Click the small square near the bottom right corner of the video window to display fullscreen.

• Keith Lenz talks about the Content Literacy Continuum as a framework for school improvement. Several schools across the country have adopted CLC.
• Jim Knight discusses aspects of his widely used instructional coaching model, which he has used successfully across all middle schools in the Topeka, Kan., school district. The model has been replicated in Maryland, as well.
• Barbara Ehren describes the collaborative coaching model that is evolving as Virginia’s State Improvement Grant moves toward statewide CLC implementation.

Each of these projects plays out a little differently, but all contain common elements and address common concerns.

CLC: Literacy-Centered School Improvement

Many schools and school systems are adopting KU-CRL’s Content Literacy Continuum as a framework for school improvement. The continuum encompasses five levels of literacy support that should be in place in every school. The levels describe increasingly intensive instruction and services to support student learning.

For schools, the process of adopting CLC begins with an exploring phase during which CLC teams help schools understand what it means to be ready for the significant changes required of school wide improvement. The teams begin to look at what services, instruction, and programs are already in place in a school, identifying holes that need to be filled.

Questions at each level guide these discussions. Knowing that background knowledge and vocabulary are critical to learning at Level 1, for example, what is the school doing to make sure students who don’t have adequate reading skills are still able to acquire that knowledge?

The continuum emphasizes coordinated, coherent services and programs cutting across levels and content areas.

“Coming up with a thousand and one literacy activities is not addressing literacy,” Keith says. “What it’s doing is giving lots of activities without reinforcing a way of attacking specific learning challenges.”

Likewise, the CLC philosophy is that designing one or two courses focused on improving literacy skills does not constitute a literacy program.

“Kids who participate in those classes don’t get sufficient practice to build on those strategies. They need it reinforced across the curriculum,” he says.

Instructional Coaching: On-site Partners

The instructional coaching model that Jim has studied and developed over the past decade defines an instructional coach as an on-site professional developer who partners with educators to identify and assist with implementation of proven teaching methods.

Jim’s work as a professional developer greatly influenced his interest in instructional coaching as a means of increasing teachers’ use of effective instructional practices, such as SIM.

“My life’s work really has been about how do you get teachers to use this. I could see results and wanted to get it in people’s hands,” Jim says. “What I found was the more forceful I was in working with teachers, really the less effective I was.”

The Instructional coaching approach, rather than mandating teacher use of new materials, focuses on building relationships with teachers. The model is based on the partnership principles identified in Jim’s Partnership Learning work: Teachers are equal and have a voice in professional development and adopting new instructional methods.

(Learn more about Partnership Learning and download the Partnership Learning Field book at www.kucrl.org/partnership)

Instructional coaches on Jim’s projects work with teachers within a frame they refer to as the Big 4: Behavior, content instruction, and formative assessment. Addressing behavior is key, they find, to the success of the three other components.

“Our thinking is if you get those four things in place, you’ve probably got a good classroom,” says Jim.

Virginia State Improvement Grant: A Distributed Approach to Coaching

In Virginia, two demonstration sites consisting of two schools each are implementing CLC. At the same time, the project team is preparing to take CLC statewide, recognizing that a one-size-fits-all solution is impossible.

The team uses the Concerns-Based Adoption model (C-BAM), a powerful set of tools to manage the process of change facilitation and promote systematic decision-making.

Building on Jim’s work, the team uses a modified approach to instructional coaching to help educators throughout the participating schools learn and use new instructional methods.

“We really like to think about it as a differentiated coaching in the same way we talk about differentiated instruction for kids,” Barbara says. “We talk about different models for different schools with different resources.”

There are, however, some ” non-negotiable,” components that the team agrees are important and should be in place–providing consistency and coherence from school to school:

1. Coaching is a component in high-quality professional development, not a separate entity.
2. Professional development occurs in phases. Coaching occurs during the phases of professional development referred to as Do It, Refine It and Use It. The team does not think about coaching as a replacement for the initial pedagogy of learning a new instructional method.
3. Coaching in some form is for everyone, including administrators and change facilitators. It is not a remedial endeavor.
4. Teachers may need different things at different times from different people with varied expertise.

Common Components

Despite differences in the three school improvement approaches described above, they all contain elements that KU-CRL has found to be essential to the success of school change. Among these are effective instruction, choice, values and communication.

Effective instruction. A strong focus on effective instruction- from instructional coaching’s Big 4 to Virginia’s differentiated instructional protocols- is a common emphasis among KU-CRL’s school improvement projects. KU- CRL’s recent research suggests that building a strong instructional “core” yields greater positive results for students.

The instructional core encompasses such components as motivation/ behavior supports, aligned instruction, connected courses and coherent learning, student-informed teaching, and a continuum of literacy instruction.

“We begin to really see the effects of the changes when we get to the instructional core,” Keith says. “We can put in all the infrastructure changes we want, we can put in all the systems for learning, but unless we focus on the quality of instruction in the classroom, we’re probably not going to see the kind of academic changes that we want to see.”

Secondary to the instructional core but still important to school improvement success are infrastructure changes (flexible scheduling, planning and professional development time, extended learning opportunities, for example) and system learning supports (data-based decision making, collaborative problem solving, instructional coaching, and other system that allow a school to learn). These components are necessary to create the context and support system for change.

Foundational to the success of instructional core change is the support of an instructional leader. That role, says Jim, belongs to the school principal.

“If the principal is not the instructional leader, it’s going to be tougher to make it happen. You really need that principal,” he says.

Choice. Choice is another common concept embraced by all three researchers. Schools and educators in this project choose professional development and improvement goals matched to their own needs.

“You have to give schools choice…based on their unique characteristics, their culture, the centers of expertise within a building. Maybe it’s the science department that takes leadership; maybe it’s language arts,” says Keith.

Working with schools in this way promotes the cultural shifts needed for successful change in secondary schools, in contrast to a top-down mandate for change.

In Virginia, project staff acknowledges that a single professional development or instructional coaching model likely will not meet the diverse needs of participating schools. Thus, active involvement of schools helps shape the look of professional development opportunities, including how instructional coaching is carried out, selected to meet project goals.

“We’re going to take our lead from the school to design instructional coaching protocols,” says Barb. “We have some opportunities in Virginia that are perhaps different than in other states as well as different challenges.”

The emphasis, she says, is on making use of existing resources within a school, then refining, shaping, and negotiating changes to develop protocols that make sense to all those involved.

Values. Shared values can help smooth the path as schools embark on large-scale change initiatives. In the CLC projects, a set of values topped by respect for teachers and their experience defines the relationship between teachers and the system.

CLC projects promote a shared vision, shared knowledge that leads to individual learning, shared leadership, shared responsibility that shapes individual planning and action, shared evaluation, and shared accountability that motivates individual action.

Similarly, Jim’s instructional coaching model is founded on six principles of partnership:

• Equality, to promote relationships among coaches and teachers as equals
• Choice
• Voice, to provide opportunities for participants to express their points of view
• Reflection, to allow participants to consider ideas before adopting them
• Dialogue, to arrive at mutually acceptable decisions
• Praxis, to enable individuals to have more meaningful experiences through practical application of learning.

Jim encourages those involved in school change projects to consider whether these principles reflect their own.

“Even if you don’t embrace the principles, work through what you do believe,” Jim says. “You need to know what your principles are.”

Communication. In many ways, the success of school improvement projects rests squarely on how well individuals and groups communicate. Coaches, Jim says, change the way teachers teach and change the culture of the school one conversation at a time.

“They have to have some pretty powerful communication skills to pull that off,” he says.

Coaches tread a delicate line between establishing close relationships with teachers and maintaining enough detachment to enable them to make solid professional development decisions.

One method they have used effectively is the “show, don’t tell” approach to professional development. Coaches often visit classrooms and present lessons–teaching students a lesson while showing teachers how to apply a new instructional method to their own material. In interviews with 13 teachers who had worked with coaches in this manner, Jim says their No. 1 observation was, “It wasn’t until she came in my classroom and showed me how that I realized I could do it. When she did it with my kids, I knew I could do it too.”

Part of the balance for instructional coaches means clearly separating the role of coaches from the role of administrators to supervise or evaluate.

“We have to keep principals informed, but we do so in a way that honors and respects the collegiality of the coaching relationship,” Barb says.

Consequently, project teams pay close attention to language choices used in describing coaching to teachers and administrators: Coaching is collegial, not supervisory. Coaches coach; administrators monitor and supervise. In Virginia, coaches make classroom “visitations,” not “observations.”

Julie Tollefson
KU-CRL
Strategram Vol. 19 No. 3
Published: March 2007

Our emphasis on the continuum during the conference should not be construed as a mandate that all SIM Professional Developers must shift toward conducting CLC professional development. Rather, we want to make sure that all SIM Professional Developers can answer basic questions that arise during their sessions. You may find yourself in a situation in which a school wants to get ready or believes it is ready to consider whole-school improvement through CLC. In that case, being able to address basic questions will increase your value to that school.

This article follows the story presented by Keith Lenz and Patty Graner in a session called “Content Literacy Continuum: What Do I Need to Know?” It begins with the founding of the KU Center for Research on Learning and continues through the development of the Strategic Instruction Model, explores the changing needs of society, and gives a brief overview of the Content Literacy Continuum. The pieces of the story are likely quite familiar to you, but it is essential to pull them together coherently to lay the foundation upon which successful CLC initiatives can be built.

A PowerPoint presentation to accompany this article is available on SIMville under the Content Literacy Continuum link.

Back Story

KU-CRL came into being in 1978 as the Institute for Research in Learning Disabilities, with the goal of improving the learning experience for students with learning disabilities at the secondary level.

Our first set of studies investigated the demands placed on students in secondary schools, comparing students with learning disabilities, students who were low achieving but did not qualify for special education services, and normally achieving students. From these studies emerged a set of demands students face in secondary settings. Our belief was that if we could help students meet these demands, they would graduate and probably do well academically in postsecondary settings. As a result, we developed the Learning Strategies Curriculum to help students learn the skills they need to acquire information (reading strategies), remember information (storage strategies), and express themselves in writing and on tests.

Next, we began to question how a general education teacher could teach content in ways that compensate for the fact that not all students have those skills. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, we completed a study on how general education teachers plan for academic diversity in their classrooms. We worked alongside history and science teachers and asked how they planned for and made accommodations for specific students in their classes who had learning disabilities. These teachers were honest with us: They were indeed concerned about those students with LD, but they needed ways of teaching that they could use to reach the whole group of students as well as that one student.

Based on this feedback, we began looking at planning routines, encouraging standards-based instruction, and focusing on curriculum content. Results from this and other studies led to development of the Content Enhancement Series. General education teachers use these routines to plan and organize their instruction; present concepts; explore text, topics, and details; and increase student performance.

We also have developed a host of supporting programs to enable cooperative learning, social skill development, self-advocacy, and problem solving, among other skills.

Societal Changes

In presenting the Content Literacy Continuum as a framework for school improvement, it’s important to touch on the changing needs of society as underlying the urgency for schools to evaluate whether their literacy programs prepare their students for the future.

In their book, The New Division of Labor: How Computers are Creating the Next Job Market, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane contend that technology is changing our expectations and resulting in the need for more expert thinking skills and more complex communication skills. Employers value employees with the proven ability to be strategic, to solve problems, and to engage in higher-order thinking skills. Schools must respond to these needs and foster development of these skills in students, or employers will look elsewhere for new hires.

In light of these societal demands and our findings over the years, the message for schools is this: If you really want to pursue literacy-centered school improvement at the secondary level, you must change the culture of the school. By this, we mean substantial change that is more complex than any infrastructure change, such as block schedules or small learning communities. If schools don’t approach content and complex thinking skills differently, they probably won’t succeed in improving literacy and preparing students to be competitive in postsecondary settings and future employment.

Enduring Gap

Another facet of the realities within which schools must operate is represented by the performance gap. As SIM Professional Developers, you are very familiar with this gap, which we identified as a challenge in our earliest studies. Essentially, the gap shows that students who have not mastered the needed literacy skills begin to struggle with content by fourth grade. As they continue in school, the gap between what teachers expect them to accomplish and what they are able to do widens. The assumption in secondary education is that if schools “raise the bar,” or increase expectations for student learning, students will naturally develop the literacy skills they need to meet this challenge. We have found that does not happen. Instead, the skill level these students have attained when they enter high school is the same level they will exhibit when they leave high school.

The adoption of SIM Learning Strategies and Content Enhancement Routines has made a difference–closed the gap–for individual students. Likewise, infrastructure supports such as block scheduling and after-school programs have addressed some difficulties for some students. System learning supports– progress monitoring or instructional coaching, for example–also contribute to some gains. We have found, however, that the biggest difference in academic performance across whole schools comes from focusing increased attention on the instructional core. The Content Literacy Continuum provides a framework for analyzing and improving that core.

Successful Systems Change

After making the case for the need to launch whole-school improvement efforts, it’s important to establish expectations for how the change process will work most effectively. We’ve found, for instance, that mandating change in a top-down fashion rarely works in the long term. Instead, each school must create its own set of goals and activities based on research-proven methods and interventions within a comprehensive framework, such as the CLC.

Successful change involves honoring the work the school has already done and building on its accomplishments. In doing so, strive to balance the following critical values:

• A shared vision that allows individual contributions
• Shared knowledge that leads to individual learning
• Shared leadership that seeks the voice of individuals
• Shared responsibility that shapes individual planning and action
• Shared evaluation that guides self-assessment
• Shared accountability that motivates individual action

Slide 1 depicts these values wrapped around the other factors we have identified as components of literacy-centered effective school improvement efforts. These components– instructional core, system learning supports, and infrastructure supports–work with the critical system change values to result in college readiness and postsecondary success for students. Note the central placement of the Content Literacy Continuum in the instructional core component. The crucial message of this slide is that all of the components of school structures, systems leadership, and values must work together and build upon each other to create a continuum of literacy instruction.

Content Literacy

A final foundational point in introducing the Content Literacy Continuum is a discussion of just what content literacy means and why it is important for students and teachers. Content literacy refers to the listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills and strategies necessary to learn in each of the academic disciplines.

Slide 2 on page 4 lists five key ideas related to content literacy, first among them that an important application of literacy is to learn critical information.

As every classroom teacher can attest, the amount of time teachers have to teach has remained steady for decades. The amount of content they are expected to cover in that time, however, continues to grow. Teachers can get through that content and make it to the end of the year, but the real concern is whether all students in their academically diverse classes will make it, too, and more importantly, whether the students will master the critical material along the way.

The key ideas listed in Slide 2 echo themes we have emphasized for years, and there are obvious connections to SIM. The Word Identification Strategy, for example, is our tool to help students decode fluently (key idea No. 2). SIM’s Content Enhancement Routines can help teachers focus on and present content that is really critical for students to know.

However, a school may already have a program or intervention in place that addresses decoding or another aspect of content literacy. If so, it is important to acknowledge that when introducing the CLC.

The ideas that all teachers must teach and reinforce common strategies and that all students must master some critical content often raise warning flags among teachers. One concern that arises early in professional development related to CLC is that content teachers don’t have time to be reading teachers in addition to all of their other responsibilities.

Our answer to this concern, first, is that the content teacher’s role in literacy development is limited and focuses on building the background knowledge and teaching the vocabulary that students need to master the content of that course. All students must acquire some degree of content to function successfully in society. It is not acceptable to assume that most students understanding the content is good enough. The content teacher’s role, then, is to identify that critical content and concentrate on presenting it in learner-friendly ways to ensure all their students understand.

The second part of our answer is that content teachers must explicitly demonstrate– through modeling, reinforcement, and clear expectations–that literacy skills and strategies are valued. This helps combat one of the main reasons students don’t maintain skills: They don’t have sufficient opportunities to practice strategies in relevant core areas. The benefit to students is increased ability to learn and understand the information presented in class; the benefit to teachers is increased success of their efforts to teach.

Enter the Continuum

The Content Literacy Continuum is our answer to how you put together everything we’ve learned over the years in a whole-school model. The information in the preceding sections of this article paints a strong rationale for improving literacy programs and establishes the continuum as a framework for evaluating and planning improvements in those programs. Now, your audience will need more information about the continuum and how it helps schools respond to the challenges we’ve outlined. The Content Literacy Continuum consists of five levels of increasingly intensive literacy support. You will find several handouts on SIMville that will help you present the CLC. It is important to emphasize that the levels refer to how a school delivers instruction and the intensity of instruction. They do not refer to student ability. Students are not “Level 1 students” or “Level 3 students.”

Level 1: Enhanced content instruction. All students must learn the critical content required in the core curriculum regardless of literacy levels. Even students who are not fluent readers should master a certain amount of content before they leave their ninth-grade history class, for example. Teachers compensate for limited literacy levels by using explicit teaching routines, adaptations, and technology to promote content mastery. The CLC PowerPoint presentation that accompanies this article (available on SIMville) contains a series of slides to help illustrate the thinking at this level of the continuum. The series begins with defining a unit of content, then depicts how units are held together by critical ideas, and how to focus on what content is critical for students to understand. Once a teacher has identified the truly critical information, he or she should focus direct instruction on that. Students can explore related, but not critical, information through independent learning, homework assignments, or group work, but those should not be the sole means for students to obtain critical information.

To build your own background knowledge of content enhancement and teacher planning related to critical content, we refer you to Teaching Content to All, edited by Keith Lenz and Don Deshler. Some of the chapters deal specifically with identifying critical content, the concept of less is more, and SMARTER, standards-based planning. Chapter four, especially, talks about the planning process.

Level 2: Embedded strategy instruction. Teachers embed learning strategies in core curriculum courses through direct explanation and modeling and require the application of these strategies in content assignments. For example, a biology teacher may instruct students to use the Paraphrasing Strategy while reading the biology text and may reinforce this expectation by modeling how the strategy applies in the science classroom.

Level 3: Intensive strategy instruction. Students who have significant deficits in key areas or have difficulty mastering strategies presented in core classes are taught specific strategies through specialized, direct, explicit, and intense instruction. Support personnel such as resource teachers or reading specialists deliver this instruction, often in smallgroup settings.

Level 4: Intensive basic skill instruction. Schools provide more intensive interventions for students who need work on basic literacy elements, such as foundational decoding, fluency, and comprehension skills. Reading instruction is specialized, direct, and intensive. Intensive instruction in listening, speaking, and writing is often a part of these services.

Level 5: Therapeutic intervention. This level provides for intensive clinical options for students with underlying language disorders to learn the linguistic, related cognitive, metalinguistic, and metacognitive underpinnings they need to acquire content literacy skills and strategies. Speech-language pathologists become integral to the literacy work of the school and must understand what components are in place at levels one through four so they can engage students in curriculum-relevant therapy.

CLC and SIM

The Content Literacy Continuum is a framework for evaluating and developing schoolwide literacy programs. We developed the continuum because we believed, based on our research and experiences, that this framework addressed the very serious needs of schools struggling to improve literacy among all students. As such, the continuum stands apart from SIM. Clearly, SIM interventions may be part of a school’s comprehensive approach to literacy instruction, especially at levels one, two, and three. However, it is important for schools to examine what they are already doing that fits this CLC framework and to consider what research based programs or interventions–SIM or other–are needed to supplement existing programs.

Julie Tollefson
KU-CRL
Sratenotes Vol. 12 Issue 2
Published: November 2006

In response to these concerns, KU-CRL convened a panel during the 2005 International SIM Conference to discuss “big ideas” that can help ease some of the difficulties involved in implementing SIM, CLC, and schoolwide change.

Panelists consisted of KU-CRL’s Barbara Ehren and Jim Knight as well as Reed Deshler, a senior consultant with Aligna Solutions and Don’s son. Don moderated the discussion.

Each panelist had the opportunity to share three big ideas about change. All three know a great deal about the process of change, but each has a slightly different perspective.

Barb Ehren

Drawing on the work of William Bridges, Barb’s first big idea involves understanding the human side of change.

“Events change, but people transition,” Barb says. “Really, the process is more about helping people move and grow than it is altering events.”

A building-level principal might, for example, declare that the school will begin implementing the Content Literacy Continuum and order the guidebooks, manuals, and other materials necessary to make the change. However, Barb says, this approach does not account for some of the very important psychological variables connected with the people who are expected to participate in the change.

“One of the key constructs in transition is the notion of loss–that when you accept something new, you are really giving up something that you’re used to,” Barb says. “To really pay attention to this process, you have to understand the grief process in the sense of losing comfortable ways.”

Consequently, as we think about helping schools or districts adopt the CLC or SIM components, it’s important to pay attention to the people involved in the process and to the variables connected with helping them make the transition from their old, comfortable ways to the new way.

Barb’s second big idea is that change facilitators–people who are heading up or participating in efforts to help systems move and grow and people transition–should be “Labrador retrievers,” not “pit-bulls.”

“There’s nothing wrong with pit-bulls. They’re a wonderful breed,” Barb says, “But we certainly don’t want them within the change/ transition process. We need Labrador retrievers. They have to be kind, gentle, but ever so persevering.”

People working for change/transition have to understand that change is difficult for everyone, including themselves, Barb says. “We have to be kind to ourselves as well as kind to others, allowing ourselves to have a learning curve in terms of our change/transition work.”

Barb’s last big idea has to do with picking best bets. Always look for the golden opportunities and work to cultivate the people, places, or things that are going to prove most helpful in the change/transition process.

“Sometimes when you go into a school, you want to have change and you want to involve the whole faculty,” she says. “Well, the whole faculty might not be your best bets up front because there may be some folks who need some convincing. In order for some people to get on board the change train, they have tosee results. They are not the risk takers. They have to see the other social studies teacher getting better success in content mastery from using the content enhancement routines.”

Barb advises thinking about this big idea as akin to a marketing tactic: How can we use the successes of our “best bets” to convince others that the change is worthwhile?

Reed Deshler

Although much of Reed’s work has been done in the context of the business world, he believes that all organizations in the midst of change have certain characteristics in common.

Reed’s first big idea is that change occurs at many different levels–the district, the school, and the classroom, in the case of education.

“Many of us, I believe, think that we can affect all of them, and sometimes it’s very, very difficult to do,” he says. “That leads to this notion that you have to have some tools in your toolkit that help you do more than just influence your sphere.”

Reed’s second big idea is that the emerging area of change mastery is an imperative for educators and administrators alike.

The importance of developing a skill set related to change mastery is evident when considering the many factors that combine to make an individual who he or she is, factors that also contribute to how the individual performs his or her professional role. Personal attributes, subject-matter expertise, and teaching mastery combine to define an individual teacher. Similar characteristics apply to administrators–personal attributes, administrative effectiveness, and organizational leadership. When these individuals are inserted into an organization, things change.

“The organization itself creates new dynamics that are no longer in the control of the person,” Reed says, reinforcing the importance of developing change mastery skills.

“It’s facilitation skills. It’s planning skills. It’s the ability to ask questions. It’s the ability to take various piece of information and make decisions,” says Reed. “It’s also tools: the ability to take frameworks and techniques and move groups of people through them.”

Reed’s third big idea involves determining whether the time is right for change.

“The real question is how do you know if you’re ready for this?” he says.

After identifying what is going to change, organizations must ask themselves “How big is this for us?”

“There are some organizations, some schools, that have the capacity to bring about a significant amount of change. They’ve done it before. They’ve succeeded. They’ve got people with change mastery skills,” Reed says. “Other organizations don’t.”

Among the components that organizations need to consider are whether there is a compelling need for the change, whether people understand what the organization is doing and why, and whether there is leadership commitment. Other questions to consider include are the tools and resources needed to make the change available both to the people involved and to the organization, how will stakeholders respond to the change, and are there competing resource demands or events that might prevent the organization from moving forward successfully.

“Good intentions aside, great interventions aside, if we’re not ready, it might not be the right time,” Reed says.

Jim Knight

Jim’s first big idea is that “learning conversations” are at the heart of leading change.

“When we are effectively leading change, we should and the people we work with should be better for the experience,” Jim says. “It usually involves some kind of conversation.”

Learning, he says, should be energizing, empowering, enjoyable, and fun. It should bring us alive. Too often, though, just the opposite occurs when the subject is change. Jim points to the idea of identity issues as the root of difficult conversations about change, drawing on the book Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss what Matters Most by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Sheila Heen.

“They say an identity conversation is all about who we are and how we see ourselves,” Jim says. “When you find yourself in some kind of conflict with another person, more often than not, it’s because of some kind of identity conversation. If they feel somehow the conversation is telling them that they’re not a good person or they’re not competent or they’re not skilled, you’re going to encounter resistance.”

To counteract such perceptions, Jim recommends using “partnership feedback,” in which a teacher and an instructional coach conduct a dialogue about data. Instead of presenting the conversation as a means of “fixing” the teacher, he says, the attitude should be “here’s what I saw.”

“If you set yourself up as the only expert in the room, you’re likely going to get drawn into identity conversations,” Jim says. “We have to turn the conversation away from that. What we’re trying to do is protect their identity so we can focus on what matters, which is improving instruction for kids.”

Jim’s second big idea is that enabling change involves discontinuity.

“Since we started the Pathways to Success project in Topeka, we’ve had nine different principals in our first three schools, we’ve had three superintendents, and they introduced this thing called No Child Left Behind,” he says. “If we had made a six-year plan and expected it to be implemented, we would have found ourselves with a bit of a problem because things change dramatically.”

Jim says planning for change means incorporating a mechanism for adapting when the course alters.

His third big idea is that enabling change involves deep thinking. To really be a change agent, he says, you have to get clarity on what you want to accomplish and look for simple words to express complicated concepts.

When explaining modeling or constructive feedback, for example, “it’s critically important to go deep in your thinking so you can find the words to explain it. If you’re not sure why that relationship box is there or what it’s for, you need to figure it out,” he says.

Jim recommends going so far as to put a paragraph or two in writing to prepare for presenting the information orally.

“It’s very, very useful to use writing as an act to help you become a better communicator,” he says. Helpful exercises include writing out the stories and anecdotes that will support the points you want to make.

A second aspect of deep thinking involves formulating implementation plans.

“If you’re going to lead change in school, you need to break it down,” he says. “You need to say what’s going to happen when, what that professional learning community is going to look like. There may be people who are going to be dysfunctional–how are you going to deal with that? To plan for execution is really key.”

Julie Tollefson
KU-CRL
Stratenotes Vol.14 Issue5
Published: February 2006

Resources

• Stone, D., Patton, B., & Heen, S. (1999) Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss what Matters Most. New York: Viking Penguin.
• www.instructionalcoach.org
• www.kucrl.org/partnership: Download Partnership Learning Fieldbook.

For years, CRL has used the “performance gap” as a framework for trying to understand the challenges that struggling adolescent learners face and to conceptualize ways to improve their academic outcomes. Historically, we have explained how two of the major lines of CRL research (namely, learning strategy interventions and content enhancement routines) can work together to help close this gap. That is, on the one hand, learning strategy interventions have been designed to change students as learners by teaching them how to learn. As students master an array of learning strategies, it is hoped that the trajectory of the curved line (which represents student achievement in relation to curriculum demands) will move closer to the straight line. The content enhancement routines, on the other hand, have been designed to change how teachers think about, select, and present critical subject matter information to students. Consistent use of these routines has been shown to make the subject matter easier to understand and to remember.

Moving beyond the original performance gap framework

Although this framework has been useful, the new realities that schools face today as a result of adequate yearly progress (AYP) requirements called for by the No Child Left Behind Act have underscored some of its limitations. As currently conceptualized, this framework lacks the power to adequately explain all of the factors that must be taken into account by teachers and administrators to truly close the gap. To this end, we have adopted a new model to guide our thinking as researchers and our actions as change agents working in schools. The goal of this new framework is to provide a tool that is sufficiently broad in its scope to identify those variables that need to be addressed to optimize our chances of dramatically improving the performance of struggling adolescent learners.

The new framework

As shown in Figure 2, the new framework ties improved student outcomes to two critical factors: (1) an instructional core (which is primarily related to high quality teaching), and (2) an infrastructure core (which is primarily related to strong administrative leadership). As will be seen shortly, all of the interventions and instructional practices that we have come to associate with the Strategic Instruction Model (SIM) are present within these two core factors. However, other critical elements have been included within both the instructional and infrastructure cores that we now consider to be essential to achieving significant student outcomes. Among the outcomes that should be used to measure the effectiveness of our efforts are the following:

• Reading (and other learning) proficiency
• Improved attendance
• Persistence in school
• Challenging courses
• Graduation

It is important to note that the first core depicted in Figure 2 and discussed below is the instructional core. This is not by accident. Historically, the vast majority of initiatives aimed at improving secondary schools have focused on non-instructional factors (e.g., moving to block scheduling, changing from a middle school to a junior high school configuration, etc.). The prevailing assumption has been that the quickest and most effective way to improve student outcomes was to change infrastructural factors. Instruction, if considered at all, was largely an afterthought in most secondary school improvement efforts. CRL’s research, however, has clearly underscored the vital role of high quality instruction in improving student achievement. Hence, this framework thinks of and specifies the instructional core first. In light of what is required to provide high quality instruction, the infrastructure core is then chosen and used to support the instructional needs. In other words, “form follows function!” Regrettably, most school improvement efforts have first changed the structure and then expected instructional practices to conform to the new structure (whether it made pedagogical sense or not)!

The instructional core consists of five elements and the infrastructural core of four. 1 These elements should not be seen as isolated elements in an inventory of potential elements, but rather as a group in which elements have a dynamic and powerful interrelationship. As we conduct additional research, we expect to better understand the relative power of each of these elements and the optimal mix that needs to be in place for different types of schools and instructional circumstances.

The instructional core

Figure 3 depicts the five key elements in the instructional core. Each is seen as being essential to creating an ideal set of instructional conditions.

Motivation/positive behavior supports. To optimally capitalize on the limited amount of instructional time available to closing the performance gap, we must first create a learning environment in which students can be fully engaged in productive academic work. A 2004 study titled Teaching Interrupted notes that 77 percent of secondary teachers report significant behavioral disruptions occur in their classrooms that markedly affect their ability to provide effective instruction. Of equal concern is the large number of adolescents who are disengaged and unmotivated. Before we can be successful in teaching critical content or strategies to students, we must take steps to create a positive and productive environment for learning. To this end, CRL has formed a formal partnership with Randy Sprick, who has created a broad array of classroom and school-based systems for creating productive academic environments. All of his programs are based on positive behavioral support principles. (An interview with Randy appeared in the May 2004 issue of Stratenotes, Vol. 12, No. 8; an extended version is available on our web site at http://www. kucrl.org/archives/classroom/sprick. shtml.) Similarly, the sole purpose of our research in the area of Possible Selves has been to validate procedures that teachers can effectively leverage to engage and motivate students.

Engaging/diverse materials. One of the greatest challenges facing those who work with struggling adolescent learners is finding ways to make learning relevant to their lives and sufficiently engaging that students will choose to invest themselves in the learning process. To become skilled and fluent learners, these students need ample opportunities to practice applying newly learned skills and strategies. To accomplish this, they need access to a rich array of reading materials that are engaging and diverse. Too often, students become frustrated when they are forced to read materials that are well beyond their skill level or that hold little interest for them. Instructional materials should:

• Be below students’ frustration level
• Be responsive to a wide range of student abilities
• Cover a broad array of engaging topics
• Be relevant to students’ backgrounds (SES, culture, etc.)

These first two elements–motivation/ positive behavior supports and engaging/ diverse materials–are listed first in this section for a simple reason: These elements are vital to “hook” students. Without fostering student interest and engagement, other instructional reforms will likely lack effectiveness.

Continuum of literacy instruction. To bring about dramatic changes in the state of adolescent literacy, significant changes are required in (a) how secondary teachers see their role in teaching literacy, and (b) how basic literacy skills should be considered as an integral part of the secondary school curriculum. Because of the broad array of student needs and the complexity of the problems presented by adolescents with poor literacy skills, no single program or approach can meet the needs of all. Thus, the best adolescent literacy programs are ones that consider both the unique needs of students with literacy problems and the realities of secondary schools. Some students will need more individualized, explicit, intensive instruction of basic literacy skills, while other students will need opportunities to practice fluency and comprehension skills within the context of their regular classes. Others might need extended day tutoring in before- and after-school achievement centers. In short, it is important to meet students where they are in their literacy development.

A continuum with five different levels has been conceptualized to be responsive to the needs of struggling adolescents. We’ve called this continuum the Content Literacy Continuum (CLC). Additionally, since the problems of adolescents with literacy problems are so significant, intervention outside of the school day may be warranted. Hence, secondary schools should consider the important role that before- and after-school tutoring programs can play to support services provided across the Content Literacy Continuum. The following is a synopsis of the five levels:

Level 1: Enhance content instruction (mastery of critical content for all regardless of literacy levels)

Level 2: Embedded strategy instruction (routinely weave strategies within and across classes using large group instructional methods)

Level 3: Intensive strategy instruction (mastery of specific strategies using eight-stage instructional sequence; individual Strategic Tutoring)

Level 4: Intensive basic skill instruction (mastery of entry-level literacy skills at the fourth-grade level)

Level 5: Therapeutic intervention (mastery of language underpinnings of curriculum content and learning strategies)

Intense-explicit instruction. CRL researcher Jim Knight concisely defined the nature and purpose of intensiveexplicit (IE) instruction for at-risk learners. Specifically, IE instruction refers to a set of instructional procedures that together efficiently and effectively enable teachers to convey content clearly to students in a manner that leads to students mastering information. IE is intensive because it involves teaching practices that ensure students are engaged in learning and actively mastering content. IE is explicit because it involves teachers clearly modeling covert thinking and providing detailed feedback as students move toward mastery of content. A primary goal of IE instruction is for students to understand, remember, and generalize content taught by a teacher. Simply put, instructors use IE instruction so that students will have a picture of knowledge in their heads that is similar to the picture teachers have in their heads. IE instruction uses most of the following instructional stages to achieve this goal: describe, model, vocabulary memorization, practice and feedback, and generalization.

Formative and summative assessments. At the core of quality teaching are data that profile the strengths and weaknesses of students on key learning targets. These data enable teachers to make adjustments in the instructional process to better meet student needs. In the absence of these data, students’ progress can be stifled and progress slowed or stopped altogether. Summative data tell teachers and students whether educational goals have been met at the end of a specified period.

When all of the elements of the instructional core are in place, considerable progress can be made in closing the performance gap, as shown in Figure 4.

The infrastructure core

Figure 5 shows the elements embodied in the infrastructure core. Generally speaking, these elements are ones that are a function of strong administrative leadership–certainly at the building level but often from central administration, as well. As argued above, school improvement should, first and foremost, be driven by the instructional core; however, if these infrastructure elements are not present, much of the power represented by changes in the instructional core will be minimized. A critical role played by the building principal is to communicate and help all staff embrace a shared vision of a school-wide approach to addressing the literacy problems of its students.

Professional development. Professional development grounded in the principles embraced by the SIM Professional Development Network is essential in supporting teachers in the acquisition and effective application of research-based practices from SIM. In short, the professional development must be focused, sustained, data driven, personalized, designed to create a learning community, and about system change. Additionally, it must provide to teachers ample opportunities to practice and receive feedback on the new practice and to receive continuing coaching to support the refined and sustained application of the innovation.

Teacher materials and resources. Quality instruction of research-based practices is dependent, in large measure, on teachers being supplied the appropriate support materials required to deliver their instruction. At a minimum, this consists of well-designed teacher manuals, student learning sheets and activities for practice, scoring rubrics that enable high-quality feedback to be provided, and the necessary technology supports, such as tape recorders, DVDs, or computers. CRL’s longstanding commitment to developing teacher manuals and other instructional supports underscores the importance of this element.

Instructional coherence. One of the greatest challenges that struggling adolescents and their teachers face in secondary schools is the problem of “fragmentation.” That is, because the school day is structured around class periods and each student having multiple teachers, they generally experience an instructional program that is much more fragmented than what they experienced in elementary school. In elementary school, most students have one teacher throughout the entire day; this fact alone greatly reduces fragmentation in learning. This can best be understood with an example. If a third-grade teacher teaches a given skill in the morning, she can emphasize that skill throughout the course of the day and capitalize on natural teaching moments when the targeted skill can be showcased when opportunities surface during the day. She has an understanding of the whole picture of a given student’s educational program and can provide coherent, wellintegrated instruction to that student. In secondary school settings, there is often little, if any, planning or orchestration across teachers. Thus, if a teacher in the first period teaches a skill, it is highly unlikely that that skill will be reinforced at any time throughout the day by other teachers simply because they are unaware of what is taught by their colleagues. Hence, relative to the instruction of critical skills, strategies, and content elements, secondary schools are very fragmented and lack coherence. To avoid this dilemma, principals need to promote shared planning times and class configurations that promote reinforcement of what is taught across teachers, classes, and schools.

Extended time. Because of the magnitude of the performance gap, students need sufficient time to receive highquality instruction in deficit areas and to have ample time to practice the skills and strategies they are lacking. Regrettably, in secondary schools, there generally isn’t a “reading class,” per se. This problem needs to be addressed. Educational leaders in schools that are having the most success with struggling adolescent learners find ways to create increased time for literacy instruction. In the absence of this challenge being addressed, it is highly unlikely that the gap will be closed. As a part of the solution, some schools have included before- and after-school tutoring programs.

Conclusion

Closing the large performance gap that many struggling adolescent learners face is a daunting task. The challenge will not be addressed through token efforts or minimizing or neglecting any of the items detailed above. The solution requires major changes and investments on both the instructional and infrastructure fronts. In addition to these factors, it is important also to remember the important role that families, out-of-school organizations, and other community supports can play in bolstering adolescent literacy programs. The resulting new framework for closing the performance gap is shown in Figure 6.

Don Deshler
KU-CRL
Stratenotes Vol.13 Issue 4
Published: January 2005

1 The recently released report by the Carnegie Corporation of New York on adolescent literacy titled Reading Next: A Vision for Action in Middle and High School Literacy was influenced by CRL researchers and, in turn, has influenced our thinking about how to best close the performance gap. The complete report can be downloaded from www.all4ed.org.

As a result of our work, we believe that of all the things an administrator can do to promote improvement in learning and literacy skills, the most important is to maintain a relentless focus on high-quality instruction. Our Content Literacy Continuum is a framework that can help administrators maintain this focus. It helps administrators analyze the strengths and weaknesses of their existing literacy instruction, clearly define the important and unique roles each teacher on a secondary school staff plays in improving outcomes, and design comprehensive adolescent literacy programs spanning content areas and grade levels.

We have identified four key spheres of influence for administrators in relation to launching and leading successful whole-school improvement initiatives:

1. Clarifying that high-quality instruction is indeed the top priority
2. Ensuring that day-to-day activities reflect the commitment to instruction
3. Tailoring the school’s organizational structures to match the instructional needs of students
4. Overseeing a coordinated professional development plan that supports instructional goals

Attention to each of these areas can significantly influence the outcomes of whole-school initiatives.

Content Literacy Continuum

The Content Literacy Continuum describes five increasingly intensive levels of literacy support that should be in place in every school, underscoring that some students need increased intensity and explicitness of instruction to learn critical skills, strategies, and content in secondary classes.

The continuum calls for general education teachers to present content in learner–friendly ways at the first level and to embed strategy instruction into their core classes at the second level. At the third level, students receive specialized, intensive instruction from someone other than the general education teacher.

At the fourth level, reading specialists and special education teachers work together to provide specialized, direct, and intensive instruction in listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills. The fifth level provides for speech–language pathologists to deliver curriculum–relevant language therapy to students with underlying language disorders and for other support personnel to teach literacy skills.

Priorities and foundations

The first sphere of influence for administrators is personal: They must be very clear in their own minds and in the examples they set that high–quality instruction and schoolwide improvement are their top priorities. It is fashionable for school administrators to proclaim that instruction is their top priority, but if their actions don’t match their words, school improvement efforts will likely falter.

“You’re starting a really significant school reform effort, and you have to make time for CLC, make it a priority,” says Ken Geisick, principal of Riverbank High School in Riverbank, Calif., and a veteran CLC administrator who strongly believes in the power of CLC and SIM to change instruction for the better. “This isn’t managing a program. This is true instructional leadership, where you’re changing teacher behavior and administrators also change the way they do business.”

At Riverbank, Ken has demonstrated his commitment to a successful initiative through a thoughtful, systematic approach to introducing CLC to his staff. He laid the foundation by first bringing the entire administrative team on board. He and SIM Professional Developer Peggy Graving–Reyes organized several CLC professional development days for administrators starting the May before launching CLC schoolwide in August.

“It was important that the administrators had that time to wrap their heads around what was being trained,” Ken says.

The administrative team worked toward creating a common vision for the school, defining their expectations for the two to four years they would be working with the external CLC professional development team, and learning a common language.

“When you get into SIM and CLC, there’s so much vocabulary that’s foreign to people,” says Ken, noting that repeated sessions with the CLC professional development team helped administrators acquire the language they needed to discuss and support the initiative.

“I’ve been working on it for four or five years. Finally last year, it sort of jelled and I really get it. I can talk about it, and I sort of am fluent in it,” he says.

Ken and his vice principals continue to build their knowledge of SIM and CLC and demonstrate their commitment to the change process by attending workshops alongside teachers, a highly visible difference from the days when administrators handled paperwork in their offices while teachers attended in–service sessions.

“It never struck me as odd at the time, but now I couldn’t imagine not being a part of those trainings,” he says.

Attending the workshops gives him the knowledge he needs to support teachers as they implement new teaching methods, even though he may not be expert enough to teach a specific intervention to students.

“I know the strategies and routines fairly well,” he says. “I still would be hard pressed to teach DISSECT, but I know why we do it. It’s OK that I don’t know how to teach it.”

Day–to–Day Action

In the second sphere of influence, administrators determine how their commitment to instruction is reflected in day–to–day activities. The complexity of schools mean many legitimate, competing interests can distract and capture an administrator’s attention. Riverbank administrators and faculty have developed tools to refocus meetings on literacy instruction and adopted SIM methods such as modeling in faculty meetings to keep SIM and CLC at the forefront. Department chair meetings, literacy team meetings, and faculty meetings follow agendas topped by specific literacy items. Reformed faculty meetings devote 40 of their 55 minutes to discussions of CLC, literacy, and what’s happening in classrooms.

Administrators don’t just talk the talk at Riverbank. They seize opportunities to model use of SIM interventions when they arise. They have developed a Course Organizer specifying eight to 10 essential questions related to the school’s planned work scope for the year, and they revisit it during each faculty meeting. In this way, they subtly reinforce the idea of yearlong use of the Course Organizers teachers develop for their own courses.

Organizational Structures

A third sphere of influence for administrators is to ensure that the school’s organizational structures facilitate the instructional mission. Rather than grasping new structural ideas–such as block scheduling or small learning communities–and then altering instruction to accommodate them, administrators must first understand student needs. Once these instructional needs are identified, the school can build the structures needed to support them.

The struggling student who needs extra support at the beginning of the year, for example, may be capable of joining a grade–level class at mid–semester once she or he masters the prerequisite skills. Administrators can encourage flexibility in scheduling to allow such movement among classes. They also can creatively build time into teachers’ schedules to allow joint planning and collaboration.

Riverbank’s collaborative approach in its CLC initiative begins with a site literacy team, which Ken views as vital to the school’s long–term success.

“It’s starting to change the culture of the campus, so that when I leave and my VPs leave and the CLC team leaves, everything will still run,” he says. “It will change, it will morph, but it will certainly still be there.”

The site literacy team evaluates professional development sessions, looks at student work, and makes determinations in conjunction with the CLC professional development team about what the school should do next.

Another structure that is critical to bringing about sustainable changes in the culture of the school is the identification and nurturing of teachers who have the potential to become on–site professional developers. Four Riverbank teachers began the process of becoming certified SIM professional developers last summer. In time, they will be the on–site experts in SIM and CLC, providing immediate coaching and trouble shooting that will continue long after the CLC professional development team leaves.

A system of data collection is another organizational structure that informs instructional decision making at Riverbank. Teachers are expected to collect data on all students. Administrators periodically pull in students representative of all performance levels to hear their perspectives about classroom instruction, then report their qualitative findings to faculty and the site literacy team. During one three–week period, administrators dropped in during 80 class periods and recorded the instructional methods and interventions they observed. They saw a lot of teachers using Frames, for example, and some using Course Organizers, but fewer using Concept Diagrams. These observations helped determine what SIM refresher sessions might be beneficial to encourage increased use of interventions.

Effective Professional Development

A fourth sphere of influence involves ensuring that precious professional development dollars are spent wisely: making sure all workshops and in–service programs are aligned with the school’s vision and instructional goals, arranging for coordinated and coherent staff development programs, and building in an accountability system that ties the professional development investment to student outcomes.

“The one thing I like so much about the CLC is it’s such a great decision–making lens for administrators,” says Ken. “What CLC does for administrators is it puts out the decision–making process for everybody.”

Decisions about sending teachers to workshops or conferences are based on how the proposed topic or new skill fits within the CLC framework, whether it complements or competes with current initiatives, and whether it supports key instructional goals.

Conclusion

Routinely reviewing these spheres of influence and evaluating how administrative actions and activities support the school’s goals will help ensure that instruction really is central. Instruction, after all, gets to the very core of what we, as educators, are all about. As the instructional leaders in a school, administrators who keep all eyes focused on the importance of these issues nurture the kinds of long–lasting school improvements that will benefit all students.

Julie Tollefson and Don Deshler
KU-CRL
Strategram Vol.19 No.1
Published: October 2006

Among the challenges Riverbank faced when it began its literacy improvement process were large numbers of struggling students, including English language learners and students performing below grade level. Many among the predominantly Hispanic student population speak Spanish outside of academic settings yet must perform well in course work and on tests in English. “That makes the gains they are making even more incredible to me, because the students are doing what they’re doing in their second language,” says Jean Schumaker, retired associate director of the Center. The school’s test scores continue to rise each year, and students are engaged and interested in learning, as Schumaker observed during a full-day visit in the fall. “I never saw one student do one disruptive thing,”she says. “It was an incredible experience.”

In launching the CLC initiative, the district looked at long-term goals as well as short-term needs. “We didn’t want this to be another one of the one year or two year flash-in-the-pan changes that comes in and goes away,” says Ron Costa, assistant superintendent for business and secondary educational services. Far from being a temporary fix, the Riverbank CLC initiative continues to gain strength and credibility through a collaborative approach that respects the experience of school faculty while acknowledging the need to improve instructional methods. At the center of the collaboration is the school’s site literacy team, which principal Ken Geisick views as vital to the school’s long-term success. The team evaluates professional development sessions, looks at student work, and makes determinations in conjunction with the CLC professional development team about what the school should do next. “It’s starting to change the culture of the campus, so that when I leave and my VPs leave and the CLC team leaves, everything will still run,” Geisick says. “It will change, it will morph, but it will certainly still be there.” The collaborative process ensures that teachers are involved in decision making and opens leadership opportunities for them within the school. “We don’t have everybody completely on board, but we do have critical mass,” he says. “We have teachers in every department who are taking the lead. I really believe we’re in a good position.”

Complementing the collaboration at Riverbank is a commitment to grounding decisions in data, both qualitative and quantitative. Administrators periodically seek students’ perspectives about classroom instruction, then report their findings to faculty and the site literacy team. They also drop in to classes and record the instructional methods and SIM components they observe teachers using. Teachers are expected to collect data on all students and to use that data in making instructional decisions. The system that Riverbank has put in place and the extent to which teachers adhere to the intended instructional steps associated with SIM components is truly extraordinary. “They have taken SIM to a place that most of us can only dream about, by examining year after year how did this go, what do we need to do differently, who else do we need to bring in,” says Patty Graner, the Center’s director of professional development. “They nurture not only the kids, but they nurture each other through that process.”

Riverbank stands out, too, in its commitment to open communication about what education looks like in the school. “I don’t think they have a lot of closed doors,” says Graner. “I think that practice is very open to the whole school community, to the parents, to the kids. People are invited to come and learn there.” Riverbank has graciously allowed the Center’s cameras in to capture examples of really good practice. In doing so, the school has helped the

Center meet one of its greatest current challenges: Finding research sites at which a significant group of leaders and teachers are willing to take risks and help us understand how to bring about change in schools as a whole. “All of us at the Center have admired the work that they have done, how they’ve gone about doing it, and of course, we admire the tremendous results that they have gotten with student outcomes,” Deshler says.

Julie Tollefson
KU-CRL
Strategram Vol.19 No.5
Published: August 2007

Don Deshler
KU-CRL
Strategram Vol.18 No. 5
Published: May 2006

The drum beat for altering the course that many U.S. high schools are following is quickening and growing louder. For example, at the 2005 National Educational Summit on High Schools in Washington, D.C., a spate of new reports underscored the pivotal role that high schools play in developing the intellectual capital for our country’s future and how our high schools need to be transformed to fulfill that expectation. Two common threads ran through these reports:

• Standards must be raised to enable graduates to compete in the new economy.
• The achievement gap must be closed for the growing number of struggling adolescent learners.

The likelihood of being successful in “raising the bar” for high school graduates is extremely remote unless we find a way to simultaneously “raise the floor” for the middle-school students who are entering high school. This paper argues that the time and place to build a strong literacy foundation for high school excellence is the late elementary and middle school years.

To help us better understand how to create a solid literacy foundation for high schools, we will explore three topics:

1. the magnitude and nature of the challenge
2. the core elements of a solution
3. next steps

The Magnitude and Nature of the Challenge

At least three key factors warrant making the upper-elementary and middle school grades the primary targets for improving the literacy levels for struggling adolescent learners:

1. the profile of struggling adolescent learners
2. the growing expectations that are being placed on high schools to raise the standards for all students
3. the skill set and professional preparation of most current high school teachers

Each of these factors will be discussed below.

A Profile of Struggling Adolescent Learners

Nearly 8.7 million fourth- through 12thgrade students struggle with the reading and writing tasks that are required for them to cope with the demands in their subject matter classes (Kamil, 2003). A recently completed study of 320 struggling high school freshmen in a large urban district found that 74 percent of all ninth-grade students scored at the “unsatisfactory” or “basic” levels on the state assessment test in reading. Those in the “unsatisfactory” level were at the third percentile in decoding and word recognition and the first percentile in reading comprehension. Those at the “basic” level were not faring much better: They were reading at the ninth percentile in decoding and word recognition and at the eighth percentile in reading comprehension (Hock, Deshler, Marquis, & Brasseur, 2005). Many adolescents report that their difficulties with reading and writing account for their decision to drop out of school (Foorman, 1998). Alarmingly, only about 70 percent of all U.S. high school students graduate. Even more noteworthy is the fact that for students of color (African-American and Hispanics), this figure drops to nearly 50 percent.

In spite of increased attention and funding directed toward children in early elementary grades, the frequently referenced “fourthgrade slump” continues to exist. Since the gap between proficient and struggling readers grows exponentially over time, the end result — as nationally mandated assessment data continue to attest– is that at-risk high school students are failing on measures of reading at epidemic rates. Predictably, students who attend schools in urban and rural low-income neighborhoods are most at risk of failing to learn to read well.

A word of caution is in order here on interpreting the student performance data cited in the myriad of educational reports being issued. In short, although all states are operating under a common mandate for proficiency, there is considerable variation in the rigor of the various assessments and how states define proficiency and set cut-scores. For example, the percentages of eighth-grade students who passed the state assessment in South Carolina, Wyoming, North Carolina, and Texas were 21 percent, 39 percent, 8 percent, and 88 percent, respectively. However, when a common metric is used (the National Assessment of Educational Progress), the numbers look drastically different: 24 percent of the students in South Carolina, 34 percent of the students in Wyoming, 29 percent of the students in North Carolina, and 26 percent of the students in Texas scored at the proficient level (McCombs, Kirby, Barney, Darilek, & Magee, 2005).

It is important for policymakers, parents, and educators to consider the ramifications of such differences on high school performance, as well as postsecondary education and future employment opportunities. Regardless of which assessment is used, the statistics concerning the literacy competence of adolescents in this country paint a grim picture. This picture is especially troubling when viewed in relation to the growing expectations placed on those who leave high school for either postsecondary education or the job market.

Growing Expectations

The U.S. job market is undergoing dramatic changes due, among other things, to the prominent role that computers and technology are playing in our economy. The growing presence of computerization in all sectors of the economy has affected the mix of jobs available, the way in which wages are structured, and the types of skills required of workers. On the labor market’s demand side, the share of menial jobs has increased modestly, whereas the largest job growth has been in occupations requiring significant education. Specifically, it is estimated that between 2000 and 2010, more than two-thirds of all jobs will require some postsecondary education. The jobs requiring the most education and offering the highest pay are the fastest growing (Carnevale & Desrochers, 2003).

In an economy heavily influenced by computerization, the workers who are most successful are those who can engage in “expert thinking” (identifying and solving uncharted problems for which there are no rule-based solutions) and “complex communications” (interacting with others to acquire or interpret information, to explain it, or to persuade others of its implications for action) (Levy & Murnane, 2004). To perform effectively in these two domains, workers must demonstrate a command of critical information in an area along with an understanding of how the information is linked together and how things work. These relationships allow a person to generalize from specific cases to classes of problems — a vital skill.

These trends have very clear implications for how students spend their time in high school: They need to be taking rigorous classes that prepare them to enter into and successfully compete in this new environment. Although some students are well prepared to meet these challenges, large percentages of American high school graduates are not (National Governors Association, 2005). If high schools are going to be successful in raising the bar, they need to limit the amount of time and financial resources directed at teaching the fundamental literacy skills that students should have acquired before entering high school. In essence, highly targeted and intensive efforts need to be directed at students during their upper-elementary and middle school years.

Letting High School Teachers Do What They Do Best

To prepare high school students to meet the growing expectations awaiting them after graduation, high school teachers need to enhance their expertise and teaching effectiveness in their subject areas. Because knowledge is exploding and the standards students are expected to meet are being raised, it is important that high school teachers who are trained in subject-matter areas (such as science and mathematics) be able to add to and reframe their existing knowledge base to provide cutting-edge knowledge to their students in a learner-friendly manner. Being able to adequately prepare the existing cadre of high school teachers to meet these expectations is a daunting task — especially when between 7 percent and 15 percent of all high school teachers in core classes are teaching out-offield (that is, in content areas in which they have no formal certification).

It is unrealistic to expect these same teachers to acquire a sophisticated knowledge and skill set that would enable them to teach foundational reading skills to struggling readers as well as continue to hone their subjectmatter expertise; yet both are critical. Being successful in teaching reading (especially to struggling learners) requires professional preparation comparable to that subject-matter teachers acquire to teach their curriculum. Education policy supporting a practice whereby subject-matter teachers assume responsibility for large numbers of struggling readers would reduce the overall ability of these teachers to raise the standards for overall student outcomes in core curriculum areas. The result would be to compromise both the amount and quality of subject matter taught and the reading instruction offered. Thus, a long-term policy for building a strong literacy foundation for high school excellence must be grounded in strategies that address literacy problems before students arrive in high school.

Finally, research on changing schools underscores how impervious high schools can be to school reform efforts. In a large study of change in America’s classrooms during the past century, Larry Cuban (1993) concluded: “The results of this study are unambiguous, at least on the subject of how much teacher change is possible: the potential for change in the practical pedagogy that teachers have constructed is far greater in the lower grades than in high school. Middle schools that have embraced elementary school-based approaches … are promising candidates for investment of resources” (p. 279). To that end, let us turn our attention to factors that are essential for closing the literacy gap in struggling adolescent readers prior to their entry into high school.

Core Elements of a Solution

A strong literacy program designed to prepare struggling readers to enter high school ready to succeed in rigorous courses is founded on three cornerstones. These cornerstones should serve as the pillars of any literacy program whose goal is to prepare struggling readers to enter high school ready to succeed in rigorous courses:

1. instruction as the linchpin
2. structures that support instruction
3. professional development for improving instruction

Instruction as the Linchpin

Without question, the main function of schools is to ensure that all students learn critical content and skills. Thus, the primary duty of administrators and teachers should be to ensure that instructional conditions that enable students to be successful are in place. Struggling students learn best when their teachers carefully select critical content or skills, use well-documented teaching practices, and do so in a coordinated fashion within and across grade levels. Regrettably, many secondary school administrators are not instructional leaders. Although many things around a school must be taken care of (facilities, staffing, busing schedules, etc.), these things must not consume more time nor be more prominent on any agenda than instruction, learning, and student progress. Until leaders and teachers relentlessly focus on things that are core to the instructional process, student outcomes will not improve markedly (Elmore, 2005).

With specific relevance to literacy, to sufficiently accelerate the development of adolescents who are markedly behind in literacy skills, middle schools should put three things in place:

1. a screening system to determine the literacy profile/needs of struggling readers as they enter middle school
2. a continuum of literacy services representing differing levels of intensity and instructional focus
3. progress monitoring to measure student responsiveness to instruction

Screening system. A screening instrument should be administered as students enter middle school to identify the various reading needs that students have. At a minimum, such screening should give a basic measure of word analysis skills, fluency, and comprehension, although the latter may not be necessary since the vast majority of students will struggle with comprehension. Further, decision rules for interpreting screening results should be clearly defined and adhered to so students get assigned to the kind of instruction that best matches their needs.

Continuum of literacy instruction. Because the literacy needs of struggling adolescent readers are so diverse, the most effective literacy programs are ones that offer instruction at various levels of intensity, are comprehensive, and are well coordinated. For example, some students benefit when teachers use graphic organizers to help them master critical subject- matter content; others need learning strategies embedded in content material, explicit strategy instruction, or instruction in basic skills or even the basic language elements that are the foundation of literacy competence. The screening instrument mentioned above will help determine what level of literacy support is needed for each student (Lenz, Ehren, & Deshler, 2005).

Instruction that is especially intensive and focused is necessary for students reading several years behind grade level (at or below the third-grade level). Classes of no more than 15 students that meet for at least one hour per day are required. A highly skilled teacher would use a combination of whole-class, small-group, and one-on-one instruction. These classes should have computer technology to provide supported reading practice, quality feedback, and error correction. The focus of instruction should be on word recognition, fluency, vocabulary, and strategies for encouraging persistence. As students master the basic skills of reading, the instructional focus needs to shift to comprehension strategies with continued emphasis on vocabulary building. Finally, it is important to provide well-supplied classroom libraries of leveled/high-interest materials that capture student interest and increase the amount of reading students do (Torgesen, 2005).

Progress monitoring. Because remedial instruction is costly (smaller class sizes, highly trained teachers, etc.), it is important to carefully monitor how responsive students are to the instruction offered and to ensure that they make sufficient progress to close the achievement gap by the time they are ready to move to high school. Measures designed to probe student performance on targeted skills should be taken at least four times per year to enable teachers to make instructional adjustments and to minimize the use of instruction that is not yielding results.

Structures that Support Instruction

For well-designed instructional programs to fully realize their potential, they must be surrounded by organizational supports. In other words, the instructional needs of students must be determined first, and then organizational supports are designed to meet those needs. As Elmore (2005) succinctly states: “The schools that succeed in changing practice are those that start with the practice and modify school structures to accommodate it” (p. 4).

The structures that support an instructional mission of dramatically improving student literacy outcomes include the following:

1. Opportunities for teachers to plan together for the purpose of coordinating instruction across classes so critical skills taught to struggling readers are reinforced and used by all teachers, thus reducing the fragmentary learning experience that most secondary students encounter.
2. Flexibility in class schedules that allow students to move from one reading class to another as soon as they meet mastery targets — even if this happens during a semester.

In short, when the overriding, relentless focus of schools becomes quality instruction, and student learning becomes a “cornerstone” of what drives a school, organizational and administrative structures and practices become variables that are continually adjusted to be responsive to instructional needs and ensure that the specified results are achieved.

Professional Development for Improving Instruction

Professional development that is coordinated, addresses major learning needs of students, is grounded in validated principles of adult learning, and is directly linked to the accountability system for teachers and administrators can be the single most important variable in improving student outcomes. Although significant resources are invested in professional development in most districts, many of these funds are not clearly tied to directly improving student outcomes and are not a part of the accountability system in the district (Deninger, Curtis, & McIntyre, 2005)

Increasingly, schools have made instructional coaching one of the centerpieces of their staff development program. When properly deployed, coaches are partners in the change process. They work one-on-one with teachers to make it easier to adopt the instructional methods that can make a difference to students’ success. Instructional coaches are team members who help pull together and lead the right combination of school staff to reach common goals. Instructional coaching can be a highly effective strategy when it facilitates teacher learning tied to targeted student outcomes, is well coordinated, and regularly measures changes in teaching practices (Knight, in press).

Next Steps

A recent study by the Consortium on Chicago School Research used an “on-track indicator” to determine the probability that a student will graduate from high school (Allensworth & Easton, 2005). Results showed that students who stay on track (that is, earn at least five credits and have no more than one semester F in their freshman year) are three and one-half times as likely to graduate from high school as students who do not stay on track. The study highlights how devastating freshman-year failure can be. Specifically, just one semester F decreases the likelihood of graduating from 83 percent to 60 percent; a second semester F decreases the likelihood of graduating to 44 percent; and only 31 percent of students with three semester Fs graduate.

These findings underscore the vital importance of making certain that middle school students enter high school prepared for the rigorous course demands they will face. The key to transforming students from struggling to competent learners is to put in place programs that bring a “laser-like focus” on teaching and learning.

For years, the majority of federal and state policy initiatives and resources have been directed at younger children. For example, in 2002, federal funding for Head Start was $6.7 billion, and for Title I in grades K-6 it was $10.49 billion. By comparison, federal funding for Title I programs in grades 7-12 was only $1.85 billion (National Center for Educational Statistics [NCES], 2004). Two relatively new federal initiatives, Reading First (for children in grades K-3) and Striving Readers (for students in grades 6-12), reflect a similar pattern of marked inequities in federal expenditures by granting $1.04 billion for Reading First versus $24.8 million for Striving Readers.

Striving Readers, although a relatively small investment, represents a symbolically important acknowledgment of the unique challenges faced by struggling adolescent readers in secondary schools. Given the importance of putting students on a solid foundation as they enter high school, it would be logical and reasonable for policymakers to insist that Striving Readers projects focus

the majority of their efforts on upper-elementary and middle schools so we can quickly add to our knowledge base of how to better serve struggling adolescent readers before they encounter the stringent requirements of high school.

Instructional components of CRL’s Strategic Instruction Model will play a key role in Virginia’s effort to improve the quality of services for students with disabilities. SIM’s comprehensive approach to adolescent literacy has garnered national attention for its proven effectiveness and strong research base, and many Virginia teachers have successfully used SIM interventions for years. The new project will expand SIM’s presence to benefit even more students across the state.

Virginia has received a State Improvement Grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Special Education Programs for this project. CRL’s share of the project represents about 75 percent of the total award, according to co-principal investigator Keith Lenz, director of CRL’s Institute for Effective Instruction and associate professor in KU’s Department of Special Education.

CRL and Virginia educators will collaborate on three main goals during the three years of the SIG project. CRL’s Barbara Ehren is the project coordinator, working directly with the schools, universities, and state-level personnel in Virginia.

In work on the first goal, CRL-guided teams will establish comprehensive SIM programs in four pilot schools—one middle school and one high school in each of two sites—that serve high percentages of at-risk students. The teams will ground their work in the Content Literacy Continuum framework developed at CRL.

The Content Literacy Continuum describes five increasingly intensive levels of literacy support that should be in place in every secondary school. The supports range from tools to help classroom teachers promote understanding of and mastery of content for all students to specialized clinical options provided by speech pathologists for students with underlying language disorders.

Under the CLC framework, virtually everyone in a school has a role to play in literacy instruction, though individual roles differ to meet the need for different levels of intensity of instruction.

The second goal of the project targets university faculty in Virginia who are involved in teacher preparation. Over the course of the project, staff expect to work with 50 faculty members to incorporate SIM materials into their teacher preparation courses.

The third main goal of the project will expand the capacity of a network of individuals who provide professional development workshops related to SIM and CLC to schools and districts. At present, the SIM Professional Development Network consists of more than 1,000 members representing all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Canada, Guam, India, and Thailand. More than 30 members of the network are based in Virginia.

“We want to expand the number of SIM Professional Developers across the state who can work with schools to implement CLC and plant the seeds for beginning CLC work in secondary schools across the state,” Keith says.

CRL will work in concert with Virginia’s Special Education Training and Technical Assistance Centers to prepare new SIM Professional Developers in key regions. Ultimately, this expansion will support use of SIM components in classrooms across the state.

In addition to these three main goals, the project includes a significant investment in technology. CRL will develop on-line professional development activities as well as a web-based repository of instructional materials to support classroom teachers.

Co-principal investigator Don Deshler, director of the Center for Research on Learning, notes that the Virginia project holds increased significance in light of recent education laws, such as the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.

“I see the core elements of this proposal as being in concert with important federal and state mandates and positioned to address some of the most pressing educational needs facing students with disabilities,” Don says.

Julie Tollefson
KU-CRL
Strategram Vol.17 No.4
Published: July 2005