Statewide coaching network looks to boost student reading scores

To get more students reading on grade level, the Tennessee Department of Education has partnered with about 90 districts to build a network that coaches teachers how best to teach literacy skills.

The Read to be Ready coaching network, part of a $9 million investment last year to improve student reading scores, will train, re-train and seek to support more than 200 reading coaches on how to aid teachers in literacy efforts.

The year-long training sessions kicked off Monday in Knoxville. Coaches at the sessions will take the lessons back to their school districts.

The state created the network to guide Tennessee school districts on practices identified to better reading instruction, especially in early grades and as the education department seeks to get 75 percent of all third-grade students reading on grade level by 2025.

Education Commissioner Candice McQueen said in a Wednesday interview the state hasn’t done a good enough job instructing teachers how to teach literacy. The practices vary throughout the state, and there are major deficiencies, she said.

“We’ve been so focused on reading skills that we aren’t focusing on comprehension,” McQueen said.

In Tennessee, fewer than 50 percent of all students can read at grade level by fourth grade, according to the most recent state academic scores in 2014-15.

Getting kids to read is different than teaching them how to understand what they are reading, McQueen said. And the two skills should be built at the same time, she said.

The hope is by creating a standard for reading, it will help boost long-term student success.

“You learn about the world in one of two ways,” McQueen said. “One is through the experiences that you have and the other is reading. Reading is a critical component of making sure all kids are learning and that the learning is moving them to success in the next stage.”

For districts that have opted into the program, there are a number of conditions they must follow.

The network requires literacy coaches spend at least 60 percent of their time helping teachers and perform specialized training for small groups of teachers on a yearly basis.

For large districts, a small group of coaches will take what they learned and instruct other district coaches.

“We put a stake in the ground saying if you are going to participate, 60 percent of your time has to be on coaching,” McQueen said. “We have some districts where only 10 percent of a coach’s time is actually coaching teachers.”

The other component of the network is that coaches must adhere to teaching a series of six practices that have shown to help students learn skills necessary to read and understand text.

“We need to be focusing on depth, because too often we have talked too much about general strategies,” she said.

The coaching network is expected to aid more than 3,000 teachers statewide in improving reading programs and practices, according to an education department news release.