(Transcript of the March 13, 2002 Broadcast)

Transmitted via New York 's Public Broadcasting Stations, produced by the New York State Education Department and the New York State Satellite Broadcast Network; recorded at the studios at Bulmer Telecommunications Center, Hudson Valley Community College.

For additional information, call or write:

John Quinn
Room 668 EBA
Office of Curriculum and Instruction
New York State Education Department
Albany, NY 12234
(518) 474-3954
E-mail: jquinn@mail.nysed.gov

(Music)

>> Rochelle: Hello, and welcome to today's "Tools for Schools." I'm your host, Rochelle Cassella.

"Tools for Schools" are produced by the New York State Education Department's Broadcast Network and the Office of Vocational and Educational Services for Individuals with Disabilities, VESID. By showing exemplary instructional practices from classrooms throughout the state, programs help school administrators and teachers assist students to meet the New York State learning standards. This month we present Part II of our series on creating a balanced approach to literacy instruction, focusing this time on efforts to help children with disabilities and at-risk students learn to read.

As we visit our schools today, you will see how they are successfully using our six Tools for Schools. Research has shown that using these tools helps all schools achieve success no matter the school's location, its size, the financial situation or its student demographics. Those tools are: Responsive leadership, ongoing staff development, engaging curriculum, flexible resources, involved parents and community, and comprehensive planning. You'll find more details about those tools in the Facilitator's Guide that accompanies today's program.

Following a 1998 reading symposium, NYSED'S Office of Elementary, Middle and Secondary Education and VESID adopted the Early Literacy Profile Assessment. This tool assesses several components that all good literacy programs should have. Those key components for literacy success as outlined by the early literacy experts who presented at that symposium are:

Phonemic awareness: That every spoken word can be broken down into individual sounds.

The ability to decode: Effective instruction identifies strategies for decoding words.

Fluency: Reading automatically without constantly stopping to decode words.

Number four: Background knowledge, including vocabulary.

Five: Comprehension, reading for understanding a story's main idea and its details.

And six: Motivation to read, a continued interest in reading for a variety of purposes.

More details now on those elements from Dr. Donna Scanlon of SUNY Albany's Child Research and Study Center and who was a presenter at the NYSED symposium.

(Music)

>> A good reading program should include assessments that will allow teachers to identify what kinds of materials the child is able to read, an appropriate array of materials that will allow the teacher to put individual children in material that is appropriately challenging. It will have an emphasis on helping the children to develop strategies for reading connected text, which includes strategies that make use of the code but also strategies that make use of the context cues to sort of direct and check their decoding attempts.

(Music)

>> The first thing we need to try to work with them is that they have a reason to want to read and to write, and that means that we have got to engage them in listening to good books and reacting to good books, and that's probably the first place that we need to start. The children need to be engaged in listening to and reacting to lots of books. In doing that, they develop vocabulary that will be important for supporting comprehension throughout their school careers, comprehension of written instructive materials as well. They also develop background knowledge that will allow them to make sense of new information. We all learn best when we already know something about what it is that we're learning about, so the more we work to develop that background knowledge from the vocabulary and then show the children how the code works so that they can access that information themselves, the more likely they are to be successful.

It's also important that children, any child who is acquiring literacy skill be given materials to read that represent just the right amount of challenge.

(Music)

>> First they need to understand that written language represents the sounds in the spoken language. That means that they need to become sensitive to the fact that speech can be broken down into a variety of smaller elements that are not meaningful but that are important for them to understand how the writing system works. It's typically referred to as phonemic awareness or phonemic sensitivity.

That phonemic sensitivity is assisted by the children becoming familiar with how the alphabetic code works, that the letters in written words represent the sounds in spoken words. So the children sort of simultaneously need to become sensitive to the fact that spoken words have sounds but also that the letters in written words represent those sounds.

Ideally, by the time the child is in a preschool setting, they're beginning to understand some of the basic components of how the writing system works. They begin to learn about directionality. They begin to understand that it's the print rather than the pictures that one attends to if one wants to read the author's words.

(Music)

>> Comprehension, the ultimate goal for reading, is clearly dependent on, obviously, being able to identify the words, but also being able to identify the words comfortably, fluently, without having to devote a lot of cognitive energy to figuring out what those words are.

(Music)

>> We can go wrong, if you will, with helping children to become literate by emphasizing certain aspects of the process before other aspects are understood by the child. So, for example, if we just went in and, for example, taught all the letter names and taught them about the sounds and the children really hadn't developed a real enthusiasm for books, chances are the kids wouldn't be as interested in learning about these more technical parts of the reading and writing process.

>> Rochelle: Research has shown that all of these elements must be present if young children are to learn to read. Does this also include children with disabilities? Do they learn to read differently? And if so, do they need special strategies during their instruction? Dr. Scanlon and Dr. Frank Vellutino conducted a study on early reading difficulties and the impact that good instructional practice has on struggling readers and students with disabilities. I spoke with her about the findings.

>> The belief was that children who struggled with learning to read, basically that there was something wrong with the child, if you will, that there was something different about that child that made it difficult if not impossible for that child to learn to read. We thought that that was a reasonable question, that you can't legitimately identify a child as learning disabled if you don't know that it's not an instructional problem.

So what we did, starting about ten years ago, is begin some research looking at the instructional influences on reading development for children who were at risk of experiencing reading difficulties. In the first study, what we found was that if children who are going at the beginning of first grade with acquiring reading skills were provided with daily one-to-one intervention to support their literacy development but that met the children where they were, meaning a good analysis was done of what they already knew and an instructional program was developed for that child based on his current needs with regard to reading and writing development, and if the children were provided with that kind of program for 15 to 20 weeks, the vast majority of children who were at risk or who were actually experiencing some difficulty made great gains, came up to a level that was in the average range.

In terms of the kinds of instruction that they need, it's not necessarily all that different, with the possible exception that some children, many children who have difficulty learning to read have more difficulty becoming attuned to the phonological aspects of language. So we might need to place more emphasis on developing phonemic sensitivity for children who are struggling with early reading than we do with kids who don't have any difficulty.

What's different is that they need a more intensive program and they need a more individualized program. Perhaps ideally every child would have an individualized program, but we don't have the luxury of doing that. But certainly the children who struggle the most probably will benefit the most from having a program that's specifically structured to meet their individual needs. But those children who struggle and need that assistance with becoming phonemically aware need also to be engaged in lots of reading of good books and in writing about the things that they are doing or reading about, partly because through the writing they actually make use of the phonemic sensitivity in a more explicit way that will ultimately turn around and assist their reading development.

The ideal is that children who appear at risk or who are actually demonstrating some substantial reading difficulty would get support services that meet their specific needs as early as possible. The study that we're recently completing suggests that starting in kindergarten with kids who are at risk is more effective than waiting until the kids are in first grade. The schools are concerned that 10, 15, 20% of their children are identified with reading difficulties, reading disabilities. We found in that study that the children that we worked with, which constituted the lowest 15% of children in the school, of that lowest 15%, the percentage of children who still had significant, severe reading difficulties after 15 to 20 weeks of daily one-to-one intervention was only about 15%. So 15% of the 15%, which calculates out to only about 1 to 3% of the children in a typical school might have difficulties that were severe enough and that -- to qualify as reading disabled.

>> Rochelle: In order to support efforts being made on behalf of students with disabilities, VESID established its Reading and Math Improvement Initiative. Schools meeting the criteria -- high need, low-performing, high classification rates and low English language arts and math assessment scores -- were given a three-year grant and parameters to follow with one goal in mind: To improve the achievement of all students in reading and math, particularly students with disabilities, and to increase student performance on the E.L.A. and math assessments.

Rita Levay, Manager of Special Education Policy for NYSED's VESID, said the participating schools had several common problems that needed to be addressed.

>> A lot of these schools had real difficulty aligning their curriculum to the New York State learning standards. That had not happened yet in English language arts. And it hadn't happened for a couple of reasons. One is that because many of these districts were high-need districts and they may not have had the staff that had the expertise on how to do that or the funding that allowed them to do that over the summer, extra time to do that. So that hadn't really occurred.

The other thing we found was difficulty in using data, to make changes in instruction and not only at the classroom level but at the school level and at the district level.

The other area was strategic planning, knowing how to bring all of the pieces together in a plan that made sense.

The other thing that they told us that they really needed was instructional leadership. So one of the areas was how can we provide instructional leadership so that when a principal or someone, an administrator that goes in and observes teachers, can also help them, mentor them, give them the assistance they need and can bring that research into practice right into the classroom for kids?

>> Rochelle: Along with the funds and guidelines, VESID offered the 37 participating schools considerable technical support. Many of the schools are in the second year of their grant, but the results already being reported are dramatic.

>> 62% of the districts have seen substantial growth. School 86 in Buffalo was a school building that in the year 2000, they had 93% of their special ed kids scored at Level 1 or 2 on the fourth grade E.L.A. In 2001, they have 80% of their special ed kids scoring at Levels 2 and 3, and 40% of them are at Level 3.

In Cuba-Rushford, we have seen some amazing changes in just the achievement of kids. On Levels 3 or 4 on the E.L.A., they went from zero percent in 1999 at Level 3 or 4, up to 25% of their special ed kids scoring at Level 3 or 4, which was really above the average mean or the mean for the state.

In Cortland Central School District, we had, for students with disabilities, on the fourth grade E.L.A. in 1999, only 42% of their kids scored at Level 3 or 4, and this last year, 65% did, which is above the mean for general ed kids. So what we had was special ed kids performing better than general ed kids did at Cortland.

When we took a look at the results for general ed kids in these districts, the general ed kids did better as well.

>> Rochelle: They are wonderful results. How did they do it? Well, we'll see in our visits to several of the schools who participated in the reading and math improvement initiative. One of them, Cuba Elementary, where they created a new level for young students who are a little bit in between. In Rochester's School 14, it's a combination class. And at a Manhattan school that's part of New York City's District 75, it's giving students with disabilities a lot more of the same lessons that their general ed peers receive, just as Dr. Scanlon recommends.

And before we leave today, we'll find out what's next for the schools who are taking part in the Reading and Math Improvement Initiative, and we'll give you some Tool Tips to boost your early literacy programs.

Since Rita mentioned the Cuba-Rushford School District, we'll begin there. It's a small, rural district in southwestern New York State that has seen an impressive improvement in the number of fourth graders meeting and exceeding New York State standards in English language arts. School administrators say there are several factors that contributed to student improvement in reading at Cuba Elementary, one of them the fact that the school received a grant as part of VESID's Reading and Math Improvement Initiative.

After noting a high number of retentions in its early grades, Cuba Elementary used a portion of the VESID funds to create a new grade level, something the school calls intensive first grade. Above kindergarten but not quite first grade, the class is not just for students with disabilities. It's actually part of the district's strategy to delay classifying students for as long as possible. Intensive first grade at Cuba Elementary is for any student who may not be ready to handle first grade reading levels. The non-stop class emphasizes the development of reading skills, using many of the elements that our reading experts say belong in a good early literacy program.

>> Let's start with A.

>> We started intensive first grade here at Cuba-Rushford four years ago.

>> We were retaining quite a few students. We felt that we needed a transition grade between kindergarten and first.

>>... R, S, T, U, V, W.

>> Because the students come to us not prepared to read, visually, auditorily.

>> Now I never will forget how to sign my alphabet

Excellent job!

>> It was my job to design a curriculum where these kids would thrive and become successful. I took a lot of teaching experiences that I have had, took programs and kind of meshed them together and came up with a mini-curriculum.

I find that my learners need lots and lots of repetition in order to master skills. A lot of kids come in with skills but they're not able to perform them at a mastery level, and that's what I'm looking for. So I need to find ways to rehearse those skills in new and interesting ways.

>> What letters did you use, hon?

>> O and P.

>> The blindfold activity that you saw this morning was very interesting. I use that whenever I introduce a new letter and new sound.

>> Now, I'm going to say a word. Your job is to listen for the beginning letter sound in the word that I say. If you hear "puh" first in the word, you're going to give me one clap. Let's practice that now.

(Children clapping)

>> They have developed wonderful coping skills because they have been unsuccessful in kindergarten, and they tend to follow their peers a lot, to watch their peers. The blindfold is there to help them, first of all, take all of the visual stimuli away from them and concentrate just on hearing the sound. But it's also helpful to me as the teacher because I can immediately see which kids are able to hear that sound in the initial position.

>> Think about the word "piano." Think about that one. Show me if you hear "puh."

(Children clapping)

>> Excellent. I'm going to say a word. The word that I say is going to have "puh" in it. You have to listen and you have to decide, "Do I hear that "puh" first in the word or do I hear it at the end?" Now, if you hear it first in the word, where will you jump, Jeff? First box. Let's practice that now. Show me where the first box is. Jump. Excellent! Now, stay right there. But if I say a word where you hear "puh" at the end, where will you jump? Show me now.

>> My kids need to be able to become efficient decoders, efficient readers. And in order to do so, they need to be able to hear the sound, the beginning, medial and ending position in words.

>> First word I want you to think about is the word "pizza." Think, jump.

>> They're required to hear the sound in position. The jumping game is just a gross motor kind of activity that helps me rehearse that skill. I'm looking for not only accuracy but hesitation. Does the child know the sound in position and is that child confident enough to jump as soon as I say "jump," or are they standing back, kind of hesitating, watching their peers and then jumping into the correct square? If they're doing so, then I know that they don't have mastery in that area.

We use the pond game to practice encoding or spelling types of activities.

>> Okay, Jeff. The word that I want you to jump on is the word "cat."

>> Not only the jumper is engaged in the game, but the peers usually are as well. If a child is erroring or is hesitating, I have had some of their peers reach out and touch the correct stepping stone so their friend can jump on the correct one. Out of the pond. Okay! No one has fallen in yet, Mr. Cedar. Okay, now, I'm going to make these tougher. The target sound I need you to listen for this time will be the middle vowel sound in the words I say. Vowels are really, really hard to hear, so you need to concentrate and listen for the middle sound. Think about this first word. Think about the word "pop."

>> Pop.

>> Show me which vowel you hear in the middle of "pop."

>> The ring game that you saw this morning was to help the kids practice medial vowel sounds. Most of my pre-first kids, when I received them in September, had very poor sound/symbol relationship skills. Most of them knew about one-third to one-half of the consonant sounds and very, very few of the vowel sounds, if any at all. In intensive first, we word-build every day and we do it in different ways. Now, today you were able to see us word-build with the magnet boards.

>> Kristin, Spell it, hon...

>> C-O-D.

>> Excellent. And let's change "cod" to "sod." That's that grassy word. Sod. Can you spell "sod" for us?

>> S-O-D.

>> We word-build with shaving cream. We word-build with tiles. I have playing cards that we word-build. They need that practice on a daily basis.

>> How do you spell "hop"?

>> H-O-P.

>> Got it!

>> By varying those activities, I'm able to keep them involved.

>> Okay. Now, we have to put all of those letters and the sounds that we know into use. We're going to start reading now.

>> I do a lot of comprehension work. The stories are decodeable. All the words that are presented in the story have been formally presented in class through the keys, word families, such as at, cat, rat, sat..

I also identify all of the sight words. We call them "brain words" in intensive first grade, and the children know the brain words in the story. Not only are they able to read them but they're able to sign them. The sign language has really facilitated their learning of the sight words.

>> Now that we have reminded ourselves of those brain words, let's tuck those away. I'm going to give you your story.

>> At Cuba-Rushford, we determine which kids will come to intensive first in a couple of different ways. Obviously, the input from the kindergarten teachers, that's invaluable. They're the people who know the children best in a school setting. They dialogue with the parents throughout the year. It's the parents and the teachers who work together to come to that decision. Once a list of potential students is developed, those parents are given an opportunity to come to my classroom and observe. So far, I have never had a parent who's actually come in and observed who has declined the idea that they should put their child in my class. Every parent has opted for the intensive first.

>> "At the rat."

>> In kindergarten, my son Nicholas was having some problems, wasn't keeping up with the rest of the children, had some problems with the concepts that they started to introduce later in the kindergarten year.

We talked about the intensive first, that that would be an option for us because she felt that it really wouldn't do Nicholas any good to retain him in kindergarten because he did do well with some aspects, but other aspects he was having difficulty with. She told me about the intensive first program, that it was a stepping stone to first grade, which just introduced the concepts more slowly to him. For some reason, I didn't think that he would do as well as he did. I was just amazed on how well he came home and how Bonnie just made it so easy for him. She takes different concepts and presents them in a different way, where it just seemed to click for Nicholas. At the end of the intensive first grade program, he was reading books on his own. He was reading books to us instead of us reading him books.

>> "Bam! The pan nabs the rat."

>> I love that. Very good.

>> Rochelle: You'll also notice in that class that they work on math skills as well. Lots of times when the kids were putting the Cheerios on things, they were building graphs.

Until just three years ago, the Rochester City School District conducted lessons for its students with disabilities in self-contained environments. Now the district is full inclusion. At School 14, an elementary school in the heart of the city, inclusion takes on an added dimension. Not only does it mean students with disabilities are included in classes with their general ed peers, but it also means first graders are included in the same classroom as second graders.

The combined first and second grade of 60 students is taught by one second grade teacher, two first grade teachers and a special education teacher. It wasn't planned that way; it just came about. But it fits in perfectly with the school's emphasis on developing strong reading skills.

>> The program that we have, the language arts block is two-and-a-half hours long, and that's at every grade level. They spend approximately an hour and a few minutes on reading and another hour and 15 or 20 minutes on writing. The students have all had their reading levels assessed using running reading records.

>> Okay, sweetheart. Where are you going to start reading?

>> The teacher sits individually with the child. The child reads a book to her. The books are all leveled, meaning that they begin with the very early books, where there's only one word on a page, where the students are using picture clues, et cetera, up to where there are multilevel sentences, et cetera. The child moves on until he hits a level of frustration.

>> You know what this word says?

>> Yes.

>> What? We know what this one says. We have been reading it all along. It says, "luu..."

>> Love.

>> Love. What is this? "Mmmm..."

>> "Me."

>> And this...

>> "Too."

>> Yeah. So what do you think this --

>> "They love me, too."

>> The teachers are trained to know when a child has made so many mistakes in the reading and what kind of mistakes. So, for example, the teacher will be keeping track of whether the child is making mistakes with beginning sounds, whether the child is making mistakes with medial vowels, and when they have made a certain number of errors, that's the level they stop at and they need to do the instruction at that level.

>> Today we're going to start a new book. First I want to ask you what do you know about sheep? What is this page called? The --

>> The title.

>> The title page. Good job. Excellent. What does the title page tell us?

>> Everyone wears wool.

>> It does. "Everyone Wears Wool," that's our title, right?

>> Before they start, they usually do an alphabet rap, and the alphabet rap is based on our belief and also on research that the children need to understand the sounds before they can actually apply them to the reading.

>> "Sss" \\M "S," salamander "S." \M\M

>> So we're working on phoneme awareness and getting them to use rhythm and rhyme to associate the letters and sounds with a specific cue, for example maybe W for watermelon. So when the teacher is working with the child at a later time and the child is having trouble coming up with a middle sound or a beginning sound, she will refer back to the rap. She might say, "wuh" like in watermelon. And the children have had the visual clues and the auditory clues, and hopefully they will come up with the right letter and sound.

>> One day, we... what did we do?

>> We jumped on the trampoline.

>> Okay. Write "we." "Wuh..."

>> The language arts program, you'll see, is divided into two components. One is readers' workshop and the other is writers' workshop. If you walked into readers' workshop, you would see all the students in the beginning of readers' workshop gathered in a whole group activity. That would be a mini-lesson on a strategy or a skill that is needed at the grade level or perceived to be needed by the teacher at that point.

>> We're going to put on your apron, Miss Chef. Whoops. Okay, pull something out. Let's see what your picture clue tells us. What is that?

>> A carrot.

>> It is a carrot. Come over here and show these boys and girls your carrot.

Let's see if Nicole found it. I hope you were looking with her. Nicole, did you find a word that starts with a C? There you go. I see a C at the beginning. Put a carrot up there.

Boys and girls, eat your carrots. Nice job!

>> Then they break into guided reading groups. In a guided reading group, you'll see a teacher sitting with three to four or five students who are all reading at the same level that has been assessed in the running reading records. The children are grouped according to the level, and they could be first and second graders together, could be first, second and special education students. What's common is the level they're reading at.

>> What is "schema," when we use our strategy?

>> It's something that you already know.

>> You went on a picture walk. What do you already know? What is this story about?

>> I know he's going to save some fish.

>> The teacher is reading with them, she's having the students read independently and reading aloud individually to her as they're taking turns so that she can not only give them the practice they're needing but also she can tune in to helping them with the skills and the strategies. If it's predicting, she'll ask the child to predict what's going to happen. If it's a word strategy, she'll say, "Now, when you decoded this word, how did you know it says that?," whatever skill they're working on.

>> Point to the W.

Did you notice there were two W's? Charles noticed there were two W's. Christopher did. So did Asia and Tamara. Nice job!

>> The test results show that our students are really growing rapidly. We have gone from overall as a school having the lowest English language arts scores to last year on the E.L.A. we are scoring in the top ten schools and we have made the state index for what is required to meet the standard at fourth grade.

>> We all love the alphabet.

>> All: We all love the alphabet!

>> Rochelle: School 14, also known as Chester E. Dooley Elementary, saw a 41% increase in the number of fourth graders meeting the state E.L.A. standards by scoring at Levels 3 and 4. That increase came from 1999 to January of 2001, and the jump helped put School 14 on the state's list of most improved schools.

Our last school today is the Emily Dickinson Elementary School. It's in Manhattan's upper west side. Emily Dickinson houses the inclusion program for District 75, which is New York City's special school within the city's Board of Education that serves students with severe disabilities. Here we visit Lisa Whitehead's first grade class. We see a literacy lesson that includes some word study, some letter/sound recognition and using phonemes to build words. We also hear about the accommodations that Lisa makes to ensure participation by two students with disabilities.

>> The little red hen.

>> All: "Who will help me make the bread?" asked the little red hen. "Not I," said the duck. "Not I," said the cat. "Not I," said the dog. "Then I will do it myself," said the little red hen. And she did.

>> We were doing what we call our shared reading and word study time, and we were reading together the book "The Little Red Hen" which we have read for several days now and worked on various things each day. Today, we were looking for "red words," what we call sight words we have been studying for several weeks, and identifying those and giving opportunity for the students to look for those words in the text.

>> This is what word?

>> I'll.

>> Good job, Alex. Thank you for sharing everything with us.

>> Now, Nina's going to point out, Tarin, red word "you." Find red word "you," Nina. Great job. Excellent!

>> You also saw part of our word study which is sound/letter recognition. We were working on capital Y this morning, writing that in our handwriting books.

>> Okay, now this is fun. This letter is really fun. You get to start -- you start at the hat line, right to the belt line. Watch. Then you start back up to the hat line, and then you are going to go from the belt line down to the writing line. What do we call this letter, Simone?

>> Y.

>> And you can also call it capital Y.

>> You also saw us practicing the letter pattern for capital Y and using the phonemes, the sounds that we have learned so far in the classroom, to build words.

>>... that you drive in. It's big. You can fit a lot of people in it. Samantha, what word am I thinking of? Good, van. Come up and make "van." Okay. Samantha is going to look for the first sound in the word "van." Good. Okay. Look at your word. Everyone's arm is up in the air. Here we go.

>> V... ah... nnn, van. Super job, Samantha. Have a seat. You did great work.

Get a crayon, one color, and put it on the start dot of your Y. You may start now.

>> I teach the first grade curriculum, so obviously that's geared towards, you know, middle of the road, the average student in first grade. Of course there are some higher learners and some students that are still trying to get up to your typical first grade level.

>> On the start guide, remember this is a slanty letter. From the start guide, stroke down to the belt line. Now, I told you next step is to go slanting back up to the hat line. Go from the belt line down, and say...

>> All: Capital Y.

>> Good.

>> The students that are able to do the work and are ready to go the next step forward, whether it's during that direct instruction time or later in the day, I give them more opportunities to go the next step, to take that skill a step further. If it's sight words that we have been learning, some students might be able to go off and build sentences with those words, do their own free, independent writing, where I might still be working on sound/letter correspondence with other students during the guided reading time.

>> Last start dot on this page... good. Start dot down to the belt line. Back up to the hat line. Pick up your pencil and go down to the writing line. What do we say?

>> All: Capital Y.

>> To meet the needs of students who are able to do the typical first grade work, I give them enrichment-type activities. For example, if it were a reading activity, I would give them the appropriate text and then maybe an assignment that would aid them to practice their skills, comprehension, sight words that they're looking for, building sentences, that sort of thing. And then students that are still working up to a certain reading level, who may not even be readers yet, I work on sound/letter correspondence, work on looking for sight words in a text and how to read a text...

>> Beautiful! Good trying. I like that. You can do it.

>> Cecilia and Max both had accommodations made for them so they could participate in the lessons.

>> Good job.

Did you do your work? Now what do you get to do?

>> Bounce.

>> Way to go. You get to bounce.

>> Both of them had their individual books of the big book that we were reading so they could see and attend and focus on the task at hand. They also were given one-on-one attention so that they could remain involved and get the support that they needed.

>> Come here, sweetie. This is what we're doing. Cecilia, look at my yellow card. You're looking for this letter. It makes the "yuh" sound. On this page, look for the letter. What letter is this?

>> "Yuh."

>> And what's its name?

>> Letter U --

>> Y.

>> Y.

>> Good. Look for the letter Y that makes the "yuh" sound. (Whispering:) It looks like this.

Excellent job. You found the letter Y. And the word -- Alexander, what word is this? It's one of our red words.

>> Red word you.

>> Excellent. Good job. Cecilia, thank you. You did good work!

>> In my classroom, the children with special needs, especially Cecilia, enjoy being an active participant in the classroom. When she is able to participate in an activity with the class and be able to come up in front of the classroom and the other students and perform a skill and do it well, she gets extremely excited and she's very happy and enjoys tremendously to be able to come up and be a leader in the classroom.

>> Let's do that. No...

>> No that the...

>> Excellent. I am very proud of this class. You guys did great reading!

>> Rochelle: As you have seen, many schools benefitted from VESID's Reading and Math Improvement Initiative. VESID continues to provide support as these schools move into the second and third years of the program and look ahead to what might be available to them under the Federal Reading Excellence Act. Here's Rita Levay.

>> The other thing they needed was more help in how to collect data and use it well in the district. It's one thing to talk about it. It's another thing to do it. Also they wanted more visits by reading and math specialists, so that's something that we need to provide through the state. Also, an annual conference for their administrators on instructional leadership issues. When we design reading and math initiatives, one of the things that we made up our mind to do was to make sure it was not a parallel kind of activity, that in fact when the department applied for R.E.A. and applied several times and then we got the award, we wanted to make sure that these districts were positioned in such a way that they could move right into an R.E.A. application, and they have already done a lot of groundwork. Next year, there will also be some Reading First money. Again, these districts are prepped well: Research to practice, data-driven, mentoring, professional development... all those things will put them in good stead for that.

State Improvement Grant Districts, that's another initiative in professional development. Again, there's a fit there and that fit is intentional. One of the things that's critical is that we develop partnerships really between districts and institutions of higher ed where they each learn from each other. In other words, an institution of higher ed can certainly bring the research and a lot of information and knowledge in teaching methodologies to a district, but a district also really is a wonderful laboratory and has experience in the learning standards that can then feed back into the preservice training for an institution of higher ed.

>> Rochelle: What are some of the steps you can take in your school to make sure your early literacy program is on the right page, so to speak? Well, here are some Tool Tips from individuals who participated in both parts of our programs on a balanced approach to reading.

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>> Through the use of staff development, through the BOCES, we built more capacity to allow the teachers to become more self-analytical as to what they needed to do to make the product better. We also brought in the BOCES teachers and assistants and aides that worked with them so they were not separate and apart from our school product. We all worked together as a team.

>> In the ideal situation, they would be able to provide their teachers with extended professional development. Ideally, teachers would have a good, solid grounding in the theory of reading development, what it is that children do as they go through this very complicated process of becoming literate. That ideally would consist, for example, of a workshop where the theory would be discussed and where teachers would learn about techniques that could promote literacy development.

>> Make sure that you have provided mentoring for teachers, that if you're going to provide some training for teachers, which we all know that if we really want to bring research to practice, we all need training; we all need some additional work. If you're going to do that, you can't just provide that training in the summer; you have to provide some mentoring for folks throughout the year.

Take a look at your data. If in fact you have your fourth and eighth grade assessments, you should be looking at that data not only in terms of those individual students but what does it tell you about your program? Are there areas that you should be looking at in your program, K, 1, 2 and 3, that may influence that fourth grade assessment, that may help improve those results?

>> As the first round of testing came in, the teachers had already been geared up to look at the writing process within the building. So when I arrived at the district in my previous position of coordinator, they had already started the process of looking at student work and looking at what they had to do to achieve those standards in E.L.A.

>> The program that we have, the language arts block is two-and-a-half hours long, and that's at every grade level. They spend approximately an hour and a few minutes on reading and another hour and 15 or 20 minutes on writing. And then again, that's only during the language arts block. They also use a lot of the leveled text and other reading in the content areas which goes on in the other half of the day.

>> It's also critically important that children, any child who is acquiring literacy skill, be given materials to read that represent just the right amount of challenge.

>> A print-rich environment encourages them to just be taking in and reviewing and revisiting everything that they have already learned. So the word wall would be for words that we might have introduced in a story or they may have been writing or maybe were learning about a map, north, south, east, directions. And that goes up on the word wall, constantly reinforcing what they have learned and what they have talked about. So they do need to see it visually as well as hearing it verbally.

>> What I like to do is draw a picture of whatever the word is. For example, this week, we're doing B. So a student would say "bat." And I would write their word and draw the picture, so in this way they can connect the picture with the text, and if they want to use that in their writing or in their reading, if they sign the word back, they can look at the chart around the room and say, "Oh, B-A-T, that says bat."

>> Having this extended time period allows the students to show the consistency not only during the school day but over time. And the consistency of the format and the design that we use is consistent from one grade level to the next, so the children do not have to relearn rituals, routines, expectations of what they're going to do during readers' and writers' workshop. It continues all the way up through.

>> We have a common thread that runs not only through the fourth grade but also to the eighth grade and into high school for the Regents courses. As all of us know, the middle school is having some difficulties with those assessments, but we have the same kind of analysis that's done not only at our primary, at the fourth grade, but also as part of the middle school and high school Regents.

>> It's important for a second grade teacher to know what a first grade teacher is teaching, to know what a third grade teacher expects, to make sure that a child is moving through the continuum towards the benchmarks and the learning standards.

>> There has to be an informal assessment process within classrooms so that teachers aren't waiting five months to identify kids that need help. All of us who have taught in classrooms know that you know when kids are struggling, and you need to provide that assistance very quickly.

>> As the children get further and further into their academic careers still struggling, a variety of other problems arise. One is that they feel unsuccessful and they're likely to believe that they are unsuccessful and therefore why engage? In addition, the people who have responsibility for the child -- the parents, the teachers and so on -- begin to see the child as one who is "disabled," and if you believe that someone is disabled, the efforts that you put forward to help that person accomplish this task at which they are disabled may actually be diminished, and so the expectations for that child are lowered the longer he experiences difficulty.

>> A lot of things I do with the children who are struggling, it's exactly what we're doing with the whole class but a step lower. We might focus on the particular sound that we're doing that week or the letter but work in a small group, and it's just a lot more individual attention. If a student has difficulty writing, I may write out what they dictate to me, whatever they want to write about the picture that they drew or the story that we read, and then they can trace over the words.

>> Rochelle: That brings to a conclusion today's presentation. My thanks to Rita Levay, Dr. Scanlon, and to all of the students, faculty and staff of the schools we visited while preparing our reading program. We appreciate their willingness to share their school day with the Broadcast Network's video crew.

If you would like a copy of the Facilitator's Guide that accompanied our two reading programs, please go to the Broadcast Network's web site where the guide can be downloaded. You can find us on-line at:

www.cnsc.nysed.gov/ciai/satellite.html

And while you're there, please take a moment to check out our on-line survey. It will take you just a few seconds to complete and it will help us a great deal as we develop future programs.

If you would like an additional copy of this video, we at the Broadcast Network suggest that you start by checking with your school librarian or media director first as many of them have a tape on hand. If not, contact us at the Questar III offices of the Broadcast Network, and Suzanne Carroll will provide you with one. You can reach Suzanne by telephone at (518) 477-6749. By fax, (518) 477-4311, or you can E-mail her: scarroll@iii-mail.questar.org.

We will be back in April with a new "Tools for Schools" program for you. In "Effective Models for Transition Planning for Students with Disabilities" we will review for you some recent changes in regulations regarding transition plans for students with disabilities aged 14 through 18. We'll see a meeting of the Committee on Special Education as members discuss post-graduation plans for a student. We'll visit with some students who are making preparations for their lives after high school, and we'll take a look at two stories of success: Students with disabilities working in the community and going to college. That's Wednesday, April 10th, 3 p.m. on your local PBS station.

We do have a schedule change to announce for May. While we were originally planning to bring you a program dealing with the NYSED requirement that schools include a character education curriculum, our plans now call for another program dealing with reading. This edition of "Tools for Schools" will focus on the new program that New York State will put in place using federal Reading for Excellence Act dollars. New York is receiving some $82 million under the R.E.A., and "Tools for Schools" will bring you the details of how those funds will be divided and how schools should use them. That program airs Wednesday, May 8th, also beginning at 3 p.m. and again on your PBS stations.

For everyone at NYSED's Broadcast Network, I'm Cassella saying thank you and good-bye.

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