“I’m reading now, Ms. Story. I’m reading”
Rising Up:
Pittsburgh West Liberty PreK-5, Pittsburgh Westwood PreK-5
“I’m reading now, Ms. Story. I’m reading”
2024 | Written by Faith Schantz, Report Editor
Marlene Story greeted her 1st graders as they returned to her classroom from their math class at Pittsburgh Westwood PreK-5. “Guess what?” they said. “We read the math test on our own.”
Her partner teacher confirmed it. He hadn’t needed to read the test directions out loud, as he was accustomed to doing for 1st graders. “This hasn’t happened before,” he told her.
Other signs that something unusual was going on began to surface in her classroom. “They’re picking up books all the time. They’re coming in, and they’re saying, ‘Can I go pick out a book [from] the library today and can I have it at my seat?’” Story says. Parents reported that their children were reading at home. “Whatever you’re doing, continue it,” they told her.
What she and other K-5 teachers across the district were doing in their classrooms represents a shift from previous district practice for reading instruction. Last year, district schools began using the McGraw Hill Open Court curriculum as part of an overall effort to ground reading instruction in a research base known as the “science of reading.” For a view of the first year of implementation, in the spring we checked in with Dr. Jala Olds-Pearson, chief academic officer, and teachers from two elementary schools: Krista Steffey (kindergarten), Gina Sinicki (1st grade), and Diane Milanak (support) from Pittsburgh West Liberty PreK-5, in Brookline; and Marlene Story (1st grade) at Westwood, in the city’s West End. All have multiple years of experience teaching a range of grade levels.
The early days
The Open Court curriculum is organized into color-coded bands—green for phonics and related skills, red for comprehension activities, and blue for grammar and writing. In the early grades, the program includes an interactive component for learning letters and their sounds, “decodable” books students take home, and stories on a wide range of topics they read together. Letter cards with pictures of an action—such as a munching monkey for M or a sizzling sausage for S—circle the walls of the classroom. In kindergarten, the program includes nursery rhymes, songs, and various ways to physically create words, such as with magnetic letters and boards.
Olds-Pearson refers to the 2023-24 school year as a “launch and learning year.” She says, “The biggest shift was really understanding the science of reading,” rather than focusing on a new curriculum. Teachers, however, needed to teach from new materials and learn new activities and routines for the three-period reading block. They did have access to the curriculum online over the summer, but, as Story says, “You want that teacher’s edition in your hands.” At West Liberty, Sinicki says, “The first day of school, I was still getting the materials—the actual, physical, hard copy materials—delivered to my classroom as I was supposed to already be teaching the content.” She told her students, “I’m new at this, too. I’m learning it with you.”
One early issue was managing the pacing. In Open Court, the foundational skills are taught in a strict sequence, based on research, which is one of the reasons the district selected it. Kindergarten teacher Steffey says Open Court has “extremely explicit instruction as far as how a letter is introduced, so every single letter has a story. Every single story has that sound repeated throughout the story.” Some schools also use the Heggerty program, intended to grow kindergartners’ skills in phonemic awareness (the ability to identify the individual sounds in spoken words), meaning students receive a double dose of foundational skills practice, Steffey says. “It doesn’t leave much time left to do your reading of the book and then talking about the story, the characters, or the facts that you learned in the book, the vocabulary words.” She heard similar reactions from other kindergarten teachers. Most “feel the way I feel about the appropriateness of the activities and stories that we’re doing, and the approach to learning. I think a lot of us feel like the timing and pacing is really challenging.” She adds that the curriculum is a tool she’s learning to use. This year, she says, “I’m going to be much better at using the tool.”
As the year progressed, Olds-Pearson and other staff from the Curriculum and Instruction department fanned out to observe in schools, and used those observations to plan professional learning for teachers and literacy coaches. According to her, they noticed “a need for just making sure folks understood the routines.” Overall, they saw more success in schools where teachers “embraced the science of reading” and were actively engaged in professional learning, she says.
Story was happy to have the support of the literacy coach assigned to Westwood. Before her twice-monthly visits, the coach would email to ask what teachers needed, Story says, whether that was co-teaching a lesson, sitting back and observing, or working with individual students. Because the coach was also learning the curriculum, Story says her visits never felt evaluative. The coach shared teachers’ good ideas across schools, and teachers also learned from one another during in-service sessions, asking questions like “‘How did you do that?’ ‘Can you explain it to me?’ ‘Can you send me that?’” she says.
As teachers became more familiar with it, some elements of the curriculum began to fall into place. For Story, who began teaching 1st grade four years ago after many years in middle schools, it was something of a breakthrough when she realized she shouldn’t expect her students to master every part of a lesson. Support teacher Milanak, who is charged with adapting elements of the curriculum for students with IEPs, noticed that certain topics kept “circling back.” Sinicki, who describes herself as overwhelmed at first, began to see the sequencing “flowing and progressing quite beautifully” as time went on. She had struggled to picture the routines around introducing each letter, “but when I saw it in action,” she says, “it does make sense.”
Meeting individual needs
Like the other teachers, Milanak appreciates the emphasis on teaching students phonics and related skills, especially after working for former principals who said, “You should not even be teaching phonics. They either get it or they don’t.” Milanak’s students, like others, consult the letter/sound cards hung around the room when they’re trying to figure out the sound a letter makes. Some can’t yet identify the letter S when they see it, but they can say “sizzling sausages” when they look at the picture on the card, she says.
Other teachers say the curriculum has the flexibility to meet a range of students’ individual needs. In Sinicki’s classroom, for example, 1st graders who are already reading haven’t seemed bored. “The curriculum is interactive, and it includes games and different hands-on, word-building activities, so it holds their interest the whole time,” she says. Open Court also includes an “inquiry” component. “I give them more of enrichment and inquiry projects where I let them go and do their own research, and they can take control of their learning a little more independently.” Steffey’s kindergarteners spend time at “centers” each day, where they can make letters out of Lego bricks or playdough, look at books, or use the “Smarty Ants” phonics program on their iPads, depending on the skills they need to work on. Olds-Pearson adds that teachers can use small group instruction to provide more complex content or to work on individual skills. The predictability and consistency of the routines may also help students who move between schools. Story notes that a couple of students who entered her class during the year from schools outside of the district were able to catch up once they’d grasped the structure of the routines.
Seeing results
In the early grades, teachers assess their students’ learning by observing them, walking around the classroom and talking to individual students, pulling them aside and asking them to read, or listening to them talk to each other. One key formal assessment teachers use is DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills), which is also a one-on-one, verbal check of skills, such as word recognition and reading fluency. To gauge progress, teachers give the assessment more than once a year.
Story, Sinicki, and Steffey were stunned at how far their students had come when they gave the midyear DIBELS assessment. Sinicki had some students who lacked “book sense” in the beginning of their 1st grade year. “Their book might have been upside down, backwards, or they were reading from right to left. It’s just mind-blowing to see their progress and how many words they can read per minute, and just celebrating those successes,” she says.
Steffey attributes the “huge difference” she saw in her students’ developing skills to the combination of the Heggerty program and Open Court’s systematic approach to phonics. In her view, the previous curriculum, ReadyGEN, assumed certain skills. Now, she says, “We’re not assuming anything. We’re teaching kids how to read.”
Story served on the district committee that reviewed K-5 curriculum from selected publishers. One aspect of Open Court that stood out was the variety of “culturally relevant” texts. At Westwood, which has a more diverse student body than most district elementary schools, children “open up the book, and they see themselves,” she says. Milanak, who spends time in many West Liberty reading classrooms as a support teacher, notes that students seem to find the materials interesting. “When I walk in,” she says, “I see the kids engaged.”
Teachers describe a kind of ripple effect when students become more successful as readers. “You’re going to love doing something if you feel like you’re good at it,” Steffey points out, and that colors her students’ overall experience. “I love school,” they tell her. “You’re the best teacher ever.” She adds, “My kids say that a lot, so I must be doing something right.” Sinicki says that a greater facility with words has changed how her students view writing. “They’re always excited to write, and I would say that that in the past has been a struggle.”
Both Steffey and Story have taught English Language Arts in upper grades, and witnessed what students go through when they can’t read proficiently. As a result, Steffey came to kindergarten “armed and ready,” she says. From the beginning, “I was bound and determined not to let anyone pass my gates without knowing what they needed to know before they went to first grade.”
Story had similar experiences teaching middle school reading. She saw how reading difficulties “snowballed” for students, leaving them further and further behind grade level. “I wanted to go back to the beginning because I feel like there were so many kids that were coming into middle school unprepared,” she says. One thing she learned is that “elementary teachers really, really work hard.” Like Steffey, she describes herself as “determined” that “all these kids are ready for second grade. I want them ready.” Based on her experience with the new approach, she expects to see a positive shift districtwide.
One little boy’s experience will stay with her. It was like a light bulb turning on, she says. She sat down to listen to him read, “and he read every single word in his book. And I said, ‘Oh, my goodness. I’m just amazed.’”
“I’m reading now, Ms. Story,” he said. “I’m reading.”
