• When Teachers Teach Teachers, Teachers Learn

    Our guest author is Kata Solow, executive director of the Goyen Foundation, where she led its multi-year transformation process and created the Goyen Literacy Fellowship to recognize exceptional reading teachers. 

    Elementary school teachers across the country are asking for help. 

    Go on Facebook, browse Twitter, and you’ll hear a common refrain: “We want to change how we teach reading, but we don’t know where to begin. We need to see what it looks like. Give us models and examples of excellent literacy instruction.” 

    Why is this happening? For these teachers, their world has just changed. Over the last five years, as reading-related legislation has swept the country, hundreds of thousands of elementary school teachers are being required to change the way they teach reading. This is a really big deal: changing how you teach reading is a hard thing to do.

    States are trying to help teachers make these changes. Most of the newly-passed laws support professional development for in-service teachers. However, the most common PD programs like LETRS are highly theoretical. While they provide educators with a strong foundation in the components of structured literacy and the research that underlies it, they do not address what these components look like in a real classroom.    

    At the Goyen Foundation, we think that we have started to build a model that bridges this research-to-practice gap by providing teachers with concrete examples of great literacy instruction. This piece is about how you can do it in your school or district.   

  • Celebrating 20 Years of AFT Collaboration with PBS Public Television Station WETA on Colorín Colorado!

    Guest author AFT Educational Issues Director Giselle Lundy-Ponce has been working in the field of PreK-12 education policy, research and advocacy for the last thirty-two years. In 2004 she initiated the partnership with the public television station WETA’s Learning Media Department to develop Colorín Colorado. Now with so much attention to the Congressional threat to defund public television, the story of 20 years of a successful partnership between AFT and public television station WETA -— to better meet the literacy needs of English language learners, their families, and their teachers -— is more important to tell than ever.

    In 2005, the AFT announced that it was launching Colorín Colorado, an online resource hub, to provide educators of English language learners (ELLs) with evidence-based resources, best practices, and information to help their students read and succeed. At the time of the launch, we recorded 400 visitors to the site, and we were pleased because we were reassured that we were meeting a need. Fast forward to today, we are thrilled beyond words that the initial 400 visitors have grown to over 3.5 million. When Colorín Colorado was launched, it was limited: We were almost exclusively a PK-3 website focused on literacy instruction, and the target audience was primarily educators and families of Spanish-speaking ELLs.

    Now we offer resources that span the PK-12 range, and the content of the website is applicable to ELLs from all language backgrounds. While many of the website’s resources are still available in Spanish, and we refer to the website as bilingual, we have added family literacy tip sheets in sixteen languages. Every year, we have kept growing and expanding beyond the literacy scope and are now the main clearinghouse for what works for ELLs in content areas across all academic subjects, social-emotional development, how to address trauma in the classroom, and a whole host of other topics on ELL instruction and ELL well-being.