Calling all Principals & Coaches: Ways to Support Your Teachers in Delivering High-Quality Structured Literacy Instruction

You’ve done the hard work of carefully choosing a high-quality, well-designed, and research-supported structured literacy curriculum and you can’t wait to see the magic happening in classrooms throughout your school. Bravo for putting the time and energy into making sure teachers have great tools to help them teach their students to read and write! However, no curriculum, no matter how great it is, is going to create magic in classrooms. First, let’s be clear—there is no magic involved at all. Great outcomes for students come from high-quality curriculum paired with highly skilled teaching. If you don’t have a plan in place for supporting teachers to use that curriculum, don’t expect outcomes to change. If you want to maximize your curriculum to get great results, there are some critical elements that must be in place.  Here are five suggestions for ensuring the best possible outcomes for students:

Build a supportive community

1. Build a supportive community of practice to enhance teachers’ professional growth in structured literacy.
   
   
   • Build teacher efficacy. Center your school culture on two important tenets: 1) all students can learn; and 2) all teachers can teach all students to read and write.
   • Attend and fully participate in professional development alongside your teachers. This helps them to see that you value the information and are still learning too.
   • Facilitate professional learning communities where teachers can learn from each other as they begin implementing your new curriculum.
     
     
     • Encourage peer observations and collaborative learning.
     • Support teacher leaders in mentoring other teachers who may need more support.
     • Encourage collaborative planning in which teams use their knowledge of critical elements to make decisions on how to maximize instructional time.

Provide ongoing professional development

2. Provide ongoing professional development (PD) and training. Create a comprehensive plan for professional development that spans throughout the school year.
   
   
   • Organize PD that helps teachers understand the major tenets of structured literacy so they know the rationale for the structure and elements within the new curriculum. Without this type of support, some elements may not make sense to them so they may choose to adapt something in a way that makes it less effective, or inadvertently eliminate something critical when time gets tight.
   • Include PD that emphasizes explicit instruction elements. A main tenet of structured literacy IS explicit instruction, so it should be the centerpiece of schoolwide PD. This is training that gives you real bang for your buck because explicit instruction is critical across all subject areas.
   • Provide PD that teaches how to use your new curriculum effectively. This isn’t just learning WHAT is included in the curriculum (typical of some core curriculum trainings I have attended); it is comprehensive professional development on HOW to use the curriculum. Ask the professional developer to model full lessons and give teachers the chance to practice delivery with peers.

Model evidence-based delivery of your curriculum

3. Model evidence-based delivery of your curriculum
   
   
   • Demonstrate lessons from the curriculum in their classrooms so they can see how it can work with their students.
     
     
     • Be sure that you are embedding explicit instruction elements throughout the entire lesson
   • Encourage teacher leaders to demonstrate lessons for other teachers. Sometimes watching a peer can be very powerful.

Observations and Feedback

4. Observations and Feedback
   
   
   • Observe teachers as they deliver the curriculum and provide actionable feedback by identifying strengths and areas for improvement. There are several tools available that can help you focus your observations on critical elements as well. Here are two to get you started:
     
     
     • PATTAN has publicly shared an explicit instruction checklist that can help you to know what to look for when you are observing in a classroom: https://www.pattan.net/getmedia/121b45c7-b376-4e10-acb7-80358daa8a7b/ho%2016.%20explicit%20instruction%20checklist .
     • Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education also has an observation and feedback tool that focuses on structured literacy elements: https://www.doe.mass.edu/edprep/resources/early-literacy-observation.html
   • Remember, the culture you have created for your school can determine the effectiveness of observation and feedback. A supportive, mutual learning environment will foster honest and open dialogue between observers and teachers.
   • Ensure that literacy leaders are trained to be good literacy coaches. Not everyone has this skillset inherently.

Support data-driven instruction

5. Support data-driven instruction
   
   
   • Guide teachers on how to effectively use assessment to inform instructional decisions within the curriculum. This means they need to understand how to use screening data, how to progress monitor to ensure that their instruction is working, how to use curriculum-provided assessments, and how to informally assess in the moment to adjust instruction in real time as needed.

Purchasing a new curriculum is a huge expense for a school, so making sure you have a system in place that will support teachers in using the curriculum efficiently and effectively is critical. Handing teachers a curriculum and simply hoping for the best with no support or guidance is not going to get you the results you want for your students. So often, when schools don’t see good results, they assume it is an issue with the curriculum. But, no curriculum, no matter how comprehensive, no matter how well-designed, will teach children to read. As the great Dr. Louisa Moats, says, “Curriculums don’t teach children to read. Knowledgeable teachers teach children to read.”

To learn more about the literacy programs available from Voyager Sopris Learning, click here.

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