Striving Readers

The Striving Readers Comprehensive Literacy Program helps states pursue a comprehensive approach to improving literacy outcomes for all children, birth through grade 12, including limited-English-proficient students and students with disabilities. Outlined here is Capstone's submission to this program.

Instruction and Curriculum Aligned to Standards

Research Base/Evidence of Research Leveled Readers

In addition to being carefully leveled to assure fidelity in instruction, each reader is carefully aligned to comprehension strategies. An alignment document for the program also shows the text conventions that learners will encounter in each book. The texts are considerate for strategy instruction.

Download our Engage Literacy Skill Alignment Comparison chart

Research Base/Evidence of Research Teacher Guides

The Teacher's Resource Guides are carefully correlated to Standards for College and Career Readiness, focused on reading, writing, speaking, and listening. Lessons cover comprehension strategies, graphophonics, vocabulary, text conventions, writing, and fluency. The teaching notes are steeped in the best practices of adherence to standards, ensuring their grade-level and reading-level appropriateness.

Research Base/Evidence of Research Oral Language Big Books

The Oral Language Big Books support listening and speaking standards as set out in the College and Career Readiness Standards.

Research Base/Evidence of Research Comprehension Kit

The Engage Literacy Comprehension Kit is based on standards for comprehension instruction that is appropriate for the reading level. By considering how to use strategies with various text types, students learn to successfully navigate both literary and informational texts applying a wide array of strategies on their own.

Research Base/Evidence of Research Benchmark Assessment Kit

The Benchmark Assessment Kit, designed to assess students' guided reading levels, allows educators to match students to texts that are appropriate for standards-based instruction.

 

Multi-Tiered Systems of Support/Instruction & Intervention

Research Base/Evidence of Research Leveled Readers

Clearly, one important goal for school reading programs is to help more students see themselves as successful readers. Achieving that outcome often begins with providing students with access to texts that are matched to their literacy instructional levels. Fountas and Pinnell (2016a) noted: “good teaching becomes moot if the text is at an inappropriate level.” Leveled readers can be part of a strategic tiered instruction and intervention model, as students are carefully matched to instructional levels with the just-right amount of scaffolds and challenges.

Research Base/Evidence of Research Teacher Guides

In addition to appropriately leveled texts, students need instruction from an expert teacher who can support and assist them as needed to address any difficulties they may encounter. Glasswell and Ford (2011) remind educators, “the challenge of reading instruction does not reside solely in the text, but in what each teacher does to move each reader forward.” The increasing complexity and difficulty of leveled texts can be used strategically with scaffolded instruction to help students move from one phase of development to the next and experience greater success with reading. With the combination of appropriate texts and supportive instruction, more students will develop positive identities with the beliefs, desires, and knowledge needed to be successful readers (Fountas & Pinnell, 2016a).

Research Base/Evidence of Research Oral Language Big Books

The Oral Language Big Books are part of a tiered model of instruction, providing additional support for those students who might be struggling with developing academic and situational vocabulary. For students with more robust vocabularies, the Oral Language Big Books provide opportunities for students to use the vocabulary they have developed.

Research Base/Evidence of Research Benchmark Assessment Kit

The Benchmark Assessment Kit allows for a tiered approach to instruction that enlists the appropriate supports and scaffolds for students who need them. The Benchmark Assessment Kit is a means for matching students to appropriate text and is part of a tiered approach to instruction.

 

Professional Development

Research Base/Evidence of Research Leveled Readers

The educator leadership team addresses the needs of individual students. Engage Literacy provides a framework for meeting the needs of individual students with a wide array of engaging texts from Levels A-V. A clear instructional path provides students the means for students to progress through the levels. The engaging leveled readers can also provide a bridge from school to home, as students share their texts with families and care-givers. The recurring characters are motivating. If a student is very excited about a new subject or topic captured in an available text regardless of its level that may be a perfect time for that student to read that book. Small groups may need to stay focused on specific texts to provide appropriate instruction, but other texts can be made available to students for independent reading.

Research Base/Evidence of Research Teacher Guides

Meaning is the basis for comprehension. Clay (2001) believed that meaning is the outcome and reward of the effort put into it, and it provides a purpose to reading and writing. Experts agree meaning is not just a reference to meaning at the word level of the text but rather at a deeper level—that of the author’s intent. If we are to move the use of leveled texts forward, it is especially crucial that educators see beyond a focus on accuracy at the word level to using the texts to help students acquire comprehension at deeper levels (Fountas & Pinnell, 2012). Engage Literacy has comprehension strategy support for each leveled text in the Teacher’s Resource Guide. Additionally, the program employs the use of recurring characters in the books, which helps students build on prior knowledge by linking content in a new text with content from previously read text—thus creating a comprehension thread from which to base comprehension. These research-based teacher's resource guides provide the key for continued professional learning throughout the continuum of learning.

Research Base/Evidence of Research Oral Language Big Books

Student understanding of new concepts may be enhanced through instruction that uses routines, embeds redundancy in lessons, provides explicit discussion of vocabulary and structure, and teaches students metacognitive skills (August & Hakuta, 1997). The Oral Language Big Books provide the opportunity for explicit instruction of vocabulary and for discussion of vocabulary words in context. This impacts student growth and the growth of the whole learner from early childhood on up.

Research Base/Evidence of Research Benchmark Assessment Kit

It is important that educators use the information gained through recording, scoring, and analyzing data to inform thinking in planning subsequent instruction (Fountas & Pinnell, 2012). It can be used as a tool for responsive teaching in giving clear and explicit feedback to students. This may be even more important with intermediate grade level students as they become more engaged with goal setting and self-evaluation in guiding their reading progress (Boushey & Moser, 2009). It also provides information that is aligned with expectations from national and state standards, which can be shared with families.

 

Assessment and Evaluation

Research Base/Evidence of Research Leveled Readers

Carefully leveled texts lead to fair assessments—students' reading levels are assessed, and students are matched to appropriate texts. This ensures that students have the correct amount of both challenges and supports as they grow in their ability to comprehend complex text.

Research Base/Evidence of Research Teacher Guides

Students’ growth and progress can be monitored, and the change in their reading development can be tracked (Fountas & Pinnell, 1996). By taking and analyzing Running Records on a regular basis, teachers can determine if students are:

  • Actively engaging with the text
  • Constantly checking on themselves to make sure the story makes sense
  • Checking on their reading to make sure the sources of information they have used interact, by asking themselves:
    • Did that make sense?
    • 
Did that sound right?
    • 
Did that look right?
  • Making predictions about the text
  • Checking their predictions
  • Self-correcting if their predictions are not confirmed
  • Solving tricky words as they meet them in the text
  • Rereading to search, to confirm, to self-correct, and to regain fluency

It is important that educators use the information gained through recording, scoring, and analyzing data in Running Records to inform thinking in planning subsequent instruction (Fountas & Pinnell, 2012). It can be used as a tool for responsive teaching in giving clear and explicit feedback to students.

Assessment in Engage Literacy is not limited to the use of oral reading samples and the Running Records. In each lesson, students will be engaged in instructional activities to demonstrate their abilities to use the knowledge, skills, and strategies that have been taught with less teacher support and more independence. These activities may involve suggested uses of the learner’s notebooks or provided Blackline Masters (BLM). These activities can also be reviewed and analyzed to provide information about intermediate grade students’ engagement levels, depth of knowledge in understanding the texts, composing skills and strategies, as well as the specific strategy or skill targeted in the activity. Monitoring the “paper trail” produced through these instructional activities should also inform educators’ thinking as they continue to plan to meet the needs of the students, provide specific feedback, and share information with families.

Research Base/Evidence of Research Oral Language Big Books

While the Oral Language Big Books do not have an embedded assessment tool, the careful and consistent practice of vocabulary development prompts student growth and language acquisition, leading to improved performance on assessments.

Research Base/Evidence of Research Benchmark Assessment Kit

The Benchmark Assessment Kit provides support and guidance for teachers to match students to appropriate text for instruction. The engaging and authentic texts provide for an accurate assessment. The oral running records in the Benchmark Assessment Kit can help teachers determine if students are:

  • Actively engaging with the text
  • Constantly checking on themselves to make sure the story makes sense
  • Checking on their reading to make sure the sources of information they have used interact, by asking themselves:
    • Did that make sense?
    • 
Did that sound right?
    • 
Did that look right?
  • Making predictions about the text
  • Checking their predictions
  • Self-correcting if their predictions are not confirmed
  • Solving tricky words as they meet them in the text

 

Collaborative Leadership and Sustainability

Research Base/Evidence of Research Leveled Readers
  • Schools need principals who strive to ensure the quality of instruction in their schools (Harris, 2007; Marzano et al., 2005; Portion et al., 2003).
  • Principals of high-achieving schools expect teachers and students to meet the schools' goals (Leithwood & Riehl, 2003).
  • Principals of high-achieving schools are confident that their schools can meet their goals (Cotton, 2003).

Engage Literacy provides a clear path for school leaders who are focusing on student growth that can be propelled by the program. A quasi-experimental efficacy study showed that Engage Literacy was an effective method for improving students’ reading fluency.

Research Base/Evidence of Research Teacher Guides

Research bears out the idea that the quality of a collaborative teaching partnership is in direct relationship to the quality of the collaborative planning that preceded it (Stetson & Associates). The Teacher Resource Guides for Engage Literacy contain "How to Use the Program" notes as well as lesson plans that can be the basis for joint planning of the balanced literacy program.

The Teacher Research Guide also includes Oral Running Records, which can be the basis of data dialogues and the assessment of student progress. Monitoring an oral reading sample provides quantitative and qualitative information about the accuracy of word identification, strategies used for word identification, self-correction rates, fluency, comprehension, reading levels, and other observable reading behaviors (Opitz, Ford, & Erikson, 2011). For assessing word level strategies, Engage Literacy provides a Running Record form based on the text of each student book to assist teachers in capturing this data. When teachers take Running Records to assess students’ progress on a regular basis, they can use the information they gain to move students from one text level to the next, through the gradient of text difficulty. Students’ growth and progress can be monitored, and the change in their reading development can be tracked (Fountas & Pinnell, 1996).

Research Base/Evidence of Research Oral Language Big Books

The Oral Language Big Books are a legitimate path for addressing students' background knowledge. By using vocabulary in context and through exposure to the strong match of visuals to vocabulary, students learn the academic vocabulary that may not be part of their cultural knowledge or background.

Research Base/Evidence of Research Benchmark Assessment Kit

Both the Comprehension Kit and the Benchmark Assessment Kit provide the opportunity for data dialogues along with monitoring and assessing progress as called for in the Striving Reader program requirements.

 

Technology

Research Base/Evidence of Research Leveled Readers

274 Engage Literacy eBooks match the leveled readers. These interactive eBooks support readers, as they are delivered via the web. The web access platform is available 24/7 through any Internet connection, so the books can be accessed from home or anywhere else there is an internet connection. There is no limit to the number of students accessing 1 book at any time, so a whole class can read the same book at the same time!

 

Family and Community Engagement

Research Base/Evidence of Research Leveled Readers

Communities can play an important part in each student's development as a reader, as do families. The leveled readers in Engage Literacy, with their various text types, recurring characters, and age-appropriate content, are engaging and motivating. The readers are visual and the stories often humorous. All the titles are precisely leveled to ensure students' success. Students will enjoy sharing these books with families and caregivers.

Research Base/Evidence of Research Teacher Guides

The Teacher's Resource Guides contain blackline masters that can be sent home with students to provide a link between home and school in extending the learning.

Research Base/Evidence of Research Oral Language Big Books

Educators can encourage learners to use newly-acquired vocabulary with their families and within the community to bolster use of academic vocabulary and to help them gain confidence using these words in real-world settings.

Research Base/Evidence of Research Benchmark Assessment Kit

The Benchmark Assessment Kit, designed to assess students' guided reading levels, allows educators to match students to texts that are appropriate for instruction in reading comprehension. It is important to share this data with families and caregivers to monitor progress. These assessments can provide solid data for families as they work with their learners to promote growth as readers.