Preview of Teaching Lab’s Foundational Skills PL Series
Written by Mandy Flora
Last summer, Teaching Lab set out to answer a question that has continued to muddy the foundation of our nation’s school system. The question was simple: Who isn’t learning to read, and why are we okay with that?
There’s no denying that literacy has been denied to people of color in America. According to Emily Hanford from APM Reports:
“Reading instruction in many schools is based on a belief that if children are read to a lot, reading should come pretty easily for them. Decades of scientific research on reading shows this isn’t true … Some of these struggling readers get the help they need, but a lot can depend on their family income, their race and ethnicity, and what kind of school they go to … America’s approach to reading instruction is having an especially devastating impact on Black, Hispanic, and American Indian children.”
And according to The Nation’s Report Card, on national tests last year, only 18 percent of Black 4th graders scored proficient or above in reading; the figure for white 4th graders was 45 percent. For 8th graders, the percentages was not much better: 15 percent for Black 8th graders and 42 percent for white 8th graders.
An Answer to the Crisis
The one answer that Teaching Lab wanted to throw at the question was a professional learning course that was designed to support teachers and instructional coaches’ understanding of the Foundational Skills of reading and to understand what it means to teach them according to the science of reading.
Most of the time, we support classroom teachers who work directly with students. However, we couldn’t ignore the critical role that leaders play in ensuring the teachers they support have the right materials, professional learning, and resources to do the job. District superintendents, regional school improvement specialists, and school building principals need support and learning, too.
Teaching Lab’s state services directly support leaders to provide the right enabling conditions for their teachers, whether or not districts partner with us for their curriculum-specific professional learning needs. While we hope that leaders will invest in PL like ours for their teachers, at the end of the day, we wanted this experience to cut through the noise around the science of reading and the resources to cut the fluff so leaders could be equipped to influence.
Foundational Skills Teaser Webinar
This teaser gave leaders the opportunity to connect the relationship between equity and foundational literacy instruction, walk away with a high-level view and free resources around the Science of Reading research, and analyze how their own school or system may be negatively impacting all students’ literacy development.
Watch the teaser now:
