January 16, 2009
Presentation by: Minnesota Reading Corps (MRC)
Christina Sheran, former literacy coordinator for MRC
Steve Struthers (MRC Vice President of Strategy & Results Management)
Christina Sheran:
Worked for MRC for 6 years, before returning to work as a school psychologist.
Start early and be intentional about building pre-reading skills: We started 6 years ago with the idea we had to start early. By 3rd grade you have to be reading proficiently. That’s not a lot of time. Under the old model, kids would come to kindergarten, learn to be part of a group and learn to follow directions, and maybe learn something about the letters in your name. We never thought about how children learn to read...
Can we imbed literacy into early education and make it fun and meaningful? We know with early education, drill and kill won’t work. We gathered information from the National Reading Panel, and looked at literacy from Birth-12th grade—that was a shift. The model grew from those efforts. We focused from age 3 to grade 3. We started with four Head Start programs in different parts of the state. We wanted to develop a program that would work across Minnesota.
Goals:
* Provide meaningful training in early literacy
* Assess where children are when they come to us
* Assess the progress along the way.
* Leave teachers and programs with the capacity to carry this on their own.
Background: Program started in 2003. Now it is statewide alliance. It has grown from 2,000 students in 2004-05 to a projected 22,500 in 2010-11. The MN Literacy Council is in charge of member recruiting, monitoring their progress. The St. Croix River Education District does a lot of the data gathering, training and coaching.
Initial assessment: Used a problem-solving model. Identified where students are when they come in. Do they know sounds? Do they know some of the letters in their name? Can they hold a pencil of a crayon? Do they understand that when I am looking at a book, I don’t get the meaning from the picture—I get the meaning from the words?
Teaching sounds, concepts: Our language is set up on sounds. There are 44 sounds in the English language and there are 26 letters. We have to help children connect that different letters can have more than one sound. We have to teach them concepts: this is the front of the book, the back of the book. This is where we start to read. We read from left to right.
Vocabulary is key: If you have an expressive vocabulary in kindergarten that is 6,000-10,000 words, you are ready to read. Vocabulary forms the foundation
Creating benchmarks: We standardized what we did. We know that if a child could identify this many rhymes by pointing on a picture, they were on track to take on reading those words, and decoding those words in kindergarten and first grade. We had benchmark numbers we knew we had to get these children to.
Start-up: Each trainer or coach was responsible for a program for 3-4 years. We would train the entire pre-school program. Then it moved to a K-3 program. We trained and coached so everyone understood the concepts the same way.
Insights from research
* Often, people reading to children want to say, “be quiet until I’m done.” What the research told us, when you read to children, the rule is to ask as many questions as possible.
* The other goal is read the same story over and over and over again. If you read the story five days in a row, the students will be reading that story. They may not be decoding, but they will have memorized it. You can teach the 10-15 new vocabulary words. That helps to be on track to be a reader. We want to teach them 10-15 new vocabulary words every day. We pre-teach the vocabulary.
* Approximately 50 percent of children show up not ready for K. Research says if you don’t talk a lot to your children, and talk in a positive way, they are not going to get there. They won’t get to kindergarten with that 6,000 vocabulary.
Graduation: When Reading Corps members get children on track—which means they met a benchmark we established that ties to the MCA 3rd grade test—we graduate them and go on to another student .
We are wired to talk. We are not wired to read. Most children can learn to read; few will learn to read on their own, less than 5 percent. The best thing the National Reading Panel did was to say you have to directly teach reading. It starts with phonemic awareness. Hearing the sounds. There also is phonics, You have to see it and match the sound. You need both. We didn’t know that until 10 years ago. We thought it was either phonics or whole language.
English Language Learners: Children who are English Language Learners can have a difficult time. Sometimes they can learn to decode words and get the sound structure. But when they read the word, it is not part of their language so they don’t get what it means. Vocabulary is huge. It helps us comprehend. The whole point of reading is to understand what you are reading.
Assessment: We assess students. If we want to know how many letter sounds they know, we give them a sheet of letter sounds and we time them. We want them to be automatic. We want them to have at least 40 sounds at the end of kindergarten. We help them with that. The assessment informs our instruction. We don’t give everybody vocabulary or letter sounds. It is a test on us. It informs our instruction.
Goals: All MN children from Age 3 to Grade 3 who qualify have access to MRC; Children meet state reading standards by 3rd grade
Steve Struthers
Matchmaking: We are trying to match sites, from Head Start to public school pre-kindergarten programs and private day care facilities serving the low income, at-risk kids we want to reach. We have pre-K and K-3 sites. At the moment we are only working in public school settings, both districts and charter. We are trying to match sites with these young Reading Corps members who have stepped up for a 1-2 years commitment. Need to match them geographically and by personality.
The sites: The sites don’t have to pay to participate. They have to dedicate an individual or two to serve as internal coaches—sweat equity. We want sites that are committed to bring it to their school and supervise it.
Reading Corps members: Individuals get a small stipend, $11,400 a year (many go on food stamps). At the end they receive a $4,700 education award. They don’t need an education background .They want to serve . Enjoy being around kids. A lot of members serve part time, they go to school or work part time.
Training: We start intensive training in July to start school in September. Training covers instruction and interventions. .Members also supported by coaches throughout the year. Coaches visit every school at least once a month. There are also “fidelity checks”, an important part of the program. We go in and observe members working with the students and give feedback.
Structure: Corps members are in the classroom for early childhood settings. They do not replacing the classroom teachers. They participate in small group and classwide activities. (Classroom teachers had their eyes open on what to do to make their classroom literacy rich.) For Corps members in K-3, students are pulled from classroom for tutoring in 15-20 minute segments. Over the course of a week, we want to see them get 60-90 minutes of direct intervention, assessment and tutoring, until they graduate.
Tracking: Weekly assessments monitor the progress on reading benchmarks. Students who exceed targets for four consecutive weeks graduate; they are still monitored (but not tutored) once a week. Some might return to the program, if the progress monitoring shows a slip in their performance.
Niche: MRC does not serve students already receiving Title 1 or special education services.
Funding: It costs $25,000 a year for the stipend, educational award, all the coaching, training and travel. One full-time Corps member serves 30-40 kids, or a cost per student of $700, a good bargain if you can get those students on the path to be good readers by the end of the 3rd grade. The federal government pays 80 percent of the costs, the state 13 percent and private contributors 7 percent.
Results: In the first couple of years, we were doing a pretty good job. Last year we substantially increased the number of kids who made the benchmarks by the end of the year. We are seeing huge percentage of kids making more than a year’s worth of growth. (See power point data.) A matched sample comparing kids with no Head Start to kids in Head Start to kids with Reading Corps. It showed more of the Reading Corps kids ready for kindergarten. In 2007, 80 percent of those who successfully exited the Reading Corp program at our first school district passed MCA-II’s in 3rd grade, a tick above the statewide average for all 3rd graders.
Systems change: 70 percent of participating sites said they had changed some of their literacy practices at least in part due to Reading Corps participation.
Challenge: 12,000 3rd graders will not pass the 3rd grade reading test. MRC is a small but growing part of the solution
Q&A
Q: What are the barriers to serving those 12,000 kids
A: Funding is a challenge. We have raised money so that we can draw down the 4 to 1 federal match. It depends on the state appropriation, approximately $1 million a year, and philanthropy. We also have to convince the feds; this is a competitive process.
The second barrier is that not everyone knows about the program. Sites have to apply. We are doing a lot of webinars, presentations at conferences. We would love to have you apply. Due date is Feb. 20. There also is skepticism, that this is the flavor of the month. Two years ago it was XYZ. Educators have a healthy skepticism in anything new. We have invested a lot in assessment and research to show them we have data. Need to educate the marketplace.
Q: Any comparisons between Title 1 kids who need this program and can’t get it and those who get it?
A: We haven’t that I am aware done a direct evaluation of Title I services compared to our results.
SHERAN: Students in Title 1 may have lower skills than the children that we would be working with. They would be receiving the help, if there is a Title 1 teacher. That would be a licensed teacher with a specialty in reading and literacy development. The Reading Corps has no certification. Twenty years ago, there was a lot of Title 1 money and lots of schools with Title 1 teachers. That is less and less. So we are finding you will have Title 1 school based on poverty, but you won’t have a Title 1 teacher. We will work with those students.
Q: You need to first learn to read in your native language. How do you honor that?
A I am a psychologist in a school where 80 percent are not native speakers. How do they approach reading if their language is not the same language they are being taught to read? We have these native language literacy programs. They are taught in their native language up until about 3rd grade. Then the idea is, and this is where I have a little concern, the idea is that they will all transfer that reading in their native language into English reading. What we are finding is some children do, but not every child. We need to step back.
For some, they didn’t learn their own language very well. So for us to teach them to read in their own language, when they were delayed in that, and expect them to transfer magically in the 3rd grade, that just seems irresponsible to me. We need to give them reading in English with a bilingual focus. So for the pieces of their language that make sense to them—use that to help them read in English. Our school has a high percentage of 8th graders who are not proficient in reading. They didn’t just come to this country. They have been in the school since K and 1st and 2nd grade. You have to step back. What does the research say?
Q: Can you work with licensed home care/family care?
A: STRUTHERS: There is no restriction on where we work. Americorps doesn’t dictate we have to be in certain types of schools. We would be very interested in getting applications from nontraditional sites. … The Minnesota Literacy Council, who helps us place the members, works at a lot of very nontraditional settings with respect to literacy. They have some expertise.
Q: Do you work with other groups around how to capture and track data?
A: We don’t, outside of the sites that we work with. Some sites have been blown away, saying they never had that kind of easy-to-use information. They can have a conversation with a parent and a parent looks at the graph and they can get it. They don’t have to be a literacy expert. It has a transformative effect. We haven’t done outreach.
Q: How do you select reading materials that are used and if those books are sensitive to the cultures of the children reading them?
A: SHERAN: We have the MRC members reading with children out of books and it is usually the curriculum that is part of any given school. We don’t have much control over selection of the books. The reading passages that we use are standardized passages that came through the U of Oregon and U of Minnesota.
Now when we think about preschool education, Steve was talking about the ELLCO, which is an environmental assessment that is an assessment of the environment and the teacher, the way the teacher is embedding literacy into their classrooms. That looks at the very thing you are talking about. Do you have 25 books in the reading center? Are those books representative of the cultures and the traditions of the children that are in your program?
Q: What’s ELLCO?
A: ELLCO = Early Language and Literacy Classroom Observation. (NOTE: The following are from a web search on ELLCO …)
http://ccf.edc.org/profdev/ellco.asp
The Early Language & Literacy Classroom Observation (ELLCO) Toolkit contains three assessment tools: a Literacy Environment Checklist, a protocol to conduct classroom observations and administer teacher interviews, and a Literacy Activities Rating Scale.
http://www.pbrooks.com/store/books/smith-ellco/index.htm
Trusted by schools across the country, ELLCO helps build better literacy programs by assessing the quality of both the classroom environment and teachers' practices. With ELLCO, educators reliably gather the essential data needed for professional development and program improvement that lead to better literacy outcomes for young children.
Q: You mentioned that one of the barriers to reaching those 12,000 students might be the districts?
A: STRUTHERS: There are members who have been at sites that have not felt supported. It is the classic thing. Some districts said we are going to do this. The MRC member arrives. The classroom teacher is—“What the heck is this? Why are you pulling kids?” It is not always love and roses at the building. We ask the MRC members the degree to which they feel supported. We haven’t run cross tabs to see it correlates with reading outcomes. We also survey external and internal coaches to see to what degree there is internal support.
Your point is valid. Are we simply getting the places that are already heading in the right direction? From an analytical standpoint, if you would look at the site’s history of MCA scores you would say those are the places we need to work. There are definitely some buildings where they are working where they are getting pretty darn good results. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be serving that handful of kids who aren’t succeeding. It is a mixed bag.
Q: Statement I am at a district that is implementing Reading Corp on a small scale. It does take a real strong commitment, and it does take a lot of staff time. It is people—60 hours a month our early childhood coaches spend working with the MRC members and their master coaches. We do a lot of the same assessments. We use the ELLCO. The benefit is having another adult in the classroom that is highly trained. Having other eyes looking at our classroom, saying, you have the wrong sized chairs for all of these kids. We have had good experience. This is our first year implementing it pre K. We have done two years at the elementary.
There are a lot of competing initiatives. I know our superintendent is looking at “how many initiatives does this building have?” Which one trumps? Which one will give us the results, or which five? I think that looking at it holistically saying, what is our strategy, this absolutely supports the strategies we want in our Pre-K and our K-3. We are excited about it. I do know there is a lot of time commitment from staff, and we don’t necessarily have the capacity to expand.
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