Strategic interventions: a research-validated instructional model that makes adolescent literacy a schoolwide priority.

Despite numerous successes achieved by American schools in recent years, one of the remaining challenges is the large number of adolescents who lack basic literacy skills. Nearly 25 percent of 8th and 12th graders score below the basic level in reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress and only 70 percent of all high school students graduate from high school. For African-American and Hispanic adolescents, the graduation rate drops to nearly 50 percent.

For the past 30 years, the University of Kansas Center for Research on Learning has worked with teachers and administrators to address this important national problem. Two dominant factors have emerged as having the biggest influence on improving the outcomes for struggling adolescent learners: (1) a relentless focus on high-quality instruction and (2) a commitment to high-quality professional development to arm teachers with effective instructional tools.

Deficits in literacy skills can be compounded when content teachers at the high school level, believing students should have been taught these skills in earlier grades, are not prepared to teach the reading, writing and other literacy skills their students need.

Unfortunately even adolescents who were successful readers in elementary school may struggle in middle and high school because reading demands change. Their textbooks may have unfamiliar features and structures, and they are expected to understand increasingly difficult material when they may lack knowledge of specific reading strategies for comprehension.

Quality Teaching

In the past year, the Center for Research on Learning participated in a series of national workshops on the challenges of adolescent literacy. Our Strategic Instruction Model was chosen as an example of a research-validated literacy program that works.

Through our work, we have learned much about teaching adolescents and about literacy. More importantly, our research has resulted in the validation of a set of tools that help adolescents learn how to learn, providing a means for them to achieve independence and success. The interventions that make up the model arose in response to the need for direct, explicit instruction for adolescents with learning disabilities, the first population studied by our center. The resulting instructional methods, however, benefit a much wider range of students.

In addition to the Strategic Instruction Model, we have designed a framework to help school districts analyze the strengths and weaknesses of their existing literacy instruction as they design comprehensive adolescent literacy programs spanning content areas and grade levels. Called the Content Literacy Continuum, this framework helps to clearly define the important but unique roles each teacher on a secondary school staff plays in improving literacy outcomes. The continuum underscores how some students need increased intensity and explicitness of instruction to learn critical skills, strategies and content in secondary classes.

Twin Interventions

Our strategic approach has two prongs for improving literacy skills. Teacher-focused interventions help teachers think about, adapt and present their content in learner-friendly ways. Student-focused interventions provide the skills and strategies students need to learn content. Both interventions are needed if students are to succeed on state assessment tests and demonstrate real-world content literacy--fluent use of listening, speaking, reading and writing skills.

"SIM puts into the hands of teachers validated, research-based skills that can be taught to all students," says Doris Williams, education program specialist with the Maryland State Department of Education.

Williams is the driving force behind Maryland's Passport to Success project, a five-year effort to create several demonstration middle schools in which every child learns the model's strategies and routines. Williams sees in the model a selection of tools schools can use to improve student achievement.

Developed in collaboration with numerous teachers and administrators from across the country, each component is designed to help meet real needs found in today's classrooms.

The Strategic Instruction Model's content enhancement routines are sets of inclusive teaching practices that help teachers organize and present critical information in such a way that students more easily understand and remember it.

The routines fall into three main categories: organizing routines, understanding routines and recalling routines. A graphic device accompanies each, providing a means for teachers and students to visually represent the content they are discussing. The power of the routines lies in the interaction between teachers and students as they work together to complete the graphic device.

At John E Kennedy High School in Sacramento, Calif., 90 percent of staff members have been introduced to content enhancement routines and actively use them across content areas. The school's biology teacher encourages students to use the "frame," a graphic device associated with the model's framing routine, which helps students understand relationships among key pieces of information when taking notes. His students use other content enhancement devices as tools for reviewing what they have learned. Among the benefits Kennedy teachers have found are that the routines promote high-level thinking skills and are accessible for all students.

Multiple Strategies

Whereas content enhancement routines focus on improving instruction, the Strategic Instruction Model's learning strategies curriculum helps students develop the skills they need to complete common academic tasks, such as acquiring information from the printed word, organizing and memorizing information, solving math problems and expressing information in writing, including on tests.

Studies have shown that when students are taught these strategies in a systematic, intensive fashion, they demonstrate gains that enable them to perform at or near grade level. Mastering individual strategies improves a student's performance on that specific skill, but the curriculum is even more powerful when students have access to multiple strategies across grade levels, as evidenced at Muskegon High School in Michigan.

In the mid-1990s, assessment tests indicated that half of Muskegon's 400 9th-graders read below grade level, with a third performing two or more years below grade level. At the same time, the School Improvement Team Reading Committee noted that students with learning disabilities were showing tremendous gains in reading comprehension. Those students were receiving explicit instruction in reading strategies.

The school designed a SIM-based program consisting initially of 50 minutes of intensive instruction every day for students who read significantly below grade level. Students learned how to use the model's word identification strategy to successfully decode and identify unknown words in reading material. After a student mastered the strategy, he or she returned to English class. Among students who mastered the strategy, reading comprehension gains of three or four grade levels were common.

In the years since, Muskegon has implemented a comprehensive literacy program, now offering three levels of strategic reading and writing classes through its special education department. Students have multiple opportunities to return to general education English classes once they have mastered the strategies they need to be successful.

"Year after year, Muskegon High School has seen gains in reading proficiency through the use of SIM interventions," says Linda Riepma, the district's executive director of secondary education. Now, she says, the district is working toward a coherent instructional model across schools. All middle school language arts teachers are expected to use the model's sentence- and paragraph-writing strategies, and upper elementary teachers are being introduced to this approach.

At the high school, every English teacher has participated in professional development activities related to SIM's writing strategies, and content teachers requested a writing strategies workshop to enable them to reinforce strategy use and to develop consistent expectations for student writing throughout the school.

Content Literacy

Our center's content literacy continuum is the framework upon which literacy programs can be built. The continuum describes five increasingly intensive levels of literacy support that should be in place in every school. Viewing a district's services through this lens can help administrators identify their existing strengths and determine where to focus next to patch the holes.

The continuum calls for general education teachers to present content in learner-friendly ways at the first level and to embed strategy instruction into their core classes at the second level. At the third level, students receive specialized, intensive instruction from someone other than the general education teacher.

At the fourth level, reading specialists and special education teachers work together to provide specialized, direct and intensive instruction in listening, speaking, reading and writing skills. The fifth level provides for speech-language pathologists to deliver curriculum-relevant language therapy to students with underlying language disorders and for other support personnel to teach literacy skills.

True to our original mission to devise solutions to the challenges faced by adolescents with learning disabilities, the content literacy continuum ensures the instructional programs in place in schools meet the unique needs of these students. The first and second levels of the continuum embed the type of support that can improve a struggling high school student's ability to perform in a general education classroom.

These supports are in alignment with provisions of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. The third through fifth levels provide individualized, intensive instruction for students with learning disabilities and other struggling students.

The continuum emphasizes infusing literacy instruction throughout the curriculum and recognizes that a host of teachers with different types of expertise are required to meet the needs of adolescents who have not developed essential literacy skills. Implementing components of the continuum is a process that requires a multiyear effort and commitment. Our center believes, based on research and practical experience, no quick fixes are available for the substantial challenges schools face.

The schools and districts that are most successful in rising to literacy challenges are those that establish long-term goals for improving instruction for students, that develop comprehensive, practical plans to reach the goals and that cultivate the supports and culture necessary to ensure continued progress toward these goals.

John F. Kennedy High School in Sacramento is one of 30 schools working with the Center for Research on Learning's professional development network to construct services and programs based on the continuum. Kennedy launched the project in 2003-04 with five reading teachers and 25 general education teachers learning about and incorporating the Strategic Instruction Model into their classes. The professional development team provided 33 days of on-site instructional coaching and workshops during the school year and a three-day summer workshop for 100 of the school's teachers.

"During the first year, we saw good implementation of learning strategies in the reading classes and encouraging use of content enhancement routines within the science department," says Cathy Spriggs, a professional developer working with the school.

Schoolwide Application

The use of SIM strategies and routines has grown with continued professional development at the school. Science, math and history departments, as well as some vocational departments have been using the content enhancement routines regularly since last year. The professional development team this year turned its attention to making connections between routines used in general education classrooms and strategies taught in a SIM reading class. Next year, the focus will be on building capacity within the school to continue both initiatives independently.

In a December visit to the school, Lois Peterson, administrator for academic achievement with the Sacramento City Unified School District, observed pieces of SIM in place throughout the school as teachers emphasized literacy regardless of content area. Social studies students, for example, were expected to use the writing strategies as they identified reasons leading to the war they were studying.

Consistent use of the model's tools, Peterson says, helps teachers identify what they want their students to learn and how they want students to show what they've learned.

"This creates the environment for kids to be successful, which is what leads to higher achievement levels among all groups of learners," she says.

During the first year of the content literacy continuum at Kennedy, reading skills for all students improved on all measures. Notably, the percentage of students scoring at the proficient level on the California Standards Test increased from 5 percent to 15 percent. Students scoring at the basic level increased from 59 percent to 62 percent.

In a recent observation at the district's alternative secondary school, American Legion High School, Peterson watched a lively debate as a government teacher used SIM interventions to break down vocabulary words and connect them to high-interest current events. As students discussed their state's impending execution of murder convict Tookie Williams and related the associated issues to topics they were studying in the class, Peterson described the level of the students' engagement as "phenomenal." That degree of engagement, she says, will result in increased literacy skills and increased ability for students to understand, analyze and apply what they read.

Strategic Tutoring

To reinforce the gains made through school-day program changes, the Center for Research on Learning advocates establishing before- or after-school tutoring programs based on Strategic Tutoring, a process in which tutors help students complete their immediate assignments successfully while acquiring the skills to attack future assignments independently.

The center's Pathways to Success project in the Topeka, Kan., Unified Schools has hired 20 strategic tutors for each of the six middle schools in the district. Superintendent Tony Sawyer praises Strategic Tutoring, saying it has helped students catch up and achieve previously unexpected success. In the project, he says, the district is "a model for what can and should be happening in the country with all of our children and for all of our children."

"We are actually closing the achievement gap," says Sawyer, now in his third year as superintendent. "That has been the goal of educators for a long time, but it's something that has been elusive. It's no longer elusive. It's starting to happen in our district."

A Supportive Network

The methods of the Strategic Instruction Model and the guidance of the content literacy continuum are not sufficient themselves to achieve lasting systemic changes. We have found that other essential components include strong administrative leadership and a dedicated team of teachers and other personnel who are well-equipped to use the interventions effectively.

The most successful projects involve building and district administrators who attend professional development workshops with teachers, who regularly visit classrooms and encourage use of these methods and who create a shared vision for school improvement.

Our center supports a network of more than 1,200 individuals whom we have certified as experts in the use of SIM materials. These individuals work directly with schools to determine which interventions will be most beneficial, teach staff how to use the intervention and provide follow-up support as teachers encounter real-life tests in the classroom.

We support a professional development model in which the expert establishes a continuing relationship with the school, adapting workshops to meet changing needs. Any school interested in adopting the content literacy continuum must be willing to commit time and resources to the multiyear process.

An Urgent Need

Literacy successes on the secondary school level require a significant commitment on the part of all staff. Failing to successfully respond to the literacy problems facing many of our nation's youth will have significant consequences. Specifically, the job market in the United States is undergoing dramatic changes because of the prominent role that technology is playing in reshaping the economy. The growing presence of computerization in all sectors of the economy will continue to affect the mix of jobs, the way that wages are structured and the types of skills required of workers.

In their book, The New Division of Labor: How Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market, Frank Levy and Richard J. Murnane describe how the workers who will be most successful in an economy heavily influenced by computerization are those who can engage in "expert thinking" (identifying and solving uncharted problems) and "complex communications" (interpreting and effectively communicating information).

Today, sizable numbers of adolescents are ill equipped to access, let alone successfully compete in, the workplace of the 21st century. The urgency of placing more emphasis on raising the literacy levels of struggling adolescent learners in our secondary schools is great.

Resources

Donald Deshler suggests the following sources of additional information and insight related to the subject he addresses here:

* Knowledge to Support the Teaching of Reading: Preparing Teachers for a Changing World edited by Catherine Snow, Peg Griffin and M. Susan Burns, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco 

* School Reform from the Inside Out: Policy, Practice and Performance by Richard F. Elmore, Harvard Education Press, Cambridge, Mass.

* The New Division of Labor: How Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market by Frank Levy and Richard J. Murnane, Russell Sage Foundation, New York, N.Y.

* Center for Research on Learning, University of Kansas, and its Strategic Instruction Model, www.kucrl.org

RELATED ARTICLE: The leader's role in literacy: relentless focus.

Of all things that a school administrator can do to promote improvements in learning and literacy skills of struggling adolescents, the most important is to maintain a relentless focus on high-quality instruction.

It is fashionable today for school administrators to proclaim that instruction is their top priority, but it may be worth your time to take a moment to assess whether instruction is getting the attention it deserves at all levels in the school district.

The first step is to determine whether instruction really is your top priority. Tony Sawyer clearly identified instruction as his focus when he assumed the superintendency in the Topeka, Kan., Unified School District 501 nearly three years ago.

"My primary role is to establish the instructional vision for the district," says Sawyer. "My role is to establish myself as an instructional leader and to make sure that every principal establishes himself or herself as the instructional leader in their building"

Daily Reflection

Step No. 2 is to determine how that commitment to instruction is reflected in your day-to-day activities. Schools are complex and have many legitimate, competing interests that can distract and capture an administrator's attention. Is the majority of your time consumed with issues of facilities, human resources and band uniforms? Or do you spend a large part of your time tending to instructional issues and thoughtfully organizing instructional assignments?

In board meetings and cabinet meetings, where does instruction come on the agenda and how much time is allotted to discussions? Increasingly, school districts spend much time considering test scores. Do you spend a commensurate amount of time addressing how to improve instruction and monitor the student learning that leads to these outcomes?

"We have to ensure that what we envision for progress is aligned with what actually happens in the classroom," says Sawyer. "My role is to make sure that a vision is translated into everyday action that is tangible in the classroom, that teachers are having conversations about what it takes to make children succeed in 2006"

Flexible Scheduling

Another variable you can influence is to ensure that organizational structures within your schools facilitate your instructional mission. Be creative in building time into teachers' schedules to allow them to jointly plan and collaborate. Encourage flexibility in scheduling classes to allow for the struggling student who needs extra support at the beginning of the year to join a grade-level class at mid-semester once she or he masters the prerequisite skills.

Too often, districts grasp at new structural ideas--block scheduling or small-learning communities, for example--and then alter instruction to accommodate the change. Instead, spend time first understanding your students' instructional needs and then determine what structures are needed to support that instruction.

A final area of influence involves making sure your precious professional development dollars are spent wisely. Are the workshops and in-service programs that your staff attend aligned with the district's vision and instructional goals? Are staff development programs coordinated and coherent throughout the district? Have you built an accountability system that ties the investment you're making in professional development to student outcomes?

Answering these questions and routinely reviewing these areas of concern will help ensure that instruction really is central in your district. After all, instruction gets to the very core of what we, as educators, are all about. As the instructional leader in your district, keeping all eyes focused on the importance of these issues benefits all of your students.

--Donald Deshler and Julie Tollefson

Donald Deshler is director of the Center for Research on Learning at the University of Kansas, 1122 W. Campus Road, 518 J.R. Pearson, Lawrence, KS 66045. E-mail: [e-mail]. Julie Tollefson is the center's director of communications.