Teachers attend SLI conference

Teachers and members of the school administration attended WestEd’s Strategic Literacy Initiative (SLI) on Thursday, October 8 to receive formal training on engaging students in reading. SLI is a professional research project put on by WestEd to study adolescent literacy development.

This program is part of the school’s five-year professional development plan created prior to the most recent Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) evaluation.

Research conducted by WestEd indicates that improved reading comprehension on standardized testing is a direct result of some of the strategies taught by SLI. As for its benefit to the school’s API score, it cannot be confirmed that SLI is the sole proprietor.

“It is hard to attribute the increase in student achievement to any one factor,” Superintendent Dr. Barry Groves said. “However, I believe that the increase in scores can in part be attributed to student focus on learning the adopted curriculum.”

Some credit is given to English Language Learners (ELL) teacher Lydia Zele’s implementation of SLI’s strategies to the English Language Development (ELD) department, as the ELL subgroup saw the greatest improvement in standardized testing.

According to English teacher April Oliver, seven teachers attended the conference last year. This year, six teachers from the school as well as Groves are attending SLI.

“The conference modeled SLI in its approach to teaching,” Groves said. “For example, the speakers used the learning strategies of SLI to teach about SLI.”

The most recent conference was one of four distributed throughout the year for teachers. Teachers from all departments attended the October 8 conference, and will serve as training liaisons to other teachers.

“The work we’re doing with SLI is based around a teaching philosophy called Reading Apprenticeship,” Oliver said. “These strategies encourage students and teachers to think meta-cognitively—in other words, to think about their thinking.”

Teachers receive instruction on the cognitive aspects of reading and how to make reading a rewarding activity for students.

“Reading difficult texts can seem like magic to struggling readers, but if they’re taught the strategies, they can perform the magic themselves,” Oliver said. “It is incredibly important for students to be given the tools to read effectively and to function as independent learners.”