Title II Information

Professional Development
Title II provides funding to improve teacher and administrator quality, primarily through training.
Improving Teacher Quality

Academic Coaches
The goal of academic coaching is to deepen teacher knowledge and understanding, and improve instruction to ultimately increase student learning.  Coaches are learners along side teachers and are a part of the learning community.  Through collaborative conversations, coaches lead conversations on content (what to teach), pedagogy (how to teach it) and student learning (evidence of what was learned).  Coaches lead and support teachers through a five-part coaching cycle.  The coaching cycle is grounded in principles of collaborative learning but also allows for differentiated and one-on-one coaching as need:

Learn and Plan
Apply
Reflect
Refine or Extend
Evaluate

Coaches provide professional development, model high impact teaching practices, build rapport among the faculty at their schools and provide evidence-based feedback on observed lessons.

Reading Recovery Teachers

Reading Recovery Intervention and Research
Reading Recovery® is a unique, short-term early literacy intervention that provides intensive individual instruction for the children with the lowest reading performance in first grade. Students receive 30 minutes of daily differentiated, individual instruction in reading and writing for a period of 12 to 20 weeks from a highly trained, certified Reading Recovery professional. During the remainder of the instructional day, a teacher serves as an intervention specialist and works with small groups of students having difficulty in literacy. This structure provides schools with a comprehensive intervention design for extending and sustaining the literacy achievement of K-5 students.
Reading Recovery was developed in New Zealand by Dr. Marie Clay in the mid-1970s, following extensive observational research on children who were learning to read. In addition to New Zealand, Reading Recovery is currently available in Australia, Bermuda, Canada, Great Britain, and the United States. In 1991, Georgia State University became a Reading Recovery Regional Training Center for Teacher Leaders.

Benefits of Reading Recovery

Research and Evaluation
Reading Recovery is the world’s most widely researched intervention for young children having extreme difficulty with early literacy learning. After nearly 30 years of research, Reading Recovery’s effectiveness has been replicated over and over again in hundreds of sites across the United States and abroad. In an era where scientifically-based research is considered a hallmark of effectiveness, Reading Recovery has a record of experimental studies that meet the gold standard for scientifically-based research (www.readingrecovery.org/). In addition, teachers and teacher leaders collect data of each student’s progress. This data is sent to the Reading Recovery International Data Evaluation Center for compilation and analysis. Teacher leaders prepare an annual report of student outcome data for their site. Trainers at the university prepare an annual report of the aggregated data from all sites affiliated with Georgia State University. IDEC prepares a comprehensive report of the aggregated data

In addition to the primary goal of ensuring that students in first grade reach proficiency in reading by the end of first grade, Reading Recovery has other positive outcomes. Reading Recovery serves as a safety net for the lowest achieving children and works as a pre-referral to special education, with many children avoiding placement in special education as a result of the Reading Recovery intervention. An additional positive outcome of Reading Recovery is the reduction in the number of students retained in first grade.

In schools implementing the Partnerships in Comprehensive Literacy (PCL) model, Reading Recovery is a critical component of the design. The partnership between university and schools allows for intensive training for new teachers and teacher leaders along with high-quality professional development in an effort to increase the literacy achievement of struggling readers. Each year, the Georgia State University Reading Recovery Regional Training Center publishes an Executive Summary, detailing the results at sites affiliated with the GSU RR Regional Training Center (insert link for Research Reports)

Additional information about Reading Recovery can be found at www.readingrecovery.org.

Successful Start
Successful Start is a classroom intervention designed to close the literacy achievement gap that exists between students from communities impacted by low socio-economic and/or language factors and students from higher socio-economic communities. Teachers undergo an intensive year of professional development and support in their teaching that changes the outcomes for children. The aim is to close the school achievement gap.

Successful Start closes the gap by enabling teachers to change learning opportunities for children in schools that serve communities with:

In others words, a good proportion of the students enter low and do not “catch up” to their peers using instructional practices normally offered by the educational system.  
Program Description 
Data Comparison 
5 Year Progress

• Provides intensive and comprehensive instruction that is responsive to student needs.
• Provides a system-wide, short term, high rated early intervention.
• Provides an effective Response to Intervention (RtI) approach.
• Provides accelerated progress for at risk students.
• Provides exceptional professional learning that improves teacher quality and performance.
• Provides for increased student outcomes.
• Provides benefits for the whole school
• High percentage of families impacted by low socio-economic factors
• High percentage of second language learners
• Multi-linguistic communities
• High percentage of migrants
• High percentage of indigenous people
• High percentage of low achievers on any new entrant measure of achievement.