Twenty-one rural schools across the U.S. collaborated to implement a multi-layered, rural-specific approach to improving prek-3 literacy, especially for at-risk children in high-poverty communities. The schools are part of LIREC — Literacy Innovation in Rural Education through Collaboration — a project that was awarded a two-year, $4.6-million federal Innovative Approaches to Literacy grant in the fall of 2015. Lead partners include the Rural School and Community Trust, the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), and the Institute for Educational Leadership (IEL). This grant with 21 schools in five states across the country, was designed to build their local capacity to support stronger literacy teaching and learning in ways that build on the unique assets and culture of each community. LIREC’s five school clusters, in Vermont, Illinois, North Carolina, Arizona, and West Virginia, demonstrate the diversity in what constitutes “rural” poverty and schools. For more details see Increasing Early Literacy in Rural Communities and the grant Logic Model.
Data-driven needs assessment was a core engine of both Instructional Leadership work and teacher Professional Development in LIREC. At the outset of the project, LIREC teachers participated in a customized needs assessment, including measures of professional capacity from the nationally benchmarked LOCI survey and detailed measures of classroom practices, time allocation, and curriculum resources in literacy. LIREC staff worked with district and school leaders to use the data to design and monitor professional learning for their sites, while teachers engaged in structured debriefs of the data specific to their grade bands to reflect on their practice and develop goals.
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Summer Lab was a critical component of the intervention model within the LIREC grant. Structurally, the “Lab” model differed from Summer School to emphasize experimentation and growth for both teachers and students. LIREC Summer Lab is designed to be an immersive learning experience for teachers as well as students. Just as students are experiencing new ways of learning in the classroom, teachers are experimenting with new ways of working together.
LIREC Summer Labs were characterized by smaller class sizes and coupled literacy enrichment for struggling readers with intensive, inquiry-driven professional learning for teachers. The classroom component focused on engaging activities with authentic texts (such as Interactive Read-Aloud and Collaborative Writing) to build student motivation to read. Summer Lab sites experimented with a range of Family Engagement strategies to increase access to high quality texts at home and further reinforce students’ positive engagement with text. Teachers had collaborative time daily to learn about effective literacy practices, debrief practices they wereimplementing, and plan for the next day’s instruction based on that shared reflection. Learn more:
Inquiry Cycles emerged over the course of the project as a central mechanism for providing blended professional learning to the LIREC network of rural schools, and the cycles that were developed and tested in LIREC schools are an important legacy product of the project. LIREC Inquiry Cycles provide 6-8 weeks of content and activities for a collaborative team of teachers learning about, implementing, and reflecting on a specific literacy strategy. They were designed using the gradual release framework already well known to many teachers as a model for designing student learning. In this framework, learners have an opportunity to experience new practices through modeling (e.g. video, classroom observation, case, webinar) and guided practice (e.g. co-designing a lesson, coaching or supportive feedback on teaching; collaborative discussion) before independent expertise is expected.
A foundational element of effective instruction, especially for struggling students, is understanding the role that motivation plays on student engagement and subsequent achievement. Helping teachers understand and support student motivation through rethinking instruction and classroom environments was a core lever in this project for supporting increased student achievement. We supported teachers in putting into practice instructional routines in the classroom that served to use motivation as a lever for change including:
Approximately $500,000 of our project funding was put into creating robust classroom libraries – many of the schools had no school library and limited or non-existent classroom libraries. In few of our rural communities was there a public library. So, we worked with community organizations and businesses to make books available and reading supported throughout the community (e.g. in restaurants, township offices, churches, local bars, and in one case a casino!). High school shop students in on district built little free libraries to put throughout the region which were then filled with books.
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Family Engagement in the high poverty, rural communities in LIREC was based upon three assumptions:
A national nonprofit organization addressing the crucial relationship between good schools and thriving communities.
A national nonprofit organization devoted to improving the teaching and learning of English and the language arts at all levels of education.
A national nonprofit organization equipping leaders to work together across boundaries to build effective systems that prepare children and youth for post secondary education, careers and citizenship.
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