When All Teachers are Reading Teachers
“I’m one of those teachers who two or three years ago would have said, ‘it’s not my job to teach students how to read.’"
Thomas Clement started at Gentry Middle School in Northwest Arkansas during the height of COVID-19 as a reading interventionist. Eventually he moved into 8th grade ELA and then took over as a Multi-Classroom Leader for ELA. He was prepared to hop right into the content but quickly realized that not all students were at grade level. At the time, 33% of the school’s population were scoring two or more grade levels below in ELA. It was clear that teaching 8th-grade ELA would require a different approach.
In his second year of teaching, Thomas was designated as a Multi-Classroom Leader for Gentry’s language arts program–meaning he was now responsible for all student proficiency scores as the lead instructional coach for teachers. This is where The LeARner Collective (TLC) comes in.
Thomas’ principal came to him and shared that TLC presented a great opportunity for Gentry to access resources that otherwise wouldn’t be available to them. In January 2024, Gentry joined Phase I of the LeARner Collective and over the course of five months they received customized coaching to explore ideas and deploy pilot solutions to create conditions for student success.
“TLC has really given us a supportive space and dedicated time to sit and talk with our team about the problem and come up with solutions. A lot of schools talk about the problem but don’t seek solutions to solve it,” said Thomas.
Through these exploratory conversations, Thomas learned even though they weren’t necessarily at fault for the low proficiency scores, it was Gentry’s responsibility and they had to come up with solutions for their students.
“A lot of these students missed foundational reading skills and they were never going to excel in ELA if they remained on a second-grade reading level,” said Thomas.
Gentry’s assigned coach, Katie, provided an abundance of resources and guidance to help bring students to grade level. She provided vocabulary instruction for all staff, software resources like Epic reading so students could have access to lower-level books as they gained foundational skills. Katie also advised breaking students into small groups based on attention to fluency, accuracy and comprehension.
“It was exhausting for my team – learning how to teach kids to read – and the students thought it was childish but we experienced significant growth. Sixty-five percent of the students in this remedial group showed some form of growth, 25% showed at least a 10 point increase, 18 students were within 5 points of grade level and 5 students ended up on grade level,” shared Thomas.
“Being able to really consciously think about what you’re doing and teaching has been impactful,” he added.
With Phase II of TLC, Gentry has been able to continue to problem-solve around literacy rates. For the upcoming year, the school will be rolling out a curriculum designed around the “The Writing Revolution,” to be implemented across all classrooms and grade levels.
