7/14/2024

How District Leaders Can Identify and Plan for Science of Reading District Solutions (Part 2)

In Part 1 of this three-part series, we explored the initial steps a district administrator can take to compile a needs assessment on the state of literacy education in their district. It’s critically important to understand this before moving too quickly into solutions.

Once all of the data is collected, the teachers have weighed in, and a deep analysis of materials is completed—what comes next?

By conducting a deep inquiry and collecting detailed information about student performance, teachers’ perspectives, and the existing curriculum, you can draw conclusions about where the gaps are—and in what specific areas students can improve. Once those gaps are identified, you can connect those gaps or problem areas to solutions. 

By taking a thoughtful and research-based approach to address these problems with science of reading district solutions, you’ll be empowered to implement sustainable programs that improve literacy scores and set students up for successful lifelong learning.

How to Use Your Needs Assessment to Identify Solutions

With insightful data, surveys, and analysis, district administrators are in an excellent position to make deeply informed decisions that will drive toward student literacy accelerations. At this point, it’s time to identify and address the root causes of the areas of deficiency.

Here are the steps that will lead district administrators toward making meaningful literacy changes in their districts:

1. Assess the Needs Assessment

This sounds redundant, but it’s not. Once you’ve gathered all of the information, it’s time to reflect on the information you’ve gathered. Are gaps in instruction creating deficiencies in skill development? Where are students struggling the most, and is that connected to gaps in knowledge among teachers? 

Let’s say test scores (including standardized tests, formative assessments, and summative assessments) show that students are struggling to decode words, leading to low text recall and comprehension. This could indicate teachers are not receiving sufficient training in phonics, phoneme awareness, and other key foundational decoding skills.

Now, evaluate the training itself and how it handles these topics. Does the professional development curriculum use a research-based approach that’s grounded in the science of reading? Is coverage of the topics clear and complete? If not, you can assume this is a problem area that needs a solution. Extend this level of inquiry to any identified areas of struggle among students and teachers.

2. Assess the Curriculum and Interventions

You can take a similar approach to evaluating your district's curriculum and current intervention practices. Extending the example from above, how does the current student curriculum handle phonics, phoneme awareness, and decoding skills? Could the student learning materials be the missing link here?

How well does the student literacy curriculum align with the professional development training content? Are both based on the science of reading and research-based approaches to literacy? Is the instructional approach designed using scientific evidence about how the human mind actually learns to read?

To go a step further, how does all of this tie into interventions when a student faces an opportunity gap—are the interventions solving the problems? What strategies are instructors using? What types of professional development training is the interventionist receiving, and does that align with teachers and students? This is another potential focus area if it seems out of alignment.

3. Identify Professional Learning to Give Teachers Appropriate Knowledge

Now that you’re armed with a suite of identified problems, it’s time to turn to solutions.

Implementing a targeted professional learning curriculum will bring about the most high-impact and sustainable change. Research shows teacher quality is the most important school-related factor influencing achievement.

Why “professional learning” instead of “professional development?” Because professional learning is interactive, sustained, and can be customized to the needs of your district—whereas professional development tends to be a one-time, one-size-fits-all approach. Within ongoing training opportunities, you’ll have the ability to focus on existing problem areas, like phonics and phoneme awareness, identified through the data.

Given the nationwide shift to science of reading-based instruction, it’s a great time to evaluate evidence-based professional learning programs that provide comprehensive coverage of the topic areas where your students are receiving the lowest scores. Personalized training will give your teachers a skills boost that will then get passed on to your students—and everyone wins.

4. Bring in Student Resources for Immediate Support

Professional learning is an investment that takes time—and your students need support today. So, what types of support can you provide students now so they’re continually progressing while the teachers are enhancing their skills?

• Hire additional reading support staff. Bring in literacy mentors or instructional coaches and make their services available to every classroom. These experts can work one-on-one with students and train teachers about how to translate the science of reading into practical classroom strategies.
• Offer tutoring. One-on-one tutors can help struggling students with personalized support and improve their reading comprehension significantly. This is a great solution to quickly address students most urgently needing support and also provide optional tutoring for students who would benefit as well.
• Collaborate with literacy experts. Engage with experts and organizations that specialize in evidence-based reading instruction. They can offer guidance, workshops, and resources to enhance literacy practices across the school or district.
• Invest in curricular support tools. Before making bigger shifts to student learning materials, consider bringing in products like Lexia® Core5® Reading (for grades pre-K–5) or Lexia® PowerUp Literacy® (for grades 6–12), which are rooted in the science of reading and accelerate literacy development and skills acquisition.

5. Establish a Plan

Now, it’s up to you to put together an implementation plan, typically in the form of a comprehensive literacy plan. Compile the takeaways, goals, strategies, resources, and monitoring you intend to execute into an actionable document to share and apply as you move forward with literacy change.

In the next installment of this series, we’ll cover the implementation process—but first, let’s go back to Columbus City Schools to see how educators there completed their needs assessment and created their plan.

How Columbus City Schools Approached Creating an Implementation Plan

When Ebone Johnson, supervisor of literacy and library services at Columbus City Schools (CCS), entered her role in 2021, her district had been conducting research over several years to improve the quality of literacy education and student results. 

Once she had assessed the data, solicited teacher input about the state of literacy education and the next steps, and examined the current resources in use, it was time to draw some conclusions.

The first big takeaway was that the science of reading was the missing link at CCS. The current methods, based on a balanced literacy approach, were working for some but not all. Around this time, the district was awarded ESSER funding, which gave it an opportunity to invest in professional learning for administrators, teachers, and staff throughout the district.

CCS had the advantage of a superintendent who prioritized early literacy—so educators had top-down support to spend funding on what was needed to make the shift to the science of reading.

They also identified gaps (as described above) and made some immediate shifts to provide support where needed. 

“One of the things that we identified early on is that our current instructional resource was lacking in phonemic awareness,” Johnson said. “We're like, OK, this is crucial. What we have is not addressing it. So, what do we need to do? We went out and did some research. And we added an additional resource—we wanted to make it easy for our teachers. So again, as a district leader, I think our role is in helping to identify those gaps, and then finding solutions that we feel can address those gaps.”

The decision was made to partner with Lexia® and adopt Lexia® LETRS®—professional learning for pre-K–5 teachers. District leaders opted into Success Partnerships to receive a higher level of support and collaboration in the creation and execution of the implementation plan.

“We decided to train all the teachers at the same time in LETRS,” Johnson said. “We thought it was important to train district administrators, instructional coaches, and district leaders, holistically training everyone possible in the organization on what this meant to start teaching based on the science of reading.”

Ultimately, CCS focused on capacity-building and aligning training curricula across the organization, planning to train around 500 pre-K teachers, 1,700 K–5 teachers, and 250 administrators across the district.

Eager to Learn How This Implementation Turned Out?

Stay tuned for Part 3, which will delve into the details of the implementation at Columbus City Schools: What worked, what didn’t, and how these changes have benefited the students of Ohio’s largest school district.

In the meantime, check out The Big Picture: Building a Comprehensive Literacy Plan to find out how educators at Friendship Public Charter School (FPCS) in Washington, D.C., created their personalized road map to journey into the science of reading—with great results.

Read the full series

Part 1: How Leadership Can Leverage District Data Assessment for Literacy Change 

Read part 1

Part 3: How Leaders Can Approach a Science of Reading-Based District Implementation

Read part 3