Key points:
A lot of teachers assume that once students get to fourth or fifth grade, they already know how to read. And while this is true most of the time, there are some kids who just don’t hit that important milestone in elementary school. The good news is that if you equip teachers with the right tools, you open their eyes to the possibility that kids can continue to learn, and that education is a continuum and not just a specific target.
The continuum is especially important with literacy, where we work to build awareness with teachers, prepare them to intervene in the moment, and not let those important intervention opportunities slip by. One tool we use is Lexia Aspire, a professional learning program that empowers educators to build the literacy skills of students in grades 4-8.
We first learned about the program from one of our district’s success managers, after we were already successfully using Lexia LETRS for educators in grades K-3. Our fourth and fifth grade teachers were asking, “Well, what about us?” They had students who weren’t reading on grade level and needed help moving that needle.
Here are five steps we took to ensure a smooth rollout of our new professional learning program for upper elementary and middle school teachers:
1. Don’t overwhelm your staff. The lessons are the perfect length of about 45-60 minutes. Within that timeframe, they get just enough background and introductory information to get into the core of the lesson, which is also the right amount of information to not overwhelm. This is especially new at the outset, when teachers are being introduced to the concepts and need to be able to digest them and apply them in their classrooms.
2. Choose a challenging but attainable program. The platform should be interactive. Make sure it poses questions and includes quizzes that teachers take to test the knowledge they’ve learned. You don’t want it to just be “busy work” for them. I’ve done a lot of literacy training during my career, but even I’m challenged by the platform–and that’s a good thing. It pushes teachers to go beyond theory and think about the kids sitting at their desks.
3. Handpick the most helpful courses. If you don’t implement the platform correctly, you’ll get a lot of pushback and wind up wasting time and money on a really good program that just wasn’t rolled out properly. For example, we selected about 12 courses that we thought would be the most valuable at this point in time, and for a specific group of teachers. We asked them to complete the courses by an end-of-year deadline. Based on how we paced it out, it worked out to one course approximately every 4-5 weeks. When they’re done, teachers receive a stipend.
4. Invest in professional development sessions. We have a fall conference every year for our elementary teachers, so we have planned sessions for that fall professional development around what is happening in the professional learning course, how the platform is linked to our curriculum, and which elements will help them teach that curriculum correctly right out of the gate on the first day of school. For example, one of our literacy coaches is doing a session on morphology and spelling, exploring how the platform’s explicit word parts and patterns instruction directly supports our new phonics scope and sequence.
5. Respect your teacher’s time. Finally, we were very sensitive to our teachers’ time constraints. We initially considered having them choose the courses they wanted to complete, but then we took the pressure off them and just picked the courses ourselves, knowing that what they were curious about versus what they need to know to be able to teach could be two different things. The good news is that there are a lot of different ways to give teachers that choice to explore, and we incentivize that by giving them an additional stipend for completing more courses.
We know teachers are busy, and that giving them yet one more training or professional development opportunity can be a burden. But there’s also a balance that has to happen when a percentage of students come into fourth grade unable to read. To ensure success, we emphasize the benefits of the professional learning program–both for the teachers and for their students–and let them dive in and get started. Once they do that and they start to see the tangible results in their classrooms, they get bitten by the bug and the rest of it happens organically. They feel confident; you can see it on their faces.
