Pittsburgh Colfax K-8:
The hands-on teaching of reading

2020 | Written by Faith Schantz, Report Editor

Jasmine Robinson loves to read. The East Hills resident and Pittsburgh Colfax K-8 parent says, “We love books in this house.” Often, she’ll ask one of her three sons to pick a book and she’ll read aloud, afterward asking, “Do you understand what I just read?” Sometimes she’ll ask one of them to read out loud to her. If he stumbles, she’ll remind him to, “Slow down and think…sound it out.” Family reading with this kind of support is “pretty much” a daily occurrence in their home.

Robinson’s first grader went to Colfax for kindergarten and “had a ball all year,” she says. His teacher, Lita Jackson, taught letter-sound correspondence using a finger puppet, and used puzzles to help children fit together words with upper- and lower-case letters. It all worked for Robinson’s son, who quickly learned to recognize “sight words” and to write his name.

Her older two, now in 4th and 5th grades, had come to Colfax from another school. “Their reading wasn’t the best,” she says. “The school wasn’t the best.” At times, her oldest son would make something up to avoid trying to decode a word. Her middle son has mild ADHD and couldn’t concentrate when too much was going on. Both boys needed help to get focused on the task at hand.

After they enrolled at Colfax, she saw what the school was prepared to do for her children. “They told me how they were going to teach them how to read and work with them and still keep them on their pace,” she says. For both boys, the school assigned assistant teachers, and set monthly goals. To reduce the distraction of his classmates, Robinson’s middle son sat at a table next to the teacher’s desk for activities such as testing and silent reading. Her oldest benefited from reading one-on-one with an adult, when a book could be broken down into smaller chunks and they could talk through individual words. Robinson—a childcare worker and frequent classroom volunteer—has a keen interest in education, and Colfax teachers have treated her as a full partner, she feels. A teacher will say, “Maybe we can try this and see how it works at home with you,” she recalls. “Their teachers are really hands-on when it comes to helping them.” Both of her older boys began to meet their goals, and made the Honor Roll.

Colfax is located in Squirrel Hill, a few blocks below the main shopping district, and a stone’s throw from the “Blue Slide Park” made famous by the rapper Mac Miller. The four-story building houses over 900 students, more than twice the average for the district’s K-8 schools. Along with a large group of students who attend its regional “English as a Second Language” program, the school draws students from the surrounding neighborhood and parts of East Hills, Homewood, Point Breeze, and Shadyside. Despite its size and its racial, economic, and language diversity, the principal, Dr. Tamara Sanders-Woods, describes it as a “close knit” place.

When it comes to reading achievement, as measured by the state test in English Language Arts (ELA), almost all groups of 3rd and 5th graders at Colfax have scored higher on average than district averages for the same groups in recent years. A three year average for 2017-19 (the state did not give the PSSA in 2020) shows that Black 3rd graders at Colfax scored at the level of district 3rd graders overall, which was many points higher than the average for Black students overall. The school’s Black 5th graders scored higher than the district overall average, again many points higher than the average for Black students in other schools.

Sanders-Woods is not as interested in her school’s PSSA scores as she is in the “live data” that comes out of classrooms every day. For 3rd through 5th grades, she describes what she sees during the three-period-long reading “block” that indicates children are being taught to read proficiently. They are engaged with one another, she says, “talking and collaborating with their peers.” There is “evidence of background work prior to the lesson,” and students know where to find resources in the room to address their gaps in knowledge. Examples of work that meet expectations are posted, along with examples that do not meet the standard. At the same time, students are “at different points of completion of that instructional expectation. So not everybody on the same thing.” Overall, students have the kind of experience that “takes them outside of whatever they’re reading, takes them outside of what they already know.”

Reading instruction in a 4th grade classroom

Alex Lucci teaches ELA in 4th grade, a year in which she says children “find themselves” as learners. She begins her reading block with a warm-up activity, followed by a student-led mindfulness exercise to help students orient to the classroom. “It’s only a few minutes, but it’s crucial to how the remainder of that block goes,” she says. Afterward, the class reads a section of the book they’re studying before moving into small groups for discussion. The whole class comes back together for a mini-lesson on a skill related to the reading, during which they record their ideas on a poster to be hung on a wall. The block ends with grammar exercises or writing, depending on where they are in a unit.

It’s a truism that students should be reading to learn before 4th grade, no longer learning to read, but Lucci always has some students who aren’t reading proficiently at the beginning of the year. Without successful intervention, research shows that those students are likely to struggle in all subjects, so “we do a lot of work” to address gaps, she says. She pulls students aside to teach one-on-one or gathers them in small groups, focusing on whatever their needs are, which might be increasing their knowledge of phonics (the connection between letters and their sounds) or reading fluency (reading out loud smoothly with tone and inflection that show understanding). She also will “partner up” students to read to each other, have them work with one of the school’s “great” paraprofessionals, or set them up with volunteers from Oasis Intergenerational Tutoring. If they had attended Colfax in 3rd grade, she would have talked to those teachers about what worked or didn’t work for them before the students came through her door.

In other cases, children become trapped in a cycle of lack of confidence leading to avoidance of reading, and they simply don’t get enough practice, she says. Typically, there are many students who need to build reading stamina, so that is a focus for the class. Another problem is unfamiliar content that can make it hard for students to connect with what they’re reading. To address that, she finds resources for information, and makes charts of what they know and don’t know about a topic. The practice creates “a little bit of passion” about the topic, she says, and a feeling of suspense about how it’s going to be handled in the text.

Viewing the class as a resource

To teach comprehension, Lucci will stop to pose questions at various points when the class is reading together. “Why do you think the author specifically chose those words?” “What do you think is going to happen next?” But she thinks the most effective tool for developing comprehension is student-to-student conversation in small groups. There, students work together to answer questions about craft elements, such as a character’s motivation for an action. They are charged with finding evidence for their statements, which returns them over and over to the text.

Students also contribute to one another’s learning in whole-class discussions. Lucci says her students have raised a lot of “great questions and experiences that they’ve gone through that have gone into our learning, and really pushed our conversations within the class.” For example, when they read a story that involved a Black family’s wedding ritual, a Black student spoke up about a similar ritual in his own family. “And it went off into a whole side conversation that tied in completely with what we were reading,” she says. In moments like these, she says, it’s absolutely necessary to pause discussion about the text and “continue the learning in another realm…because of a situation that’s been brought up by a kid.” Not only do these discussions help students develop as listeners and speakers as well as readers, but they also return to the assigned reading with “a deeper understanding of what’s going on in the text.”

Addressing race and culture in a diverse classroom

Although such conversations may arise spontaneously, they’re not likely to arise at all unless the teacher has created a receptive space. Coming to a school as racially, culturally, and economically diverse as Colfax, Lucci says she was very conscious of being a White woman from the suburbs. “I personally have done a lot of research and have done a lot of learning just for myself to be comfortable to have conversations, and be open to my students having these conversations in class,” she says. She also works to create a comfort level for students, in part by sharing aspects of her own life. “From the beginning of the year,” she says, “the expectations are set that everyone’s opinion is able to be shared.”

Lucci also attributes her willingness to address issues of race and culture to how her principal has worked with the staff. For Sanders-Woods, the turning point came when she was required to read the book Courageous Conversations About Race, by Glenn Singleton and Curtis Linton, and complete a related two-day training as a condition of being employed by the Pittsburgh Public Schools. “It just shook something in me that it’s okay to talk about this,” she says. “And they want us to talk about this, but there’s a way in which you do so. So I kind of ran with that.” She and one of the assistant principals started book studies and conducted other forms of professional learning on recognizing racial bias. Sanders-Woods has also focused on making sure every student has at least one adult they can talk to, to report “how a practice is making them feel.” Without suggesting adults have all the answers, she tries to address “what we can do within our control in the spaces that they’re in.”

For students who haven’t been identified as “gifted,” she says one of those spaces is the “segregated” place the school turns into on the day other students go to the Gifted Center. Across the district, the vast majority of students identified as gifted are White children from higher income families, and Colfax—which draws students from some of the wealthiest, majority White neighborhoods in the city—is no exception. In Lucci’s class and others, however, students have a way to be recognized for their skills that doesn’t depend on the gifted label. If they meet 80% or more of the standards for a particular skill, as measured by end-of-unit tests, students are called “masters,” and they can tutor their classmates. Lucci says a student may feel, “I might not go to the Gifted Center, but I may have mastered skills one, two, and five, and someone who does [go to the Gifted Center] may not have mastered those.” It reinforces the idea that everyone has strengths, she says, and also room to grow.

Making students responsible for their own learning

Public recognition of mastery corresponds with a push for students to take more responsibility for their own learning at the school. Several years ago, during school improvement planning, Sanders-Woods says teachers embraced the theme of “Let data take the wheel.” That also applied to students, they realized, and they needed to start with them. Often, she says, “We have these assessments, we give a kid report cards, we give them their tests back and they don’t know what that means, what that letter grade means,” or even what “mastery” means. Now—with data centers and data folders in every classroom—“they can talk to you about where they are, where they need to be, and how they’re going to get there.”

“We hold our students to really high expectations and they know that these expectations aren’t going to waver,” Lucci adds. “But also we have really strong relationships with the kids. So if a kid doesn’t get their work done…we’re sitting down together and we’re going to work through this. Whether it takes a day or three days, the child wants to [succeed] because of the environment we’ve created.”

When schools closed in March and teaching and learning moved online, Lucci felt that her students had taken those lessons to heart. Despite the difficulties of the transition, she was proud that her students could apply what they’d learned at home, and excited to see how many of her students “really did push themselves to get the work done.”

One was Jasmine Robinson’s eldest son. Throughout the uncertainty of that time, Robinson says, the level of commitment from all of her sons’ teachers was a constant. When the building closed, she felt overwhelmed at first, but teachers helped her make a plan, and her spirit wasn’t daunted for long. With that kind of support from the school, she says, “Nothing gets in our way of learning.”