Foundational literacy remains top-of-mind for educators across the United States. ANet Coach Anna McKinney shares two stories of her experience working alongside educational leaders to support foundational literacy. If you're interested in resources, check out our foundational literacy webpage!
This school year, Community of Saints school in West St. Paul, Minnesota, decided to adopt Magnetic Reading Foundations in grades K-3 with ANet support. I worked alongside Principal Bridget Kramer to develop and implement an arc of professional learning for the teachers and leaders, including PD from the curriculum provider, as well as sessions led by ANet that were spread out throughout the first half of the year. The professional learning focused on foundational skills, phonological awareness, and phonics. Part of the coaching work included observing classroom instruction, providing feedback on foundational skills instruction and curriculum use, and creating a system for collecting data on student progress. I noticed through our observations that the implementation of Magnetic Reading Foundations was strong!
By the end of the year, Community of Saints saw high growth in reading in grades K-3 and particularly high growth in the foundational skills of phonological awareness, phonics, and high-frequency words, according to the iReady assessment.
The key to our shared success has been collaboration.
I have been able to collaborate with my ANet peers to better work alongside our partners at Community of Saints. In April, I brought their data to my coaching squad for ideas on helping one teacher who was not seeing the student progress she hoped. My team, led by Ali Turro, was able to provide insights into the data and the next steps I could take with the leaders and teachers to strengthen their instruction further.
The teachers and leaders at Community of Saints experienced similar collaboration throughout this school year. They meet regularly to complete the entire Teaching & Learning Cycle: planning, analyzing data, and adapting instruction, together. Their reflections show increasing specificity as they learn from me, their students, their data, and each other.
Risen Christ is a K-8 Spanish/English dual immersion school in South Minneapolis. They support a diverse group of students, with 95% of their student population being Latino, 3.1% Caucasian, and 1.4% African American. A majority of their students are English Language Learners, and many students are first or second-generation Americans. They also employ a diverse teaching staff, with 52% of their teachers identifying as Latino, 38% as Caucasian, 5% as Asian, and 5% as multiracial. All of their teachers speak either Spanish, English, or both, with 45% as English-only speakers, 41% as Spanish-only speakers, and 14% as Bilingual speakers.
Despite their mission to develop fully bilingual and bi-literate students, students struggled to learn to read in both languages. This year, the leaders and I decided to focus on Spanish foundational skills in kindergarten and first grade alongside English oral language skills. They adopted a foundational skills curriculum for Spanish, and the leaders and I have been working together to provide observations and feedback, support with looking at data, and additional professional learning. The professional learning was provided to teachers during their professional learning community time (PLCs) by their Biliteracy Instructional Coach Casey Thomson and Director of Academics Carmen Grace Poppert, and focused on building skills. By midyear, staff at Risen Christ were seeing higher growth and achievement than typical for their school’s early elementary students in Spanish reading.
Leaders and teachers at Risen Christ are becoming more confident in using a curriculum to provide grade-level instruction. They have met in PLCs throughout the year to unpack each unit. They've learned about foundational skills, how to assess students on each phonological awareness and phonics skill, and how to use that assessment data to inform small group instruction. In the most recent cycle, teachers wrote their own SMART goals around one of four topics: phonemic awareness, fluency, oral language development, or encoding. In small groups of teachers focused on each topic, they directed their own learning around their goal.
An important component of ANet’s coaching work is considering the students you serve through an anti-racist lens. To better support the diverse students and staff at Risen Christ as they implemented their new foundational skills curriculum, educators at Risen Christ worked with ANet coach Jona Moore to support anti-racist conversations and staff culture.
In a recent cycle debrief meeting, I asked the leaders, “How has anti-racism work contributed to equitable instruction?” Here are their responses:
Through our partnership, we continue to work on increasing teachers’ content knowledge. Viewing our work through an anti-racist lens has helped staff work better together and increased consideration as we built content knowledge. Clear structures for the Teaching & Learning cycles and expectations for progress monitoring and pacing are paving the way for this work. Observations show that the pacing and content of lessons have improved and show an opportunity for students to do more of the work.