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Literacy Strategy for School Leaders

School leaders set the vision and create the circumstances for success in early literacy at their school sites. That involves utilizing data to understand the needs of students and teachers, setting achievable goals, and building the capacity and commitment of the team to work together to achieve them. And school leaders play a vital role in helping staff understand that 95% of all students can become proficient readers.

Leaders must build their own understanding of early literacy in order to be a more effective coach and support the team with the tools and resources they need, while also recognizing that achieving success in a school-level reading initiative takes time and involves continuous improvement along the way.

Goals of School-Level Reading Initiatives

Experts suggest that all school-level literacy initiatives should focus on three goals:

  1. Improve overall levels of reading proficiency. 
  1. Ensure that all students make at least expected yearly growth in reading ability each school year.
  1. Accelerate struggling readers’ development to produce substantially more than one year’s growth in reading ability for each year of instruction.

Creating a Literacy Action Plan for Your School or District

Across these key goals, leaders must create a school-level literacy action plan. Arizona’s Move On When Reading legislation requires all districts and schools to have a literacy plan in place for serving students effectively in grades K-3. Schools can choose to extend their literacy action plan beyond third grade. 

Experts highlight three key areas of focus for school leaders: 

  1. School Leadership Activities

The school leader must commit to improvement and convey a sense of urgency to school staff about school literacy improvement. The following activities have been commonly observed where schools have launched and sustained improved literacy efforts.

  • Establishing a school literacy leadership team. Leaders create a leadership team that includes key teachers and other staff who are critical to changing the school’s literacy outcomes. This group helps the school leaders create a culture of literacy. This team analyzes current school weaknesses, strengths, instructional efforts, and professional learning efforts. In addition, the team makes decisions about which consistent instructional strategies the school should utilize across all classrooms.
  • Staffing plan to meet the needs of all students. Typically, this involves ensuring that the school has reading specialists to provide interventions for struggling readers. 
  • Scheduling to meet the needs of all students. The literacy leadership team must review the school schedule and determine when time is available within the school day for providing the intensive interventions needed for struggling readers. In addition, schools should determine how to emphasize reading across the school day (lunchtime, homeroom, etc.).
  • Professional development plan. Providing job-embedded professional learning is critical for success. This might include hiring reading coaches, establishing grade-level reading study groups, peer modeling, and attending professional learning sessions. And school leaders should attend professional development sessions.
  • Administrative oversight and supervision activities. To ensure implementation fidelity, school leaders must visit classrooms and reflect back areas of success noticed as well as areas for more growth. Check out this great resource for conducting class visits as a walkthrough to observe specific research-based practices during literacy instruction in grade 4–12. 
  • Prioritize communication with families. Move On When Reading requires communicating to parents when their student is struggling with reading at the stage when they are identified as being well below-grade level. However, regular and transparent communication with parents and caregivers on how their child is doing with reading is key to achieving success and so that the best services and interventions can be identified and deployed to support struggling students. 
  • Sustaining implementation of the literacy plan. The change process is difficult. Therefore, successes should be celebrated. The role of the principal and the literacy leadership team is to identify ways to regularly celebrate and reward student, teacher, and school-level literacy accomplishments.
  1. Using Data to Guide Instruction

Establishing and overseeing an effective plan to collect and use student performance data to guide instructional decisions is another primary leadership responsibility.

  • Reading assessments. The kind of assessments needed depends on what the school wants to know related to overall planning and resource allocation, as well as how to provide relevant instruction to all students. Middle and high schools commonly use outcome assessments, screening measures, progress monitoring assessments, and diagnostic tests.
  • Data management system. Data collected from assessment tools must be presented in a usable format so that staff can discuss and make decisions.
  • Decision-making meetings. Leaders and teachers need to participate in regular meetings throughout the year to evaluate school-level data and evaluate student progress. School leaders’ attitude toward data and their consistent use of data in evaluating instructional progress and instructional needs sets the tone for the whole school.
  1. Appropriate and Effective Instructional Materials

Ensuring that teachers have useful, effective materials to support their instruction is the third major aspect of the role of school leadership in advancing literacy outcomes.

  • Using books to enhance literacy instruction. Teachers, disciplinary and reading specialists need a variety of books, written at different levels of difficulty, to support students’ instructional needs.
  • Instructional programs and materials. These include material and products specifically developed to help improve students’ reading skills.
    • Schools need to provide reading specialists with a strong, research-based intervention program based on a structured literacy model that incorporates a scope and sequence, explicit and direct instruction, and opportunities to practice using appropriate materials.
    • Disciplinary teachers and other staff may need supplemental materials and programs for support in how to provide more effective instruction for their students.
    • If carefully and strategically used within a comprehensive and teacher-guided instructional process, computer programs can provide more practice opportunities for struggling readers.

School-Level Strategies to Support Struggling Readers

Beyond the important early literacy years of Pre-K to grade 3, it is important to identify strategies to support struggling readers in grades 4-12. According to the What Works Clearinghouse Practice Guide, Providing Reading Interventions for Students in Grades 4-9, goals for supporting struggling readers in upper elementary, middle, and high school include: 

  • Building students’ decoding skills so they can read complex multisyllabic words.
  • Providing purposeful fluency-building activities to help students read effortlessly.
  • Routinely using a set of comprehension-building practices to help students make sense of the text.
  • Providing students with opportunities to practice making sense of stretch text (i.e., challenging text) that expose them to complex ideas and information.

Schools that truly commit to supporting struggling readers should hire reading specialists who provide specific intensive interventions based on the needs of those struggling readers. These students fall into two major categories:

  • Readers who are perhaps one to two years below grade level and who primarily need reading comprehension support.
  • Students who have severe and pervasive reading difficulties and likely need support with reading accuracy (decoding) and all of the other comprehension support.

Within these broad categories, older students may vary greatly in both the causes and manifestations of their reading problems.

Boardman, et al., (2008), make the following suggestions when schools are seeking solutions to better support struggling adolescent readers.

  • Adjust the focus and intensity of interventions according to individual student needs.
    • Assessment practices must support the identification and progress monitoring of specific needs.
    • While some students require interventions that can be carried out in content-area classrooms (e.g., supporting vocabulary learning in a science classroom), others need instruction better suited to small, intensive learning environments (e.g., learning word-recognition strategies).
    • Targeted support is most effective when provided in well-planned, regular small-group sessions over a long period of time.
    • Middle and high schools need reading specialists to provide focused and extensive support to students with more significant reading deficiencies.
  • Offer teachers in general education classrooms professional development and support in providing class-wide interventions in reading. 
    • Considering the number of struggling readers in secondary classrooms, many recommended practices can and should be implemented in grade-level general education content area and literacy classrooms.
    • Vocabulary learning, reading comprehension strategies, and attention to reading motivation support all learners. However, general education, content area teachers commonly need support to learn and integrate these instructional practices.
    • While all teachers can play a role in improving adolescent literacy, not every teacher plays the same role. Administrators must lead schools in sorting out who is responsible for providing the various aspects of reading instruction, when these practices will occur, and for whom.
  • Create ways for general education teachers and specialists to collaborate.
    • Coordination of instructional practices is especially important for students who receive additional support in smaller intensive settings.
      • For example, a student who is learning to use a summarization technique in a reading classroom should be encouraged to apply these skills in their social studies classroom.
      • Likewise, a student who is learning specific vocabulary in science will have a greater opportunity to increase their understanding when they are given support and practice with the same vocabulary words and instructional techniques in the reading class.
    • Collaboration is also necessary to coordinate program-wide decisions and implement reading instruction.

Sources

RMC Research Corporation, Center on Instruction, Boardman, et al., 2008, Effective Instruction for Adolescent Struggling Readers: A Practice Brief.

National Association of Secondary School Principals, 2005, Creating a Culture of Literacy: A Guide for Middle And High School Principals.

RMC Research Corporation, Center on Instruction, Torgesen, et al., 2007, Improving Literacy Instruction in Middle and High Schools: A Guide for Principals.

Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, What Works Clearinghouse, Vaughn, et al., 2022, Providing Reading Interventions for Students in Grades 4–9.