What targeted actions did we take to address our school’s learning focus? 

Initial scan in grade 8 English class. Students read a piece of text and were asked to answer questions related to that text. They were also asked to self-reflect on the strategies they were using to decode the information from the text. 

What gap or problem were these actions intended to address? Why was this particular strategy/action chosen? 

We chose to do an initial scan because we needed to understand the students’ current literacy strengths and stretches and determine what we can address most effectively. 

What does the evidence tell us so far? 

The majority of students achieved an overall score of ‘proficient’ for this literacy assessment, which is great news! We anticipated more students to be in the ‘developing’ or ‘developing/proficient’ areas. It is easy to look at this data and think that no changes need to be made to our practice, but when we break down the data by skill, we begin to see which areas require more targeted approaches. When we break down the data, we see that our grade 8s would benefit from: 

• Explicit instruction of higher-order skills such as inferencing, connections, & responding. 

• Guidance with generating ideas and selecting logical connections. 

• Scaffolding for various written responses, their purposes, and their conventions. 

• Some support with vocabulary and main idea for different content areas. 

To what extent are the actions making a difference? 

Students were noticed using literacy strategies to decode text when they received explicit, direct teaching of a strategy, such as text features. For example, a student stated “I determined [the definition] by looking at the info box taught by [my teacher]” 

How will we move forward accordingly?  

• PLT skill building sessions 

• Staff collaboration to embed direct instruction of literacy strategies across all curricular areas 

• Re-scan later in the school year to assess how explicit instruction is making a difference in the transferability of literacy skills.