Reading Portfolio
Five Year Literacy Plan
Introduction
In the summer of 2020, I took the course Education 750: Guiding and Directing Reading Programs. During this course, I was able to create five year literacy plan for my district. For this project, I need to draw from my school and district literacy data, identify areas of strength and areas for growth and development. The goal was to design a plan for working with your school and/or district. Identify major priorities for the work – and the process(es) I would establish in order to cultivate these priorities in
my setting. For each priority area I needed to indicate supporting reference information (citations) and connect the priorities with the Wisconsin Teacher Standards and the Wisconsin State Standards for Reading/Language Arts.
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To complete this project, I followed a six step process:
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Step #1-Data Mining Process
Some of the data that I looked at included the following: FastBridge aReading, data Fountas and Pinnell Benchmark Assessment data, Title I data, reading intervention data, Forward ELA test data, ACT Aspire data, ACT data, behavior and attendance data, and parent and staff survey data.
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Step #2-Analyzing the Data
In this step, I examined the data to look for common trends and noted my observations.
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Step #3-Summary of the District's Current Reality
In this step, I wrote out exactly where our district is currently at with our literacy.
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Step #4-Determine (hypothesize) the Root Cause
In this step, I hypothesized what the root cause was of why I was seeing the trends I was within our literacy data. This step helped me in determining the SMART goals and action plan.
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Step #5-SMART Goals
I created three SMART goals-
SMART Goal #1: By the end of the 2024-2025 school year each grade level K-5 will have 85% of the students reading at or above grade level as evidenced by their reading benchmark and/or reading screener scores and data.
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SMART Goal #2: Each school year the grade levels 3-8 will consistently exceed the state score and continually increase the percent of students scoring in the proficient and advanced categories of the ELA Forward Exam.
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SMART Goal #3: Each school year our district will continuously see at least a 4% increase each year for our special education students scoring in the proficient and advanced categories of the ELA Forward Exam and at least a 3% increase evidenced by the ELA state assessment results for our students with disadvantaged socio-economic status.
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Step #6-Five Year Action Plan
In this step, I wrote out the steps the district needed to take in order to assist us in meeting the SMART goals.
Wisconsin Teaching Standards:
Standard 1: Pupil Development
Standard 9: Professional Learning and Ethical Practice
Standard 10: Leadership and Collaboration
IRA Standards:
Standard 4: Diversity and Equity
Standard 6: Professional Learning and Leadership
Standard 7: Practicum/Clinical Experiences
Wisconsin Administrator Standards:
Standard 1: Mission, Vision, and Core Values
Standard 2: Ethics and Professional Norms
Standard 3: Equity and Cultural Responsiveness
Standard 9: Operations and Management
Standard 10: School Improvement
Standard 11: Teacher Standards
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Link to Standards Page for Additional Information and Descriptions About these Standards
As a team lead in my district, I have had the opportunity to attend our annual Data Retreat where we create our School Improvement Plan and determine our goals for the upcoming school by reviewing our school's data. However, this assignment gave me the opportunity to look at data for our entire district and throughout all different grade levels, which is something I don't get to do on a regular basis especially within the high school and the ACT Aspire and ACT data. This assignment also gave me the opportunity to look behavior and attendance data and to gain a deeper understanding of digger deeper into data based on different groups of students. One of my big take aways from completing this process was gaining a better understanding of the importance of a consistent way/place for teachers and everyone in the district to keep track of data. While completing the assignment it was difficult to find some of our district data and some of the data charts were incomplete. This school year we have started using EduClimber so hopefully this will help us maintain our data in a consistent manner. A second big take away from completing this process was fully explaining the why behind the action steps I had created. I learned that if we want to have teacher/staff buy-in, it is essential to explain the rationale and purpose to ensure everyone is on the same page and understands why that action step is essential to the overall plan. Overall, this assignment was an enriching experience that assisted me in preparing for a role as a literacy leader.