High Progress Literacy
Changing Learning. Changing Outcomes. Changing Lives.Read to Succeed South Carolina
Your Read to Succeed District Plan is in place, and your School Plans are written. Your principals have reworked school schedules to provide 90 minutes of reading and writing instruction in every grade.
Now comes the hard part: making the changes necessary to improve outcomes for every student in your school.
South Carolina’s Read to Succeed legislation has a single goal: “to improve student reading achievement for all students, prekindergarten through twelfth grade.”
In HPL, we take that goal seriously.
District and School Plans Outline What Has to Happen:
Form leadership teams to guide and support research-based practices toward clear and measurable student goals. Arrange for systemic, job-embedded professional learning opportunities to support teachers in developing and using formative and summative assessments, and put in place exemplary literacy classrooms for all students.
And all of this is precisely what we help you do at High Progress Literacy.
Changed Outcomes Require Changed Classrooms
Obvious. Right? A lot has to change to bring about better outcomes.
When R2S was being debated on the floor of the House, lawmakers insisted over and over that just requiring teachers to take courses wasn’t likely to make a difference in outcomes for kids.
And you know what? They were right. Which is why the law requires much more than coursework for teachers.
Coursework and professional learning alone do not change practice. Just ask some of the talented teachers we have worked with over the past several years who already took those courses and have their Literacy Endorsements.
What supports these changes in practice?
When professional learning accompanies side-by-side coaching to help teachers make specific changes aligned with the research.
When R2S coaches-in-training have numerous opportunities to coach side-by-side with an HPLA coach with over 20 years of coaching experience.
When coaches, teachers, and leaders observe and collect data side-by-side with an HPLA coach who shows them where to stand, how to look and what to look for to assist teachers in aligning their classrooms with the research.
When teachers and leaders engage in ongoing conversation and reflection around these data with an HPLA coach who who keeps their focus on bringing about the changes that result in high-progress outcomes.
Yes, we provide R2S coursework. But more important, when we work with schools and districts, we share years of experience in coaching, observation, data collection, data analysis, and decision-making that has consistently produced high progress outcomes for students.
And because we know that reading and writing support lifelong learning in every discipline, we know that the work we do in the name of R2S cannot stop with ELA.
We Help You Make the Changes that Make a Difference
We ensure that students learn how to learn. That they learn how to read, write, speak, and listen across the curriculum. That they learn how to raise questions, wonder, explore solutions, and solve problems.
We work with teachers, leaders, and students to learn how to make sense of informational texts that teach science and social studies. Articles, images, maps, models, and more. With TextDepot, our collaborative curation site, we support teachers to build text sets aligned with their standards.
We know that none of the practices advocated in R2S are new. We know them as Balanced Literacy, or Reading and Writing Workshop. And many years of research and experience have taught us that programs and structures—even those advocated by R2S—do not make the difference in outcomes for students.
Necessary? Yes. But not sufficient.
What really matters, is what happens (and doesn’t happen) within those structures. What teachers do matters. A lot. But what students do (and don’t do) in our classrooms matters much, much more.
Causes and Effects
In HPL, we use a cause and effect model to help you draw the lines from adult decisions to student outcomes.
Our side-by-side onsite coaching, together with job-embedded professional learning experiences in PLCs allow teachers and leaders to build the knowledge and capacity necessary to to transform every classroom into a high progress classroom where all students learn how to learn across every subject area.
This is our goal. And it is the goal of Read to Succeed.
As one HPL teacher said, “HPL is magic.”
Well, maybe. We just know it works. And we have the data to prove it. Contact us. We’d love an invitation to play in your sandbox!
Contact Us
HPL really isn’t advocating anything new. We’ve always known this–or thought we did. What’s different is that in HPL, you’ve been able to take what was conceptual and make it very practical for teachers and leaders.
You know, we thought we were already doing all this before we started working with HPL. Our work together has helped us to be able to look through a much different lens, and that has made all the difference for our school.
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