Checking for understanding: administrator-led efforts for developing teachers to deliver evidence-informed reading instruction
Date
2025
Authors
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
There is a century-old debate surrounding reading instruction that has been termed “The Reading Wars” (Kim, 2008). In 2022, the Pennsylvania General Assembly passed Act 55, a piece of legislation focused on school districts providing their teachers with professional development on the Structured Literacy (SL) approach to reading instruction. This Education Leadership Portfolio (ELP) aimed to address the problem of teachers having too little understanding of reading development by enhancing teachers’ understanding of reading development and, ultimately, their reading instructional practice. Three improvement strategies were enacted to foster this enhancement: (a) understand teachers’ knowledge of reading development, (b) design and pilot a professional development series to enhance teachers’ reading instructional practice using the Science of Reading (SoR) principles and the SL approach, and (c) evaluate the initial implementation of the professional development series pilot. Data collection included surveys, observations, and interviews to learn about what informs teachers’ reading instruction, their understanding of reading development, and factors that enable or hinder teachers’ ability to implement evidence-informed instruction in their classrooms. Results suggested that teachers had increased awareness of SoR principles that undergird the SL approach, which illustrated a shift toward data-driven systematic and explicit reading instruction. Results also demonstrated increased student achievement in foundational skills based on Pennsylvania assessments. Overall, this ELP underscored the importance of an administrator’s role as an instructional leader in creating conditions to enhance teachers’ instructional practice, particularly evidence-informed reading instruction. This ELP has implications for several constituent groups. First, an elementary school should support teachers’ reading instructional practice, specifically language comprehension instruction and Duke and Cartwright’s (2021) research on the active view of reading to enhance teachers’ reading instructional practice. Next, as principals implement Act 55, they—themselves—need to work to understand their teachers’ understanding of reading development by gathering and analyzing teachers’ and support staff members’ perceptions. By understanding these perceptions, principals can leverage professional development to enhance teachers’ reading instructional practice. Finally, researchers are urged to investigate the long-term effects of teachers’ reading instructional practice that include SL to examine influences on students and their outcomes (e.g., if fewer students are identified for special education as a result of SL implementation in early grades). Such investigations should include urban, suburban, and rural schools to account for contextual differences. This kind of research builds upon this ELP to consider how more students across these contexts can have more equitable access to high-quality reading instruction.
Description
Keywords
Pennsylvania Act 55, Science of reading, Structured literacy