School Models

In this section, I describe schools I learned about and/or visited that are using promising models to support literacy development for students who are not yet reading near grade level.

While no program I describe officially adopts the Four Resources Model for their reading comprehension instruction, the schools I highlight have the expansive view of literacy that is part of the Four Resources model.

Based on what I learned during this investigation, I do not feel that the empirical evidence I read clearly signals a particular model or program as the most effective pathway to accelerating the reading development of high school students reading below a sixth grade level. Instead, I found individual schools doing exceptional work with impressive student outcomes in terms of literacy and other criteria. Even for these schools, however, I was not able to obtain disaggregated data about the literacy outcomes for the students reading far below grade level relative to students reading closer to grade level. I was only able to observe and read evidence about overall success in literacy.

While I did not find empirical data signaling a particular model, I found a project-based model to be the most compelling model for English language learners. Please see the description of Marble Hill below as well as the project-based learning tab for more information about this approach. I observed many models of PBL for English learners, all of whom were not yet reading at grade level at the time of my observations. Unfortunately, I did not observe any schools using PBL in an intervention reading setting for native English speakers but believe the project-based model could also be effective for this group if significant effort is dedicated to ensure that the students receive explicit instruction in skills that they need to develop as well as the rich literacy opportunities that PBL affords.

Of all the schools I read about and observed during my sabbatical, two schools stand out as having significant quantitative success relative to other schools with similar populations: Marble Hill and Brockton High. Marble Hill stands out because of its exceptional achievement for English learners using project-based learning and scaffolding, and Brockton High School stands out because of its impressive whole-school literacy focus.

Whatever model or program schools select, I have learned that it is important that teachers have the autonomy to modify and adapt curricula and program models to suit their contexts. Curricular programs are resources and not scripts. Ample evidence suggests that schools need to adapt as well as adopt (P. David Pearson and James V. Hoffman, “Teachers or Programs?” From Research-Based Practices for Teaching Common Core Literacy, my emphasis added).

This “School Models” section (this page and the subpages within the page) contains the following:

• • Features of successful programs for ELs and description of Marble Hill

  • Excellence Through Equity: Brockton High School

  • Overview of School Visits and Descriptions: Please see the subpages within this webpage for descriptions of the schools.

  • Where and when of literacy instruction

  • Alternatives to separate interventions

  • Project-based learning: Please see the "Project-based learning" subpage on this site.

Features of Successful Programs for English Learners

One of the most helpful documents I read during my sabbatical was “Schools to Learn From,” (Castellón, Cheuk, Greene, Mercado-Garcia, Santos, Skarin, & Zerkel, 2015), an open source report published by Understanding Language (associated with Stanford University) that provides an in-depth description of six schools “that have demonstrated extraordinary academic outcomes for English Language Learners (ELLs)” (p. 2). The schools were selected after a rigorous evaluation of the outcomes of their English learners.

The Executive Summary on pages 2-4 of the report outlines shared school values and innovative school designs that the researchers observed across all six schools. While the values and school designs are focused on outcomes for English Learners, I feel that these same criteria could be extended to schools with a literacy focus for all students.

The following “shared school values” are taken directly out of the report (p. 3). The report includes additional details for each category.

• 1. The school puts forth an ambitious mission focused on preparing all students for college and career success.

  2. The school mission guides all decisions.

  3. The school holds a mindset of continuous improvement.

  4. The entire school shares responsibility for students’ success.

  5. The school is highly attuned to students’ needs and capacities.

  6. There is a strong sense of pride in and respect toward all cultures.

Schools to Learn From: How Six High Schools Graduate English Language Learners College and Career Ready

Also excerpted from the report, the following includes innovative school designs that are shared by all the schools.

• 1. Passionate, strategic, and mission-driven leadership.

  2. Strategic staffing.

  3. Ongoing, intentional assessment with follow-through.

  4. Intensive social-emotional support

  5. Unified language development framework integrating content, analytical practices, and language learning.

  6. Intentional, carefully-orchestrated structures.

  7. Strategic community partnerships.

Schools to Learn From: How Six High Schools Graduate English Language Learners College and Career Ready

Please see pages 4-5 for more detail for each of these.

Marble Hill

Of the schools in the "Schools to Learn From" report, I have selected Marble Hill to highlight because I think elements of their program would also be suited to native English speakers who have not yet reached the sixth grade reading level as well as English Learners.

The description of Marble Hill can be found in Schools to Learn From on pages 132-166. Some key elements of the school features that support the exceptional student achievement the students are experiencing are the following:

• 1. Instructional focus: project-based learning, inquiry learning and scaffolding

  2. Assessment focus: performance assessments and portfolios

  3. Administrators' focus: instruction

Please see the project-based learning sub section within the School Models page for more information about project-based learning.

Excellence Through Equity and Brockton High School

In addition to Schools to Learn From, I also found Excellence Through Equity (2016), edited by Pedro Noguera, to have ground-breaking information about school reform related specifically to literacy.

Excellence Through Equity: Five Principles of Courageous Leadership to Guide Achievement for Every Student (Blankstein & Noguera, 2016)

In Chapter 1, the then principal of Brockton High School outlines the staff’s efforts to turn their school around through a grassroots focus on literacy. What is remarkable about their improvement is that they did it with minimal additional resources and with such a large student body. Brockton High School has over 4,000 students and has had tremendous, sustained academic success. Please see Chapter 1 of Excellence Through Equity to read a complete description. Below, I have outlined some aspects of their literacy plan.

In each classroom, teachers post literacy charts that display the cross-curricular connections in reading, writing, speaking and reasoning. The following chart is an example that I found online that matches the chart published in Excellence Through Equity. Additional charts are available online using the following search terms: literacy charts, Brockton High.

Brockton High provides concrete examples for how educators can collaborate and change the outcomes for their students in significant ways.

The following are some of the topics covered in Brockton’s professional development sessions for the teachers to first learn themselves and then to teach the students:

• • Using active reading strategies

  • Analyzing difficult reading

  • Reading and analyzing visuals

  • Analyzing graphs and charts

  • Developing speaking skills

  • Checking for understanding

  • Problem-solving strategies

  • Helping English Language Learners Achieve

  • Teaching Vocabulary in context

(p. 41)

One of their “lessons learned” is that “to achieve excellence through equity, the focus needs to be on adult learning, not just student learning (Noguera, p. 42).” The teachers did not simply provide professional development about these strategies and then leave teachers to monitor on their own. Instead, teachers worked collaboratively to create and use common assessments and to review student work regularly and to “establish consistent standards for all students” (p. 42).

This blog and article describe the way Brockton High achieved so much success.

https://andreagabor.com/2011/09/30/a-school%E2%80%99s-decade-long-literacy-obsession-and-how-it-transformed-brockton-high/

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/28/education/28school.html

The following blog and responses includes critiques of descriptions of “miracle” schools such as Brockton High that use approaches that some believe are not scalable and/or require inordinate amounts of uncompensated time on the part of teachers:

http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/Bridging-Differences/2012/12/working_within_the_constraints.html

School Visits

I visited ten schools, based on recommendations from colleagues and from searches online, Please see the subsections of this webpage for more information. For the site visits, my purpose was to identify best practices rather than to evaluate individual schools or programs. I believe all of the schools I visited and described in this section show promise. Please see the following links.

• • East Side Community: extensive outside reading, homogeneous, double period English class in 9th and 10th grade for all students, no separate intervention programs

  • MS/HS 223: use of complex texts, specific time for intervention programs for all students, limited separate intervention classes

  • Flushing International: project-based learning, scaffolding, portfolio assessment and use of complex texts

Note: The report Schools to Learn From created by Understanding Language that I have referenced multiple times on this website came out after I had already planned my visit to the East Coast. Hence, I was not able to visit any of the schools described in Schools to Learn From.

When and where does the intervention take place?

Throughout my sabbatical, I repeatedly encountered debates, discussions and tension between models that embed literacy instruction into class content and those that offer separate intervention classes (while also embedding literacy into the content areas). The following is a an exploration of some of these approaches as well as a brief commentary about class size.

Class Size

Separate intervention classes can take many forms, and there are costs and benefits for each model. What is clear is that the class size has to be significantly reduced for intervention classes to be effective. Every study I read about intervention classes and every intervention class I visited had significantly reduced class size. In California schools, where the class sizes are already too large, in my opinion, I am concerned that raising class size for content classes in order to reduce class size for intervention classes will only make it less possible for content teachers to integrate robust, personalized literacy instruction for students who are reading far below grade level. Yet not reducing the class size for the intervention classes likely will result in the intervention classes being ineffective and possibly more harmful than helpful. The funding per pupil in the schools that I have highlighted (all outside of California except for two descriptions included in the phonics section) is often twice that of the funding per pupil in California. Looping and coring (ELA/literacy blocks or humanities blocks) are two ways to reduce student contacts; reducing student contacts is one way to increase the likelihood that teachers can know their students and their strengths and areas for growth in terms of literacy. However, these approaches are not the same as having smaller class sizes.

Pull-out classes

I was not able to visit any pull-out intervention classes (groups of two to four pulled out of classes for intervention) in high schools. In fact, I was not able to locate any pull-out programs at a high school level until I recently spoke with an instructional coach from Oakland Unified. Oakland Unified is using the pull-out model extensively at a middle school level. I have spoken at length with a teacher who works as interventionist at a middle school level at SFUSD. Both the SFUSD educators and the Oakland educator with whom I spoke reported significant success at a middle school level with the pull-out intervention. In Oakland, I understand that the high school intervention pull-out program is not fully off the ground and has had inconsistent results. I believe students are pulled out four times a week with an interventionist in groups of three to four, and the interventionist teachers are highly trained and supported. The programs are costly given the teacher: student ratio and training. In addition to being quite costly, pull-out classes create master scheduling challenges, particularly at a high school level. That said, for students who are reading far below grade level and for whom other intervention programs have not worked, very small group and one-on-one programs may be necessary. Funding such programs without compromising the success of other programs poses a significant financial challenge for districts.

Assuming districts can find the funds to provide intensive reading support for the most at-risk students, one possibility for one-to-one or pull out classes is a version of Reading Recovery for high school. Reading Recovery is a highly successful program at an elementary school level. While I have not read reviews of any Reading Recovery programs for high school, I have discussed the possibility of modifying Reading Recovery for high school with academics and practitioners, and those with whom I have spoken and I feel that the model has potential to support students who need intensive interventions at a high school level. I predict that successful development and implementation of such a model would require significant resources over a long period of time. With existing school budgets and class sizes in California, I feel that a Reading Recovery program at a high school would have to be provided with additional funding for schools.

Responsive Literacy Instruction (variation of Response to Intervention)

William Brozo, in RTI and the Adolescent Reader: Responsive Literacy Instruction in Secondary Schools, challenges the basic premise that the RTI model used in elementary schools is relevant to high schools and points out that minimal research has been conducted to verify the approach for high school.

He provides recommends "responsive literacy Instruction,” using the same acronym of RTI that stands for Response to Intervention.

In Brozo’s words, responsive literacy instruction

• • views adolescents as a resource

  • occurs within comprehensive literacy programs

  • provides special supports, but not always special settings

  • includes more than a curriculum of basic skills

  • comes from effective teachers who have knowledge and practices to address struggling adolescents readers’ needs.”

Brozo, p. 105

Alternatives to Intervention Classes

One problem with separate intervention classes is the stigma that often goes along with being placed in one. By definition, students are in reading intervention classes because they lack certain skills. In other classes, students take classes for graduation requirements, or they take a certain class or sign up for a program because of a career interest or talent. Intervention classes are for students who struggle in reading. This positioning for an adolescent is difficult, and the impact on one’s identity a reader is undeniable. Another challenge that secondary literacy experts acknowledge is the transfer of strategies from intervention classes to mainstream classes. During preliminary research, one researcher with whom I had an phone conference has found that even if students can enact strategies in an intervention classes, they are not always able to transfer this knowledge to their content classes. Her research has not been published, and therefore cannot name her at this time.

I have observed that the positioning for recent immigrants in ELD classes is different than the positioning of long-term English learners and native English speakers in terms of how they feel about being in intervention/specialized (ELD, LEP) classes. My experience has been that most recent immigrants recognize the benefits of receiving additional support as they simultaneously master high school content and learn a new language. Thus, I see the challenge of students taking intervention classes year after year particularly difficult for long-term English learners and native English speakers.

Since being placed in intervention classes at a high school level year after year can be discouraging, I suggest some alternatives to a separate intervention classes.

When considering alternatives to traditional intervention classes, educators need to put special thought into the instructional design of classes and classroom placement for high school students who have the intellectual capacity to read yet have not mastered basic decoding skills. I personally feel that these students need a specialized reading class with an expert reading teacher. In our district, this class takes the form of a System 44 class co-taught by a special education teacher and a reading specialist. SIFE students may also need additional classes in addition to ELD/ELA classes. In Reading for Understanding (2012), Schoenback, Greenleaf and Murphy explain while too often secondary intervention classes focus on decoding, "a small percentage of students may actually need help with decoding skills. These students, however, require intensive, precisely targeted, individualized support specific to their carefully assessed needs, provided by highly skilled teacher, and lasting no longer than necessary" (p. 7). I believe it would be difficult to teach students foundational reading skills (decoding) within the context of some of the alternatives I suggest below.

Please note that I have not found comparative research studies looking at literacy outcomes for striving readers comparing separate intervention classes with some of these embedded models.

Double Periods English/Literacy

Some school have a double period (English and elective) for all students, and the students are grouped heterogeneously. One advantage of this model is that the students who most need the additional literacy time receive it without feeling stigmatized by taking an additional literacy class that other students do not have to take. If the teacher appropriately differentiates, all students will benefit from this additional literacy time. Since the class is a core class, teachers have fewer student contacts. I believe that reducing class size is important, but, if it is not possible, reducing student contacts could enable teachers to more effectively address literacy needs. East Side Community has a double block for all 9th and 10th graders, and they use the extra time for differentiated literacy activities related to the core content and/or extensive reading.

Intervention Time for All students: Literacy Period

Another option is having an intervention time for all students. MS 223 uses this model. Please see the separate tab about MS/HS 223. Different students receive different supports during the same period time, but everyone has a time set aside for literacy support and development. Similar to the double period for all students, this model reduces the stigma of being in a support class. Also, similar to the double block of literacy (essentially two English classes) implemented at East Side Community, this model requires an additional class, or the class replaces another class. .

Looping

A number of schools making significant progress in literacy use a looping model. These schools include Marble Hill, Flushing, other schools in Schools to Learn From, Hillesdale High School, and some private schools. Looping provides many obvious benefits; with looping, teachers get to know students’ learning styles, families, strengths and areas for growth over a period of two years, and the teacher can therefore better modify their instruction to meet the needs of particular students. In theory, looping does not cost any additional costs in comparison to reducing class size and/or adding an additional class. The biggest "costs" are teachers' time (having to alternate preps from year to year) and adding complexity to the master schedule. Teachers also save some time since they save time getting to know students and parents. Looping alone would not be sufficient for students to accelerate two to four years of reading growth in one year, but looping in combination with afterschool and/or summer programs could be an effective approach.

Team Teaching: Reading and Content Teacher

Brozo mentions the model of a reading teacher team teaching with a content teacher (p. 127). I could envision this model being particularly effective if the team teaching were to take place in a science class where literacy might not otherwise be emphasized. Students could be clustered in classes with a maximum of eight students with reading difficulty per class, and the reading teacher might be able to serve two or three classes. This model might not require any more funding than a support or reading class. Schools would need to evaluate such a model closely to ensure that the students’ reading levels increase. This model might need to be combined with additional support after school. Since time reading is a significant factor for students' reading development, the team teaching approach would have to result in the student doing more reading overall in the school day. Most intervention models involve more time for students to read via an additional class. Since this model does not involve extra time, the time in class would need to be used differently. If the additional teacher only helps provide access to the content, this will be beneficial in terms of the students' content knowledge but not necessarily in terms of their literacy development.

Afterschool, Weekend and Summer Literacy Support

A detailed evaluation of afterschool and summer programs was not possible given the scope of this website. However, a number of schools in the Schools to Learn From report included summer, weekend, and afterschool programs as part of their programs. For example, Marble Hill has a flourishing Saturday school. Providing literacy support (and language development) after school and on weekends or in the summer allows students to participate in the full range of coursework offered during the school day and receive the specialized support outside of regular school hours. While I think this model has potential, providing essential skills development for students outside of regular school hours poses inherent challenges. One of the greatest challenge is that highly trained teachers are needed to teach these classes and/or supervise the literacy instruction, and it could be difficult to find the appropriate staff to teach it. One possibility would be for schools to offer such support as an eighth period class with a credentialed teacher.

SES Supplementary Educational Services is a government program that in the past has allowed students to receive one-on-one tutoring in reading and other subjects. Since one-on-one and very small group tutoring has been instrumental in supporting elementary-aged students with reading difficulty, this program could provide an opportunity for high school students to be able to receive similar supports. One-on-one tutoring is extremely expensive and appears to be prohibitive within a school's standard budget. SES tutoring could be a way to support students with the greatest difficulty with reading with high support (one-on-one tutoring). The SES program is currently in transition, and I do not know all the details.

Partnerships with Literacy Centers

I have not done research on official partnerships between literacy centers and schools, but many non-profits provide intensive literacy support and training for volunteers. Project Read is an example of an exemplary non-profit working with high school students and others.

Project-based Learning and Blended Learning Models

Project-based learning and blended learning models using online reading programs could be integrated into any of these models. Please see the Project-based learning tab in this section for more information about Project-based learning.