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Advocacy plan for students in Poverty

PROBLEM: I currently work with a first grade team that wants to improve our dedication to providing support for our students not only at school but also at home.  When we discuss this topic as a team we have identified the need for more home and school collaboration with our families.   GOALS/OBJECTIVES: Objective 1: My team holds weekly meetings with our Principal and usually a few other important teachers that pull students for special services.  During our PLC meetings we can bring up any concerns we have or anything important we need to discuss.  My first goal would be to discuss the problem and have a conversation about providing our students with more home and school collaboration in the PLC meeting.  I would ask them what they think or if they had any suggestions,  I would also ask if they would be willing to listen to a presentation in the future at a staff meeting.   Objective 2: I would want to give a presentation to the whole staff...
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Advocacy Plan for Students of Poverty

Problem: Inconsistent literacy learning expectations is contributing to the perpetuation of the literacy  achievement gap between students with differing socioeconomic backgrounds nationwide. These  inconsistent expectations are not always present because of a conscious decision on the teachers  part. Many educators may in fact believe that they are helping students who they know are  struggling with the obstacles characteristic of poverty.  It is my belief that we need to ensure all  teachers understand that this in fact hurting students, rather than helping them. The truth of the matter  is, students living in poverty do have significant barriers to becoming successful readers and writers.  However, lowering expectations of these students is not the appropriate way to combat this issue. That  being said, we need to make sure we equip both teachers and students with the right tools and materials  in order for students to effectively acc...
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Teaching Strategies-Part 2

As we have already established in previous installments of this blog, students living in poverty have many hurdles they must overcome in order to become successful readers and writers. As teachers and literacy leaders we believe it is our responsibility to advocate for this population of marginalized students. One way we can accomplish this includes sharing what we know about research based literacy strategies that have been found to be effective in improving literacy outcomes for students living in poverty.  Increasing engagement is one way to improve literacy outcomes for students in this population. Providing students with autonomy support, using mixed ability reading groups, building self-efficacy, using explicit instruction, and peer learning have all been shown to increase student engagement (Kennedy, 2018). Below you will find  5 literacy strategies that incorporate one or more of these elements.  Strategy #1 This strategy has been included because of its utilizati...
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Teaching Strategies for learners in poverty

This blog was created to provide teachers with appropriate teaching strategies they can use in their classrooms, these activities are based on evidence and research.  These literacy strategies can help learners in poverty gain extra practice in skills necessary for becoming fluent readers.  Many learners in poverty deal with situations that are out of their control and it is our job as educators to figure out what these students need in order to fill the gaps they have missed. Figuring out how to support learners from different backgrounds and populations takes time and should be carefully planned out. The article written by Rasinski (2017) stated that since the year 2000,with the publication of the report of the National Reading Panel (NRP), phonemic awareness, phonics or word decoding, reading fluency (automaticity in word recognition and expressive reading), and text and word comprehension have been repeatedly cited as essential to student success in learning to read. ( p.5...
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