 10 percent of students and prioritized those students who also were enrolled in a course requiring a high-stakes assessment reported to the state.

Why did this matter? We wanted the data we analyzed for school improvement to reflect the impact of our literacy initiative to motivate our faculty to continue the right work. From a student motivation perspective, we ensured our most vulnerable students received an English credit rather than an elective credit for the remedial class where they received the intensive literacy intervention.

Even after this selection process, we still had a high percentage of students who were performing below grade level in literacy and were not scheduled for support. To include these remaining students, we organized groups by similar Lexile levels. We then assigned these homogenous groups to a SLIP teacher during our 25-minute daily advisement block, which we treated as our intervention flex block. These strategically assigned SLIP teachers conducted a diagnostic assessment to determine where to begin instruction on the literacy continuum and began the work of systematically closing gaps using our structured literacy curricular resource. These students received a less intensive, while also accelerated, form of the intervention.

For both groups, we provided ongoing coaching and modeling of best practices to our secondary teachers. Seeing is believing. We had to let them experience the work with students and marvel at the benefit.

In both contexts, the remedial English class and the intervention flex block, the teachers leveraged a science of reading instructional framework to systematically support students via a review (to ensure mastery of the previously introduced skill), direct instruction (modeling the phonics/decoding skills students have the potential to master in just 10 minutes of instruction), dictation (explicit, multisensory practice with the phonics/decoding skills just modeled) and transfer to reading and writing.

In the context of the science of reading framework, we encouraged teachers to use extended transfer where secondary students had the opportunity to employ phonics/decoding skills in the context of lengthier reading and writing tasks. In this way, application of the skills was authentic and facilitated our most vulnerable students in accomplishing goals in other classes/contexts.

A Cumulative Approach

The intervention did not occur in isolation. Rather, the intervention actually provided students with the prerequisite skills to complete secondary coursework. We were not just decoding like robots. We were transferring skills for increased vocabulary understanding and comprehension of content-specific material.

Our message to teachers? Go as fast as you can 鈥� but as slow as you must. The approach is cumulative, so if we keep moving without ensuring mastery, we will eventually hit a wall and fail to progress. However, if we approach this systematically, we can close gaps, resulting in higher Lexile levels and equipping students with what they need to experience long-term success.

For many of our identified students, we also realized that underlying issues tied to the whole- child framework had to be addressed alongside the literacy gaps. These issues included but were not limited to attendance and motivation, mental well-being and behavior. We provided guidance on how to support the whole child while teaching multiple domains of reading with a heavy emphasis on phonics and vocabulary. Finally, we challenged teachers to create multiple opportunities for students to transfer these skills via reading and writing across the curriculum.

Did this work make a difference? At the close of only one academic year, our high school celebrated a 9 percent increase in the number of students reading at or above grade level. We also boasted double-digit percentage increases in student achievement across biology and American literature and composition courses.

Finally, we celebrated a 14 percent gain in students who passed their end-of-pathway assessments in career, technical and agricultural education. We touched all learners, including those seeking enrollment in college, employment or military enlistment. We achieved our goal of increasing the likelihood of student readiness for long-term goals post-graduation. And we achieved equity in instruction.

Personal Success

To increase the likelihood of success for all learners, school system administrators must systematically tackle the root cause 鈥� often tied to literacy. The quantitative evidence suggests this work is worth it. Stories like Michael鈥檚 confirm that.

Michael鈥檚 father did persuade him to enroll in the remedial support class. At the onset of the course, Michael shared that he wanted to be a welder or an anesthesiologist after graduation. That represents quite a wide professional range.

At the close of the semester, as we observed in his classroom, an unexpected conversation happened. Michael paused from his instruction, looked up and said, 鈥淚 want to apologize for my bad attitude towards this class. Last week, I was reading my welding book and realized that if I hadn鈥檛 stuck with this class, I would not have been able to read the words. So thank you.鈥�

We were so overwhelmed with emotion, it was difficult to respond. That same student, now a recent high school graduate, went on to attain a Lexile level that reflected above-grade level performance. We were able to reach out to him after his final Lexile assessment to share that he was positioned to choose his preferred career pathway after graduation. A lack of literacy ability would not dictate his direction. Rather, his increased literacy level unlocked the potential to achieve his wildest dreams.

Is it worth it to support varied levels of learners within the complexities of a content-driven environment? Michael certainly would say so. We do, too. 

Jessica Graves is the director of student achievement in the Colquitt County School District in Moultrie, Ga. Dan Chappuis is superintendent of the Colquitt County School District.