001Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to our special meeting, a work session around literacy and language development. Thank you for all being here. Let's do a roll call, please. Director Alvarez? Here. Director Tidholm? Present. Director Espinosa? Thank you. Here. Director Holien? Present. President Van? Here. Thank you very much. And to the right is our superintendent. With that, I'm going to kick it off to Dr. Reinig, and you can have everybody go around, or Dr. Durant. I want to jump in real quick, and then I'll hand it over to her, okay? So I just want to have a couple of remarks. I just want to share such good evening, directors, and just thank you for your time, your continued commitment to the students and families of our district as we begin tonight's discussion on our literacy priority. I
002want to frame the conversation with the national perspective that underscores the urgency of our work. According to the most recent Nations report card, reading scores among high school seniors in our country have dropped to their lowest level since 1992. Nearly one-third of seniors lack the basic reading skills needed to comprehend and analyze text. These are not just statistics. They represent students who are leaving our schools without the foundational literary skills they need to thrive in college, career, and life. Experts point to several contributing factors that the lingering effects of the pandemic, chronic absenteeism, and the rise of social media use, especially among students already facing academic challenges. And while early literacy remains critical, the data shows that the decline in reading achievement extends well beyond the primary grades. We're seeing significant drops in middle and
003high school performance as well. This is why our district's priority is so vital. It's not just a strategic initiative. It's a call to action. And this is the second year of this priority, and we must ensure that every student, regardless of level or background, receives instruction, support, and resources they need to become confident and capable readers. Tonight we'll share how we responded to this challenge, the strategies we're implementing, the data we're monitoring, and the partnerships we are building to accelerate progress. We know that literacy is a gateway to all of the learning, and we are committed to ensuring every student has the opportunity to succeed. So thank you for your ongoing commitment and leadership and support as we take on this critical work together. Now I'll hand it over to Dr. Rynick. All right. Thank
004you, Dr. Duran. So I'm Jennifer Rynick, Deputy Superintendent here in Highline. And as Dr. Duran mentioned, this is and continues to be a focus. And thank you for the board support in ensuring that literacy remains a focus in Highline. We are literally working on this, every single person across the district. But here tonight, we have a few that represent different bodies of work connected to literacy and language development. Mr. Bernard Gutz, Executive Director of Student Learning, Ms. Katie Virga, Executive Director of Student Learning, Dr. Tanisha Brandon-Felder, Director of Pre-K and Elementary Success, Ms. Adina Thea, Director of Elementary Language Learning and Pre-K 12 Arts, and Dr. Laura Schneider, Director of Secondary Instruction. So to get us going tonight, I do want to start with a land acknowledgement. And this is familiar to all of us.
005And I see this opportunity that the land acknowledgement provides us to recognize respect and learn from the past in order to create a strong future. I want to share a timely connection. Yesterday, our central office staff joined others across North America in recognizing a National Day of Remembrance, also referred to as Orange Shirt Day. Staff members wore orange in honor of Indigenous children who were forcibly removed from their families and sent to residential schools. And in recognition of the lasting intergenerational impacts of this harm for so many Indigenous people in the United States and Canada. 417 residential school institutions have been documented by the United States Department of the Interior. This includes 17 in Washington State and 2 in what is now South King County. In addition to remembrance, Orange Shirt Day provides opportunity to
006reaffirm our values as outlined in board policy, as well as our commitment to creating educational environments in which every student's identity is respected and celebrated. And we hope that through some of the work in front of you and that you'll hear tonight, you'll see those connections. This work, as we know, is critical to deliver on our promise to know every student in Highline Public Schools by name, strength and need and ensure that they graduate for the future they choose. As you are all well aware, we have four board adopted strategic plan goals. And I think you will see explicit connection to our topic tonight, literacy and language development to each of these goals. We know that when students see themselves and learn about others through text, it supports a culture of belonging. We know that
007literacy and language development are foundational to being able to fully access learning experiences across all content. And literacy and language development across multiple languages contributes to students' ability to live, work and communicate across cultures and to ensuring students are prepared for a changing future. The big four areas, these big four areas continue to be a focus in Highline literacy, of course, along with language development represents one of the areas. Again, want to share appreciation for the board's support in maintaining these areas of focus in a world where there can be a lot of distractions and a lot of competing demands. I think any systems ability to maintain focus is always something to celebrate and appreciate. Specific to tonight, we want to continue thinking about the notion of learning from what's come before us and learning
008from and to design what's happening now and make plans for the future. We wanted to provide an overview for the board of research related to literacy development and language acquisition. We know that there's a lot out there in the world right now of information and we want to share in a very short period of time an overview of some of the research that guides our work. We then want to connect this research to current data, our efforts and the resources that we use in Highline. And then also knowing that it's the interest of board directors to be out and about in schools, want to make it really concrete and give examples of what you might see or hear related to our efforts as you are engaging with staff across the district. And with that, I'm
009going to turn it over to Dr. Laura Schneider to take us through a quick run through of a multi decades of research related to reading instruction. That better? So that's just a short little history tour through where we've been with literacy and reading instruction. There are decades upon decades of research and acquisition, but we also know that the teaching of reading, teaching of literacy is also highly political. There's been a lot of changes, shifts over the years in terms of what's prioritized. Hi. Kind of swinging back and forth between whole language instruction to scripted phonics instruction. And in the year 2000, the National Reading Panel was asked by Congress to do some research and provide information on what do we know from the research, from the science and what works best for helping students learn
010how to read. And so their report, which at this point is 25 years old, did outline some key aspects of reading instruction that need to be in place, particularly in the areas of phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, and oral language. And some key takeaways for us in education are that there needs to be explicit instruction and focus in those areas in order for students to really excel and learn to read. So the current sort of work that we're doing here in Highline is grounded in the science of reading. We've in the past done more work around balance literacy and are shifting more towards the science of reading approach, which anchors to evidence-based practices and includes a lot more systematic, explicit, direct instruction around some of the reading skills that are identified in the research.
011So it is a shift. And just to sort of get us all on the same page about what we mean by the science of reading, the definition here that we're drawing from the Reading League in 2001 is the science of reading is a vast interdisciplinary body of scientifically-based research about reading and issues related to reading and writing. The research has been conducted over the last five decades across the world and is derived from thousands of studies conducted in multiple languages. The science of reading has culminated in a preponderance of evidence to inform how proficient reading and writing develop, why some have difficulty, and how we can most effectively assess and teach and therefore improve student outcomes through prevention of an intervention for reading difficulty. So as we go through the presentation, you'll be hearing some
012connections explicitly to the science of reading, and we want to make sure that we're sort of clear on our approach, how it connects to that science, and then how we're enacting that. Hi, everyone. I'm going to give some perspective that both incorporates language as in language learning and literacy. So the science of reading literature and research has really grown and developed over the last 20 years. And so more recently, there was a study, actually multiple studies done with the schools that were implementing almost perfectly the science of reading. There were still students learning how to read. And so there's studies on what were those things. And so there's been a more current model that we've been using to really incorporate all of those components of the science of reading and later research to make sure
013that all of our students are learning how to read. And so this model is called the active view of reading. This is all the things that go into resulting our students really actively reading, reading voraciously at a level that point them to be able to choose that for the future they choose. So first, the first part of this is self-regulation. So before students can even engage in learning, they have to have motivation, they have to have engagement, and executive functioning skills. And so our cell department supports our district a lot, helping our students, supporting them to get to that point where they can really focus and learn how to read. Then the top part, third recognition, this is all the parts of the science of reading research that I think people are the most familiar
014with that has to do with phonological awareness, phonemic awareness, coding, phonics knowledge. It's all really, really important and students need to be directly in understanding. On the bottom part is language comprehension, which sometimes actually really was a part of the original science of reading research, but didn't get quite as much attention. And so that is students having background knowledge as well as content knowledge in the subject and understanding the language structure. And this is really, really important for all of our students, but especially for our language learners. They need to understand the structure of the literacy, the structure of the language. They need to have the background knowledge, the vocabulary knowledge in order to also access and become a reader. And then there's these bridging processes, which are in the middle and that has to
015be reading fluency and morphological awareness, which is knowing the parts of words like suffixes, prefixes, root words. And once you put all that together, we get readers. But it is a lot of different components and it's very complex, which means that our teams mostly together to make sure that all of our students are getting these components so that they can. So the next part is about, it's more about our literacy development for multilingual learners. So just really focusing on what multilingual learners need to become active readers. And so WIDA, which is the world class, even though I use that word all the time, world class instructional design and assessment. That is the assessment test that we give for our language learners to define what level that they are on. And it also has a set
016of standards for every grade level of language that students need to know. And so they have outlined five guideposts for literacy instruction to help educators support literacy development. And this is supposed to be part of core instruction. So as I read these, these really fit in with that active view of reading, that language comprehension portion of that. And it's building on students' cultural and linguistic assets, incorporating their culture into the literacy, incorporating their home language in developing that, which we also do through our dual language programs and after school heritage world language programs in elementary and in secondary, we also have language and dual language as well. Developing oral language skills through classroom interactions and discussions, expanding and strengthening vocabulary, word knowledge, word recognition, developing reading comprehension and academic literacies and fostering meaningful access to
017literacy learning practices, which is like really decoding the language of instruction. So we're going to talk just a little bit, part of our literacy is we have our dual language models and I could get really into that. I'm super passionate, but just know that our national data that we've been getting is that we are looking at still demonstrates that English language learners are demonstrating the greatest long-term achievement in the two-way language model. We have a K-12 dual language model and which means that all students have access to our dual language program. And what's really cool is that national studies as well as even looking at our own data shows that all of our population students are showing success in dual language. And so there are specific studies about special education students and students are shown
018to have the same or greater progress in dual language programs as in non-dual language programs with the added benefits of being bilingual. We have students that speak the target language, either Spanish or Vietnamese as their first language and it's a great program for them because they also get their home language developed which is great for learning literacy as well as native English speakers and students that are speakers of other languages at home like Mali, Dari and tons of other languages. And actually those students which many we call third language students that they're actually learning at least a third language are actually performing on par or better than the rest of students and then students of equal kind of status in our non-dual. So we are really excited and confident that it is a program that
019benefits all of our students and we're always trying to get better and seeing lots of growth. One more. Okay so this is our data for our English language program exit rate. So this is our strategic goal that measure 7B to increase the percentage of multilingual students demonstrating proficiency in English on the WIDA assessment within five years by five percent annually. We are not where we want to be yet but we are improving every year and so we have had steady growth from when we first started this initiative in 2021-22 school year from last year and we are aiming to get more progress. Okay so one of the things that we were going to focus on today as we talk about literacy is some of the results that we're seeing in some of the data that
020we're looking at in elementary. So on the screen right now you'll see literacy growth increase the percentage of students in grades K-8 who show at least one year of growth on iReady English language arts by five percent annually and the scale of this makes it look a little more dramatic than it is but when we look at 22-23 we're at 45% and then jumped up to 48% and then last year a dip down to 43% and so some of that could be a result of the cyber incident and having the students have their first assessment of the year six weeks later than usual and so it was measuring a shorter period of time like they had more before they took the baseline but we also want to investigate that deeper and look at what are
021other things that we can pull from the data to help us plan for future professional development and instructional pedagogy and so one of our initiatives in the student learning team in collaboration with MTSS is increasing the data literacy of our teams the data literacy of school leaders and the data literacy of teachers and then asking ourselves what are we seeing what is it telling us and what are we going to do about it so that's one of our focuses this year the overall reading proficiency by quarter for last year if you notice we did make progress in the overall proficiency from fall to winter to spring and and there are still significant numbers of students in yellow and red so it's our work continues but it's promising to see that growth as the year progressed
022and then when we look at the domain proficiency that actually helps drive some of our initiatives and work for the upcoming year so when we look at the level of proficiency in high frequency words and phonics compared to comprehension and vocabulary it tells us that we are doing and are going to continue to do that foundational literacy work around foundational skills but we need to pay more attention to the comprehension that that is supposed to lead to and so one of the things that we're taking on this year is a focus on writing and looking at the writing process and the comprehension levels needed and the rigor that goes into being proficient writers while simultaneously looking at the impact of focusing on writing to some of the reading measures that we also study so we've
023identified inference and vocabularies two places where we can measure across reading and writing and some of that was initiated by looking at this data all right so looking at the secondary scores for iReady when we look at our work last year in our middle schools for sixth seventh and eighth grade we see a six percent increase for students that are at mid or above grade level and a corresponding decrease to students that are well below grade level in the middle school grades and in high school we have notably a ninth which is really a celebration to see that much growth at the ninth grade our testing of kids in ninth grade is a newer practice to use this exam with ninth graders and to get that engagement and to continue to get students at this
024level to be motivated and highly engaged in their reading skills definitely a celebration and i think the result a lot of potential work specifically last year but really building up to that of really getting teachers and students talking about reading instruction at the school level and the you know the thought that kids learn to read then they read to learn and you're done learning reading is a misconception right that we're working on constantly trying to help everybody understand kids family teachers learning how to read and and is a continuous process and i think that's one of the celebrations and then our last slide just shows the kind of the trend data looking from sixth to ninth grade and what you see there if you follow those kind of color lines through you see that overall
025we're having kids be better by grade level and that's the direction we absolutely want to continue heading and also that there's there's those red lines are pretty big on the right so we know that we have any work to do and you're gonna hear more about what that work looks like it's queued up for our work for the rest and beyond so before we talk about strategies and professional development and work moving forward though we want you want to also name that one of the things that you directly support us forward is making sure that teachers have access to adopted materials and also providing supplementary supplemental resources that support so a number of years ago arc was adopted as well as iqd the american reading company at the elementary level i design the secondary level
026and a lot of work goes into curating those supporting their use working with teacher leaders at school level and implementing those according principles and ensuring that they're being used and we also have relationships with the with the publishers and go back and forth to understand updates they need to refiner supplementing that of course there's a number of different things that you might hear about that are resources that we use in school that are listed here a couple just to highlight are the calories product is a specific product that complements literacy development in our spanish arts program in sixth through ninth grade formative is a it's a newer product that we're using that really helps teachers get into understanding how students are doing on specific standards and is in is illustrating and i think in a
027different way in a new way with a lot of ease of how we can better target instruction and use that information to fine-tune what we're doing and of course those instructional materials that we get are aren't the whole story there's the also the part of our work it's about the practice and how we're engaging kids with the work and i think the an overall trend i think that you will see and hear is that there is a lot of focus on making sure that there's systemic instruction across the board that we're specifically intentionally teaching standards and using the science of reading to perform how we're how we're doing a few other highlights on this list um our uh secondary level really last year the one of the one of the headlines last year was really
028paying attention to our kids expected to be in techs and in asking that question in very intentional ways and raising that and raising the intentionality making sure the kids are directly engaged that's complemented this year by making sure that we're getting kids to talk text and make deeper meaning of it through account um another strand to really i think highlight through here is that um in order to help language be meaningful and literacy to be meaningful there's so much work goes into helping kids understand what the reading is about see themselves in the reading so reflected in that infinite meaning that's when we talk about thinking about the work that's listed there with guided language acquisition by design glad um is really about helping kids engage with understanding what a lot of work goes into
029that last but not least in this slide i'll just highlight um we do a lot of intentional work with helping teachers engage with data and helping kids um i could talk a lot about that and some exciting things happening with language learning but i'm gonna gonna so we had an opportunity to talk a little bit about some of the um priorities and focus that was happening this year um so i want to point out specifically what's happening for elementary so we are continuing our focus looking at foundational skills because we realize um that the need for explicit and systemic um systematic instruction is continuing to be important um so the foundation skills but looking at that um also through the lens of how we're looking at fluency and also reading comprehension so the three of
030those connecting so we're able to see um stronger outcomes with students actual reading abilities um the writing um as we introduced this year we know that writing is already been happening in our schools but doing some aligned um calibrated writing um opportunities and professional developments around the writing process or engaging with the writing process looks like um as well as looking at how writing response to texts um is available and then writing across genres um so then learning centers as a way to strengthen student engagement and also student um efficacy around their own learning when we think about how this connects to our literacy by literacy rich learning environment um and you have the graphics in front of you and many things that were already shared instead um are included in this infographic and the
031containers allow us to see what the literacy environment looks like so students are able to create and come into a space um where these are present and the attributes are allowing us to really think about the strategies in which we are um applying um literacy instruction and then the components of the actual literacy skills that we are wanting students to leave their experience their learning experience so um we have opportunities to see what this looks like in practice we're actually are starting our learning our innovative learning walks next week and some of the things we might be able to see um and opportunities for us to ask questions um are here for you so we might see um students working on a piece of writing or sharing writing during class time and we'd be able
032to see students applying their foundational skills to reading complex texts engage in content learning um you might want to ask or wonder are students applying the foundational skills they have learned um to be independent reading and do independent reading and also to engage in writing tasks and then our students authentically engage in reading and writing to promote lifelong reading and writing skills the goal is not to just be present but also to be um moving forward into in transferring these skills all right so um for secondary one thing i want to highlight is that when we talk about adolescent literacy we have to think a little differently about who who students are when they're middle school and high school students and what that means for their reading and uh as someone who's worked in literacy
033research in the field for 30 plus years i've talked to a lot of middle school and high school readers um one of the things we know is that kids bring in middle and high school a lot of life experience a lot of big sophisticated ideas they have a lot of social energy they really want to make meaning with their literacy and they also understand some things about power and the power that having uh being able to read use language and have literacy brains um what is the challenge for us in the teaching of reading at secondary is that we have a lot of kids who um i'll just use the ninth grade we have a lot of ninth graders coming in and teachers trying to work with them in the classroom and if they're three
034to five years behind in reading a lot of secondary teachers being content experts were not taught how to teach reading they don't know what that means in practice and i had a teacher really thoughtfully asking questions with irate data last week what does that mean when my kid comes to the classroom and i want them to read this technical text but i know that they're at a third grade level that the heart of the challenge for uh accelerating reading for middle and high school so for that reason um i do want to start with just sort of a shout out and appreciation to our secondary school leaders teacher leaders and and teachers because um they have really wholeheartedly embraced um this purpose and um we saw last year by the end of the year with
035learning walks a lot of reading happening in classrooms across the school day we saw teachers leaning into things they had not tried before really trying to make sense of data and where their kids are at so our priorities in secondary we have five targets you see three of them here target one is engaged reading and we started where um where we needed teachers to first be able to do some things that needed to get in place across the school day we needed to increase opportunities for reading and student time on text across the day not just language arts we wanted kids to be able to go to school and be reading throughout the school day part of that is because the research is clear that if we're going to accelerate kids reading they need 90
036minutes time on text 90 minutes is not going to happen in one classroom with a you know a single dip so we wanted kids to have that experience in fact reading all content area texts and and the range um and expertise that that built um so teachers embrace that we increase a lot of the reading um that was happening in all content areas the second target is explicit vocabulary instruction which we saw in the science of reading research um and you know making sure that there is direct explicit instruction of language words um across also across the school day and in content areas um that we're not taking that language for granted but really seeing the opportunities to help kids become proficient users of that language and this year um the other instructional focus um
037that we've added now um we have one and two underway is we want to see more kids engaging and accountable talk with their reading um and really work on integrating reading writing speaking and listening in their classroom experience very regular basis so that they're able to work their big ideas but also do that in a way that sends and accelerates their reading by making that really centered into text with one another um so we have just gotten that work kind of off the ground this year um i got exciting email um about an hour before we came in here and some of my team had gone out to a high school ninth grade classroom and videotaped kids sitting in a circle discussing a text um doing all these things that we're seeing here so um
038happening out there exciting um in terms of what we would see going into classroom um we should be able to see artifacts of vocabulary instruction on the walls and in content areas we know that language learners need visual access and repeated dosage of vocabulary um to learn that language um so we're trying to build that practice across classrooms um you should be seeing kids reading actively with a text in hand on a chart or something that they're visually engaging with um we should see them actively engaging about discussion uh about text and discussion with one another academic vocabulary and so that we were one of our big goals has been to really make that um thinking visible um either through what kids are writing with text how they're talking with text how they're interacting um
039and so we can we can ask about you know how is each lesson engaging students is reading and reading as part of their learning as bernard mentioned and how are students engaging in accountable talk with text um and it's it's a complex um ask that we have teachers to learn these practices so um we're just very excited that they're embracing that opportunity and we're growing um all right so our next steps in elementary this is these are our focus um focus points for this school year um in dual language we are having specific training for dual language teachers on teaching foundational skills um but through our holistic bi-literacy model which teaches the foundational skills but also spends time to teach the connections between the languages so spanish we would learn um compared to english how
040is the a sound different um or similar some sounds are the same some sounds are different some grammar things are the same some are different so it adds that component of metalinguistic awareness between languages and um has a scope and sequence that puts the two the letters of the two languages um together to save time as much um to compare the other initiative that we have um which has been um a practice we've been trying to develop for a number of years is implementation of GLAD um which is our language learning um acquisition structure that we have for all teachers k-12 and so in all classrooms this is these are strategies for teachers to implement that help all language learners access instruction so again like the pictures um have charts it's there's many other like
041vocabulary cards there's um an array of strategies that teachers can use to teach content depending on what it is that they're teaching so we continue with professional development um both at individual schools and then we have district-wide professional development and we are really working on um getting small group support implemented for multilingual learners in all schools um where we would really like support not just for our newcomer students which often get um those are students who've just been here a year or less um but also our students that have been qualified for multilingual services for many years um and often because they're able to conversate very fluently um the teachers think oh they're good and they don't spend as much time working to develop their language skills and so we have a specific target this
042year to really target um those students so the kind of middle upper levels of students still qualified um for language services with WIDA to really help push them push them forward so that they can really be thriving and reading of literacy um so one of the other things that uh is the next step for us in elementary is the balanced data analysis protocols reading and foundational skills in PLCs so we're working really closely with school leaders this year to um explore ways to engage their teachers in that um database decision making and um planning their their future instruction based on what they're seeing from the data they're gathering and we consider anything data if we can ask ourselves what are we seeing with it telling us and what are we going to do about it
043and so really bringing in the street data along with the map and the satellite data to to help people triangulate and really explore but really push to make sure that we don't leave without saying what are we going to do about it and so tomorrow at our instructional leadership session with the school leaders we're introducing a data analysis protocol that they can revise um to make sure it's an entry point for no matter where their teachers are that they can move forward but that an expectation is that all um teachers are engaging in this data analysis protocol a data analysis protocol and then the outcomes from that where they're planning whole group and small group instruction and for their focus students they will bring back to the teacher session in November and they will do
044some um intentional planning facilitated planning to map out in collaboration with their colleagues what to do about it and plan their upcoming unit we're building a lot of intentionality into our structures speaking of intentionality the other piece is building the capacity around instructional skills and um instruction specifically like how are we teaching foundation skills um so our standards based instruction cadre members which is our specialists our literacy specialists um our language learning specialists um and other content areas come together once a month for really specific professional learning on the coaching level and um that group last year came together and and created um a menu of many modules that are focused on foundational literacy skills um about 15 minutes each or they're able to take back into PLCs um professional learning um communities um or
045for staff meetings or for other just kind of smaller team meetings so they can build um casting understanding or what it looks like to actually um understand the foundational skills and then be able to teach them um the other piece that um we're doing is um launching um we're calling letters academy um which is um stands for language um essentials for teaching of readers for teachers of reading and that is really focused on really going into um the view the um active view of reading that adina shared earlier um and so there are um educators have a chance to kind of go deeper into their own understanding um of what it looks like to really explore the reading so there are some things that are in place and to help build our own internal capacity
046all right so um i'm gonna talk a little bit about what our next steps are in secondary and one thing i want to highlight too across k-12 is that the work that we're doing to engage teachers to continue practice is also all about you know how do we use so when we're talking about these different these different activities is in those those materials best um at secondary in a similar way to what my colleague described at elementary there's a number of different structures that we're using to um engage both teacher leaders and principals and directly with teachers to support that um coming up on november 3rd across across the system k-12 is going to be a big opportunity for us to engage all teachers in thinking about their literacy work in line with our inclusion
047work so that's going to be an opportunity um as well as uh teacher leader structures where teachers come together uh and department chairs can come together and all of those structures are about getting teachers aligned with improving practice and secondary specifically it really is around that accountable talk for reading goal is one of the big focus areas and with our leaders it's really about this second thing that you see up here in the bullet points it's about is about using is about using data in really effective ways and um helping helping staff engage with high quality tools formative is one of those that i mentioned before but also of course continuing to lean into iReady something another data point that we're using across the system k-12 is the use of elevation which you may recall
048we talked about a little bit last spring when we when we moved into using that tool and that's specifically helping our staff understand our language learners in a deeper way and track our work across the board with language learning but also too with a focus on our literacy goals um so in the coming weeks we're going to a couple other things we're going to see in in addition to that big date in november is we're going to be out doing learning walks and um specifically looking for those things and ongoing work throughout the year is also thinking about what are those additional supports for tier two and tier three and making sure that we're accessible to all of us across the system okay so that was a jam-packed 45 minutes of information for you all
049um i want to first just go back and revisit what we hoped to accomplish during um this presentation um one providing an overview of research um two connecting that research to our current efforts including the resources that we use in highline and three ensure that you all as directors um have a little bit more clarity of what this all might look like when you're out in schools and we do have about 15 minutes so i think we hit the sweet spot team well done for discussion and questions and i would invite um you know questions or thoughts or responses on certainly anything you heard today also importantly anything that you didn't hear and want to hear and those could be topics that we plan for continued engagement in the future if it meets the interest
050of support um so with that i will open it up for questions in this thank you so much dr reinegg uh directors any questions that you would like to ask director holley i just want to say thank you uh jennifer and team that was a great presentation i know there's been a lot of discussion over literacy over the past since i've been on the board and i know for a fact even before and i know your team is working extremely hard and diligent to to increase literacy rates and there are some great spots that you highlighted and i just want to say thank you especially to the teachers and the boots on the ground because this is a lot of hard work um and i think with the focus and dedication um we will get
051there so thanks thank you director holley dr espinosa one um and your report um there's a comment made data teachers know and um engage with student data but then you also mentioned having students know their own data and engage and i'm wondering what would happen or what happens with students i'm assuming it's in some form of empowerment of eight of agents in their own journey what happens so one of the things where where we've been working on at secondary is first of all we haven't really had data so bernard mentioned that um last year is the first year that ninth grade was able to use i ready so that teachers can actually see where how are my kids reading at grade level right um what's their proficiency um and so there's sort of learning to
052happen there around like understanding how does this help me better serve my students and um adjust instruction and also work with that data with my colleagues who are doing similar teaching in the classroom but the goal ultimately and what we're aiming toward is that um we were able to share with students and they're able to know like here's where i am as a reader there are some goals i have what i want to get better on here's how i'm going to be getting support with that goal during the school day right so that teachers have a way to plan um and partner with students around their own reading goals and um this year we're building um what's target three at secondary balanced reading assessment really trying to get folks using i ready well building in
053the use of formative which is more classroom based so that um teachers can have kids read a passage say in science in their classroom around what they're teaching get some data on how well did kids understand it and you know what evidence do i see of their standards and then kids can get feedback right away on how did i do on that and what do we need to work on as a reader but also having the supports in place for kids um so they have goals for their reading but they also have the support they need and they're able to really partner with educators so that's what we're working forward um and in some schools they're using i ready data with kids in advisory and doing some of that work already um but because we've
054just been slowly building out the assessments we need and the data literacy with our teachers um you know in a lot of places it hasn't really gotten yet into the hands of students but that's wanted to we had an opportunity um last spring to start asking students kind of like what their goals were around reading and our goals to go deeper with that um but some of the things i think it brings up especially at the um the p5 level is opportunity to start co-designing your learning with your teacher um and your educators which i think really it's like co-ownership so there's like a personal why um that's driving and kind of leading the student not the teacher but the student around what's their purpose around learning and so having i think connected where they're
055able to like look at that data whatever that data may be um and understand it but also be able to own it um hopefully would create a little bit more ownership around their learning which i hope would then go into like our motivation the one thing i'd add to all that is um this work that we're describing about engaging students with their with their data whether that's iReady or um their WIDA scores for language learning or a full class grade um one of the things that there's a lot of intentionality around is making sure that additions are in place for kids to be able to benefit from looking at that data kids have to understand the basic concept like what is this scale they they need to understand they need to feel motivated by it
056and they also need to be in a safe environment but it's important to take risks back closely so inherent in the work that we're talking about is a lot of intentionality across the top of this piece of paper is i think a lot of that could work thank you very much just um i wanted to hear a little bit more i'm excited to see Lao and secondary about the development of tier two and tier three reading support i think that's something new that um i know we keep hearing that you know some of our teachers in secondary are at times having a hard time because that's not been their foretale i mean they're in secondary ready some of their subjects and then they're getting at times stuck because now they're having to get back to
057engaging them and they're reading supports um uh and love that it's connecting now literacy with science and i mean that's always been there but i think i love that now we're putting it down in black and white like of course literacy it's in science it's in math and it's in everywhere right uh but um i feel like with the learning walks and and the collection of all of that uh data and now development of tier two and tier three is do we have like a starting point this is going to be happening like in one school and then it's going to be rolled out is it how is that going to be i love that question because it reinforces the interconnectedness of our four priorities so um you are aware that um multi-tiered system of
058support is a second priority that is absolutely in service of literacy development uh just yesterday we had a central office staff and our mtss implementation team i should be letting Katie answer this question but i but i thought i was a good learner um and we uh we learned a little bit about intervention menus that are being developed um across content areas and grade bands and and i think that's the tricky piece so um uh we need to know the what of those interventions but we need to understand the data to be effective in matching the interventions to the student needs and as bernard indicated earlier just as in tier one the tier two and tier three interventions are a mix of materials and practices it so there's not a one-size-fits-all all of this goes
059together to help us make informed decisions as practitioners about what's next for a particular student or group of um so it is complex work um but it's exciting to see how the pieces are coming together um in service of um so i also want to mention i'm working with the mtss team and i'm new so i get to be in a space of being a learner and also bringing in some perspectives and one of the things that i'm really excited about um as we continue the mtss work is yes there's these menus and we're looking deeply at tier two tier three strategies for um intervention but i don't want to exclude that from the tier one so one of the things that we're working on as we plan um for our small groups is that
060small groups can be tier one and you can differentiate within your classroom and do learning centers and other small groups without it being a tier two intervention also if you're planning for any tier two tier three interventions you need to embed that content into your tier one and through elementary we're driving that through our focus student work and so we don't say you have a focused student because we want you to pull them out and do these things separately we have focused students so we can say what do these students need in order to access the grade level content others will benefit from it but they need it and that's how you embed it into all of your tier one so it's both like you can do tier two tier three interventions but those skills
061need to be embedded within the tier one as well thank you thank you very much so you know literacy is our core is is our core and of what we do some of our community is is tough they're telling us that is not our priority but uh based on what i'm hearing based what i'm seeing as far as our evidence and data literacy is so i just want to make sure that um our community hears this is that the literary literacy is our core of what we do we don't have to spell it out we don't have to say it and scream it we're just doing it okay so so thank you for that um as everybody was talking i i was just reflecting back when i was younger i learned how to read i
062did but i didn't comprehend i i couldn't i could read the words i can i can say it but i couldn't comprehend so when i got to middle school it got difficult for me to understand what i was trying to read and the whole bit so it took me some time um i got help and and that helped me get to where i am at today um we shared about support of our teachers you know get into the secondary uh side and and our students aren't able to comprehend or read so what what kind of resources or what kind of uh professional development what does that look like for those teachers to to help our students we don't want to push them along but how do we kind of stop it right there and put
063some practices in play to help them what does that look like or do you want to talk about some of our second year and how um what they thought prior yeah i mean um so we're asking teachers to learn a lot of different things and we're trying to do that in a way that feels um doable and authentic right so last year when we worked on um engaged reading the structures we have um to use we had our did day our literacy did day at the beginning of the of the year last year um was with uh doug fisher and willy focused on how you build in reading across the school day and explicit vocabulary instruction this year the did day was with um dr jeff's three years um about how do we build accountable
064talk into classrooms so that every teacher got sort of introduced to what the core instructional work was um we then have a language and literacy cadre for secondary that i work with mostly every month includes all central office specialists and a school-based teacher leaders from the whole system and this year when we meet we're really working on how do we support teachers around accountable talk practice so we do some professional learning we do some planning for supporting adult learning we're trying to really build the relationship between central office and school-based um structures so that there's coherence um and then we have the um instructional leadership session days with our district um principals fun is tomorrow all right yeah i know i'm like ready and we're we're trying to build their um common vision and capacity
065for leading teachers so we've got a few layers of support um but we do need um you know to make sure that we're providing enough training for our teachers and there's a lot of moving parts with that um and a lot of that we have to have um our school leaders and schools well equipped to support teachers at the the school-based level for that um so that's kind of how we're approaching that work thank you for that um when when people think about training it's a one-stop you know i showed you something that's that's your training i thank you for sharing with me that it's the continual that you're building it upon it um and we're keeping on with that so i greatly appreciate that um you know at the state of highline dr gran
066was sharing with us you know the one year's growth how how can we use i ready as evidence to show our community that you know one year of growth is something that we should be celebrating with our students one year is huge yeah our community is saying that three three years a lot of our students are three years but you know that that one year we have to build upon that so what kind of evidence can we provide that would show that to reinforce that we are doing you guys are doing our our leaders are doing it can try and and the last minute or so that we have to answer that and i think you know the short answer is it's complex and the longer answer is um that we think about both proficiency
067growth but growth is what have the most um direct impact on we can't necessarily um control where a student enters whether it's a grade classroom or our system as a whole that we can't control how much we support them one year's growth is in my belief an expectation that all of us families community students teachers and those come to this space every day should have as an expectation a minimum expectation for all of our students um that the complexity and the is the is the simplicity of the the numbers that we show because when we talk about the percentage of students that are meeting one year's growth it's literally did they get a particular score um on that assessment and we all know that assessments are given at a moment in time and maybe i
068woke up late that day maybe um i am having a stomach ache whatever it might be and maybe i made progress i made growth but i came just shy of that target again that's one example and that's not intended to represent all of our students but that in that situation that would not be represented in the percentage of students overall who made that growth target so i appreciate the question and i think we can do some thinking together about ways that um in partnership with our families we um are communicating information not only about their individual child or their school but the the district as a whole about ways to make that information accessible but also really representative of the great work that um our students are doing um with support from the teachers that
069are supporting them um i know that last year we did a lot of work with our family action committee on making sure that the priorities that we are engaging in uh were communicated to families in ways that made sense and um this is could be another step for that so i thank you so much it will we're a minute over so just thank you thank you all for being here and sharing with us uh this is ongoing work like like i said and we'll stay in contact and just to see the needle move higher and higher so thank you with that so with that i would like to have a motion to adjourn make a motion we adjourn all in favor second yes okay we got a second i said okay all in favor aye
070any opposed yes you you don't want to lose okay thank you thank you all