Targeted Reading Instruction Certification and Coaching Processes to Increase Capacity for Sustaining High-Quality Reading Instruction

• In Event: An Ecological Perspective on Supporting At-Risk Readers in Rural Elementary Schools

Abstract

Rural teachers may be uniquely positioned to support students, as they are often intergenerationally connected to families and students (Barrett et al., 2015). Fostering teacher-student connections through one-on-one instruction can yield further benefits, leading to higher teacher efficacy and student reading growth during early elementary school (Varghese et al., 2016; Vernon-Feagans et al., 2018). To improve teachers’ differentiated instruction for young readers with diverse needs, many districts employ literacy coaches to provide teachers with face-to-face feedback and ongoing support. Yet, in-person coaching is resource-intensive, particularly in rural districts with highly-distanced schools. This project examined the two-year application of Targeted Reading Instruction (TRI) in a rural community. TRI, a literacy PD program with embedded remote webcam literacy coaching, is comprised of daily one-on-one instructional lessons enacted by the classroom teacher with an individual student. In each twenty-minute TRI lesson, teachers use activities to build children’s fluency, decoding, oral language, vocabulary, and reading comprehension, and children have made large gains across studies (Vernon-Feagans, 2013, 2018).

This project explored TRI certification and coaching processes that would allow teachers to take ownership over TRI and increase their schools’ capacity for sustaining high-quality TRI implementation and coaching. In the first year, TRI’s university-based coaches provided TRI training and weekly webcam coaching with all 24 K-2 teachers in the district. Year 1 teachers who implemented TRI with high frequency and fidelity and who demonstrated capacity for leadership were asked to become certified on TRI and to act as TRI “Facilitators” during the second year. In the second year, the seven selected Facilitators were meant to continue TRI in their own classrooms while also providing TRI training and coaching with K-2 teachers at their respective schools (Aiken et al., 2020). Our research question asked whether Facilitator status and/or participation year were related to students’ residualized reading gains, hypothesizing that Facilitators, particularly in their second TRI year and receiving continued TRI support, would be better positioned to promote their students’ growth.

Data for this study were collected from four elementary schools in a small “rural-distant” (NCES, 2017) school district during 2016–18. Outcomes were school-collected progress-monitoring data (DIBELS) for all students receiving TRI during the first or second years (N = 115) and whose teachers participated both years (N = 17); see Table 1 for descriptive information of schools, students, and teachers as well as fidelity of implementation data. Multiply imputed hierarchical linear models, accounting for missing data and nesting of students within teachers, was used to test the above hypothesis. As shown in Table 2, Facilitator status, participation year, and their interaction term were not significant in predicting spring DIBELS scores. Thus, across the 24 teachers, students receiving TRI appeared to show reading growth regardless of whether their teachers served in a Facilitator role. More work, including explanatory sequential mixed methods, will follow these analyses to unpack how Facilitators may have been able to effectively support their peers’ TRI implementation during the second year and the potential challenges in doing so.

Authors

• Mary Bratsch-Hines, University of Florida
  Presenting Author

• Heather Aiken, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
  Non-Presenting Author

• Cheryl Varghese, University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston
  Non-Presenting Author

• Eleni Zgourou, Kean University
  Non-Presenting Author