We believe that within three to five years, by providing the necessary support for students and teachers, each and every student will read at grade level or above. As educators, it is our moral obligation and shared responsibility to ensure every student can read, write, speak and listen, and use literacy as a pathway to achievement.
Project LITERACY is a collaboration of administrators, principals, instructional coaches and teachers to uphold this vision. We work to ensure effective dedication of resources, application of research-based instructional strategies, data collection and analysis, outcome assessments and communication of progress to families and the community.
Literacy Goals
Our goals are to have students meet or exceed benchmarks at the following levels:
95% Grades K-5
90% Grades 6-8
85% Grades 9-12
We will incorporate the following district initiatives to achieve these goals:
- Power standards – what to teach
- Data teams – monitoring student learning and providing feedback
- Data-driven decision making – identifying student needs
- Effective teaching strategies – how to teach
Literacy Instruction
Instruction is focused on several important reading elements, including allocating sufficient time for reading instruction and teaching the elements most essential for reading in an alphabetic writing system (phonemic awareness, alphabetic principle, vocabulary, comprehension and fluency).
Teachers promote literacy skills by instructing students in two main areas:
Learning to Read
- Acquire strategies for “decoding” unfamiliar words
- Build “sight word vocabulary” of many thousands of words
- Learn to coordinate skills for fluent reading of text
- Begin extension of vocabulary beyond oral language limits
- Acquire variety of strategies for enhancing comprehension, or repairing it when it breaks down
- Develop or maintain a positive attitude about reading and view it as an important skill for learning and for pleasure
Reading to Learn
- Extend “sight vocabulary” to unfamiliar words in increasingly challenging text
- Learning meanings of thousands of new words – vocabulary expansion
- Increasingly detailed knowledge of text structures and genres
- Expansion of content knowledge in many domains
- Reading specific comprehension strategies become more complex
- Thinking and reasoning skills increase
Assessments and Intervention
Students are regularly tested to determine where they stand on their benchmark targets. Interventions range from intensive instruction provided to students significantly below benchmarks to advanced enrichment given to students who consistently exceed benchmarks. Instruction is targeted to meeting students’ needs in specific areas of literacy, such as fluency, comprehension, language and writing.
Also integrated is technology literacy—effectively using technology tools in instructional settings to engage students, increase achievement and support higher-order thinking and communication skills.
Professional Development
Underlying Project LITERACY is the provision and implementation of research-based instructional methods. Staff receive ongoing training and feedback at several levels, including formal classes, professional learning teams, networking, modeling and practice of teaching methods, and side-by-side coaching. This helps to ensure that all professional development is consistently and coherently aligned with the commitments each school has made in its schoolwide reading goals, instruction, assessments