Your weekly source of learner-centered inspiration
Dear Educator,
When I was a literacy coach, my team and I noticed that many students were going through their day without the opportunity or expectation to read. Many students were performing below grade level and struggled to read their textbooks and assigned novels. Teachers were supporting students as best they could using current tools and tactics, but it wasn’t yielding results.
So, to achieve our goal of increasing literacy in the classroom, our English department shifted from examining what we were teaching to reviewing what students were responding to. In this week’s issue of Bright Spots, I want to highlight how we strategized to achieve better learning outcomes in the classroom.
With Gratitude, Katie
BRIGHT SPOT OF THE WEEK
Learning Is A Process, Not An Event
To learn about new strategies that would best benefit our students, we read the book 7 Keys to Comprehension and came together after school to engage in collaborative conversation that allowed teachers to experience the new strategies in their own reading and learning. Each week, we independently read about a new strategy, rotated modeling lessons for our colleagues, and collaborated on a plan to put the new ideas into practice.
We were empowered educators who moved beyond the standard of a scripted curriculum.In spite of the pressure to focus on short-cycle passages and tests to assess comprehension skills in isolation, we let students lead the discussion: We allowed them to choose the books they read and discuss the texts with peers, and encouraged them to further investigate relevant questions.
As the school year progressed, we maintained our relentless focus on learning, experimenting, refining, and analyzing the impact our new methods had on students.By the end of the following year we had almost doubled reading proficiency from 34 percent to 66 percent,a statistic which has continued to improve in subsequent years. We continued to work together to improve our practices, but, most importantly, we learned that we could break a cycle and redesign a system to achieve better outcomes for our students and our teachers.
Interested in discussing how you can achieve better learning outcomes in your context? Let's connect!
Below are some resources to support you in your professional learning process.
1. Creating professional learning experiences. Interested in learning about how we collaborate to design professional learning for your unique context? Read about it in my blog post, Learning Is a Process, Not an Event.
2. Aligning practice and research. Learn more about the ongoing conversation of professional development as a continual learning process in Job-Embedded Professional Learning.
