The Teacher's Role

After safety, the most important job of K-3 teachers is to assure that children read at or above grade level by third grade. You are the reading delivery team. Children whom you teach to read early and well generally excel in school.
Teachers deliver 85% of their curriculum using black boards, computers, and books, and we expect students to understand all of it. Yet, the 1 in 4 students who enter fourth grade reading on a first or second grade level understands less than half of that curriculum. Lacking the fundamental skill of learning, these students fall further behind every year in every class that requires reading.
Classroom teachers who have worked with high reading goals for a while generally make the following observations:
1. Expect significantly more focus on coordination. To successfully teach the lowest 25% of students, elementary teachers must function as a team with a common purpose and well-defined roles. Anticipate increased contact with the rest of the staff as well as peer accountability. Each person on the team is dependent upon success of the others. No elementary school can assure that at least 90% of its students read at grade level if their teachers, no matter how individually excellent, work in isolation or as individual providers.
2. Prepare for more training. The first solid element of any building reading plan is to assure that the classroom teacher is trained and skilled. This means not only more staff training, it generally means school-wide training.
3. Expect increasing focus on reading. This translates into a school-wide reading focus, includes the greater use of displays by librarians, charts at home to measure family reading, and increased use of volunteers.
4. Anticipate an increased emphasis on "learning." This requires a willingness to re-teach and re-test in tighter cycles, expanded repertoires of assessments, more nimble instruction, and softening of rigid schedules. For some students, 90 minutes of direct reading instruction must increase to 180 minutes and 270 minutes. Schedules must accommodate it.
5. Prepare to cut heretofore sacred things. We cannot continually add. Pre-school, ESL and kindergarten teachers may have to significantly decrease time spent on social skills to focus on academics. Pet projects may have to go. For some students, doubling or tripling the amount of time spent on direct reading instruction means cutting time spent on other academic subjects or classroom projects.
6. Expect moves out of the silos. Music teachers can teach reading.