Published on June 12, 2006
MONTGOMERY, Ala. -- Katherine Mitchell, who has spent the last eight years overseeing Alabama's Reading Initiative, isn't surprised anymore at what secondary teachers will do to mold the program to fit the needs of their individual classes.
Much of the initiative's focus has been on K-3 children, but a new study funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York is commending the state's teachers in higher grades for their flexibility and creativity, saying its success is largely due to their adjustments.
"We're very pleased to have someone of the caliber of the American Institutes for Research talk about our story," Mitchell said. "We know that we are one of the very few middle and high school literacy efforts and we hope this will help put the emphasis on middle schools and high schools nationally."
Mitchell said she has seen teachers do things like buy textbooks that focus on varying degrees of reading levels for their classes and incorporate vocabulary exercises into math and science lessons.
The initiative, which began in 16 schools in 1998, has been expanded to all of the state's 800 elementary schools and is in 135 middle and high schools.
The program assigns reading coaches to schools, where they work with the staff as well as with students. All faculty members are required to participate in the initiative, and that's what sets Alabama's initiative apart from other programs, Russell County High School teacher Wendy Warren said.
"In days past, when they would say they had reading programs, it would just be the students in their English class reading together, which was great, but now it's expanded to all subjects," said Warren, who is also one of ARI's reading coaches. "Now it's meaningful within every content area."
A team from the American Institute for Research spent two years interviewing Alabama teachers and students for the study, which Carnegie commissioned to show how the secondary component of ARI is coming along. It was released Wednesday with plans to distribute to school districts nationwide.
"The reason Carnegie funded this study is we thought it was probably the best example of a state that has really thought through literacy as an issue in grades K-12 as opposed to just K-3 like many states have done," Carnegie's Andres Henriquez said.
Henriquez said the ARI study is meant to supplement the 40-page "Reading to Achieve: A Governor's Guide to Adolescent Literacy," booklet that Carnegie funded and released in the past year.
"Basically the issue is why focus on adolescent literacy and what governors and states can do to improve that," he said. "It's really an overview: this is what you need to do if you're going to start looking at this in your state and this is why we need to focus on these areas."
Mitchell said a pilot program, aimed at providing an enhanced and closely studied ARI in grades 4-9, will begin in 14 schools in the 2006-07 school year with the goal of improving adolescent literacy initiatives in all schools.
Jennie Sanders says she's seen many improvements from ARI at Russell County High, where she teaches health to students in grades 9-12.
An ARI activity that's a big hit is one where students draw what they've read and list any vocabulary words they don't understand.
"I've found that the students really enjoy it and it's bringing other subject areas into your classroom, like art," she said. "The ARI workshops come up with so many activities that it keeps things moving. There's no deadtime, it's constantly moving. If you have no deadtime, you don't have any discipline problems."