Sidebar

Magazine menu

19
Fri, Apr

Issue 48 | Parents as Consumers

A Springboard teacher coaches a family on their action plan during a workshop.
Credit: Springboard

Over half of fourth graders in the U.S. read below grade level. Reading below grade-level by the end of third grade is one of the earliest predictors that a child is on track to leave high school unprepared for college or a career. This is especially true for students living in poverty; one in six students living in poverty does not even graduate from high school.

For many students, this slippery slope begins in the summer, when low-income kids typically lose months of reading skills. Year after year, low-income students fall further and further behind their wealthier peers because the summer represents one step back for every two steps forward gained during the school year. One study concluded that two-thirds of the achievement gap among high school students is attributable to summer learning loss in elementary school. 

The persistent literacy gap between lower-income students and their higher-income peers speaks to a larger issue, however. It is symptomatic of an underlying challenge: schools struggle to bring low-income parents into the process of teaching kids. As a result, we fail to capture educational value from the place children have most of their formative experiences: the home. 

Children spend 75 percent of their waking hours outside of the classroom, yet our nation does shockingly little to capture educational value from this time for low-income kids. Too often we treat their families as liabilities, rather than assets. Why don’t we see in a low-income parent the very same love, commitment, and potential we see in a wealthier parent? Many of the families Springboard works with have learned the hard way just how important it is for their children to have a better educational experience than they did. In their determination, there is boundless potential.

It may sound like an obvious question, but think for a moment: why is it important to involve families in the battle to close the literacy gap?

The best way to become a strong reader is to read, and read, and read some more. For some children, it may seem like a reading habit magically happens, but it’s not magic at all. Who is making sure that the child has something to read? Who is setting aside time in the day, even during the summer, for that child to read? Who is helping that child to keep going when the reading gets tougher? The answer -- the caring adults in their life. 

The children enrolled in Springboard programs lack the literacy skills they need to read on grade-level. However, they do not lack caring adults in their lives. And so, Springboard builds on this underutilized and undervalued natural resource in education -- namely the parents and families of our students -- with promising results.  

We Work to Close the Literacy Gap

At Springboard, we leverage families to help us attack the literacy gap on three fronts:

  • Springboard Summer is an intensive, five-week summer program that combines daily reading instruction for Pre-K through 3rd graders, weekly workshops training parents to teach reading at home, and an incentive structure that awards learning tools to families -- from books to tablets -- in proportion with their children’s reading progress.
  • Recognizing that bottom-quartile readers need additional support, we developed Springboard Afterschool, which trains teachers to differentiate instruction and engage families in order to accelerate struggling readers’ progress during the academic year.
  • Springboard’s summer and afterschool programs build the requisite mindsets and skillsets to embrace a culture change around parent engagement. Springboard Schoolyear is a blueprint that embeds literacy-focused family engagement into the academic year.

It is important to note that at Springboard we don’t swoop in and give school communities a makeover. Instead, we train teachers and leaders from within the community to create fruitful partnerships with families.

A father practices asking comprehension questions while his son reads.
Credit: Springboard

Our Innovation Solution: We Create Family Partners 

Partnership: this word is used -- perhaps overused -- to mean many different things. At Springboard Collaborative, here’s how we think about it:

First, we acknowledge and respect the unique position families have in their children’s lives. This begins with a home visit. 70 percent of families in our program welcome their child’s teacher into their home. This personal interaction provides the foundation for a truly effective partnership focused on the needs of each individual student. Then teachers create personalized student action plans, which they share and refine with families. During the 2017-18 implementation of Springboard Schoolyear, every single family received a student action plan, and 96 percent of families reported that they "understand exactly what [their] child needs to do to become a better reader." Because of these home visits and the customized approach to learning, Springboard families know they are valued and respected.

Second, we recognize that literacy coaching is a specialized skill that can be taught. Each week, our families attend a family workshop. Each hour-long seminar focuses on a different literacy skill that that the families can work on at home. Our weekly family training workshops average an impressive 91 percent attendance. Over and over again, low-income parents prove themselves enthusiastic and effective home literacy coaches.

You can’t build literacy skills and cultivate good reading habits without resources. With this in mind, we provide families with brand new books that are targeted to students’ reading levels. Springboard distributed 36,314 books this summer, an average of 10 books per student, increasing families' at-home libraries by 30 percent.

Third, we recognize that communicating and working with families requires educators to shift their thinking. We train teachers and leaders to create student actions plans, lead family workshops, and communicate with families. As a result, 96 percent of site leaders said they improved in their ability to communicate and engage with families. When these same teachers and leaders return to the school in the fall, they are empowered with the skills and knowledge they picked up over the summer.

Lastly, we expect big things. Participating in the Springboard program is not easy. We ask parents to come to workshops, try out new literacy skills, and dedicate time every day to cultivate good reading habits with their children. And families rise to the challenge. 

Before Springboard, 14 percent of our families were reading with their kids 0-1 day a week and a little more than a third of families (36 percent) were reading with their kids more than five days each week. During the Springboard program we increased the number of families consistently reading with their children (more than five days a week) to a whopping 66 percent. The number of families reading very little with their kids (0-1 day a week) dropped to a mere four percent. 

Results that Extend Beyond the Home  

Springboard’s combination of individualized literacy instruction with robust parent engagement pays off. Working together, we are able to replace the typical three-month summer learning loss with a more than month summer learning gain. Springboard scholars, the same students who were at risk for getting lost in the literacy gap, start the school year reading on grade level and sometimes even months ahead. 

And these results have staying power. Six months after completing Springboard, 67 percent of scholars regularly read 4 or more days per week (a sustained 14 percent increase), and they read with more stamina. In fact, 78 percent of scholars regularly read more than 10 minutes every time they sit down to read (a 25 percent increase in the amount of time spent reading).

Who do you think is driving this sustained reading effort at home? It’s no longer the Springboard teacher. The Springboard teacher set the course over the summer, but does not necessarily work with the same group of students thereafter. It’s the family members -- the home literacy coaches -- that sustain habits with the children they love so deeply. During focus groups, we often ask parents: “Of everything you got at Springboard, what most helped you to support your child’s reading progress?” Invariably, the answer is “the practice of setting and achieving goals with my child.” This fundamental practice will not only help children to become strong readers; it will help children to access life opportunities and realize their full potential.

The impact of Springboard families isn’t confined within the walls of the home. As one parent noted, “These things we are learning are very exciting to me and I take them home to my sister, who has a little boy who's about to go into kindergarten. So the skills don’t just go to me; they go to the whole family, the whole block really.”

Springboard Collaborative is proving that family engagement represents the largest opportunity for low-income schools to dramatically improve educational outcomes. It took a long time for the education field to embrace the idea that all children can learn. It is Springboard’s ambition -- and our charge -- to prove that all parents can teach.

Authors' bios

Alejandro Gibes de Gac is the CEO and Founder of Springboard Collaborative. As the son of immigrants who sacrificed everything to give him educational opportunities, Alejandro learned firsthand the potential in parent engagement. 

Amanda Hamilton Roos is an education consultant specializing in family engagement and literacy. As an experienced teacher and parent of three, she knows the power of parental love from both sides of the classroom door.

Works Cited

1.  Donald J. Hernandez, “Double Jeopardy: How Third-Grade Reading Skills and Poverty Influence High School Graduation,” ERIC: Institute of Education Science, April 2011, https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED518818.

2.  “Our Impact,” Springboard Collaborative, accessed May 6, 2018, https://www.springboardcollaborative.org

3.  “Statistics,” The National Children’s Book and Literacy Alliance, accessed May 6, 2018, http://thencbla.org.

Mission of Parent Reading Coach™

We believe in the power of parents to educate and guide their children in the learning process. We do this by giving parents the knowledge and tools necessary to decrease their dependence on formal educational systems.

We do this because we know millions of caring parents have voiced their frustrations on behalf of their children, who have been forced into a one-size-fits-all educational system. We do this because we demand an educational system that adapts to a child’s learning style, teaches them at their respective academic level, and allows them to pursue their academic passions and interests. 

We do this because parents are asking for a roadmap to take control of their child’s educational experience.  

For years I taught students to read the many different ways the vowel sounds are written by drilling flashcards, one by one. It often took a good student up to a month to memorize all those vowel sounds. Then, because that task was impossible for Kimie, a four-year-old, I invented my Vowel Reference Card.

It worked so well for her that I started allowing all of my students to use that card as a reference while they learned the common vowel sounds. Many students were able to master the sounds in less than a week, sometimes in just one lesson, and then they were able to start applying that knowledge to actual words.

My journey of more than 50 years of working as a regular and special education teacher, along with doing specialized one-on-one tutoring with parents as part of the process, has resulted in the creation and publishing of my own materials. When I couldn’t find materials to teach a child, I would just create them myself. For reading, I used the Orton-Gillingham Method as my base. For math, I used right-brain, hands-on, manipulatives, and some I created myself, to simplify concepts. Always, the materials I created came from a student’s need, one I couldn’t meet using the teaching materials that were currently available. I created my materials for students first, then I wrote them up formally for parents and teachers.  

I’ve published my materials for parents for two main reasons:

  1. Teachers, based upon my personal experience as a teacher and trainer of teachers, are driven by school priorities (requirements to use the materials provided to them from school districts) and the difficulty in working individually with students, especially when classroom sizes are large. How well I am aware of that! I was trained as an elementary teacher (1965) and taught Kindergarten, 1st grade, a composite of the lower grades, and then 5th grade. I remember so very well, watching some of my 5th graders, struggling to learn, and yet, being so very aware, that I didn’t have the time to meet with them individually and help them with these struggles. The summer, after I taught 5th grade, I went for my Master’s Degree in Reading and Special Education. Even then, after increasing my knowledge of what I needed to do to help my struggling students, I just couldn’t find the time to do the job in the classroom, both in my 6th grade classroom the next year or the year after that when I went on to teach in a composite Special Education classroom. In an effort to address the need I saw firsthand, I began tutoring, one-on-one, with parents as my helpers.  
  2. Parents, when directly participating in the process, by being present at each lesson and later practicing the lessons with their child between tutoring sessions, proved to be an awesome support in the process. I’ve told many a parent they needed to take credit for the job accomplished because without their help, yes, I might have done as well, but it would have taken me so much longer to accomplish our goals. Plus, when my job was done, the parents had a communication system concerning reading/math/writing with their own child, so they could continue to be a part of their child’s education.

Problem from a Parent’s Perspective

Special Education

The current processes provided by schools, as illustrated below, result in money being spent on evaluations and the development of Individualized Educational Plans (IEPs) with few adapted and specialized instructional services for the student. Given that close to one in five students in English-speaking countries has a language-based learning disability, dyslexia being the most common, we understand that 20 percent of the population needs alternative solutions.

When solutions depend solely on teachers, we experience additional barriers. Teachers have said, “Teaching children is the role of schools,” mainly because they have their hands full in teaching the children and do not have the time to teach parents how to teach their own children. They encourage parents to read to their children (awesome advice), but parents also need early literacy knowledge and tools if they are going to be part of the process, and ultimately part of the solution. 

Children Entering School Ready to Read  

Parents who want to assist in the early literacy preparation for their children often find too much information, information that often appears to be building on random skills, resulting in parents being kept in the dark on how to teach their own children to read.

A Better Way: Giving Parents the Knowledge and Tools

Although the solution is simple -- training parents to be part of the early literacy and math instruction for their own children -- the challenge was, and is, to create a model or system that engages and provides parents with the proper knowledge and tools to teach their children how to read.   

Not knowing exactly where to start, I simply started with the belief that parents needed the knowledge and tools if they were going to teach their own children. The process can be complicated, but my system has simplified that. If I could reach the parents then students would actually learn how to read in a timely manner, and I could save schools lots of money. 

Initially, I taught my methods at a university to both teachers and parents, but the ability to reach many was prohibitive because of time and cost requirements. After numerous conversations with teachers, schools, and parents, and multiple adaptations, Parent Reading Coach™ was born. Parent Reading Coach™, illustrated below, is based upon the premise that all children can read when parents use research-informed learning techniques and strategies; every child is valued for his or her uniqueness and able to learn at his or her respective academic level; and parents shift from delivering content to being facilitators of learning. Parent Reading Coach™ provides training videos and a virtual student platform to caregivers and students. Through this system, vested parents and caregivers have access to the tools and knowledge necessary to help their children learn to read. Parent Reading Coach™ uses a cloud-based platform that can be used to disseminate material to students, parents, and teachers, as well as administer reading-based learning challenges. The program moves sequentially and prevents students from progressing until they demonstrate mastery through parent engagement. Additionally, this model allows students to build their own skills, and teaches them the foundations of reading by practicing and progressing without relying entirely on their parents and teachers. Finally, Parent Reading Coach™ has adapted to include the distribution of hardcopy books that students and parents determined are needed in order to support their success, thereby providing physical materials in addition to an online platform.

Early Literacy Eight-Step Model

I learned that consonant sounds are not much of a problem as the schools do a good job of introducing those sounds, and most students do well when learning them. Vowel sounds, however, are written many different ways and are not grouped in ways that make sense to students. For this reason, most reading programs are structured upon the ability of the student to recognize vowel patterns and depend highly on memorization.   

Step 1: With much help, I organized my reading program into an eight-level systematic approach with my vowel reference card being the centerpiece. This eight-step process allows parents and students to teach and learn a system that is now manageable for both.

Description of the Eight-Step Process:

  1. Association of eight consonants and two short vowel sounds. 
  2. Joining of beginning consonants with short vowels. Flow 1 and Flow 2.
  3. Joining of all single letter beginning and end consonants with the five short vowels. Flow 1 and Flow 2.
  4. Association of blends with short vowel sounds. Flow 1 and Flow 2.  
  5. Joining of digraphs with short vowel sounds. Flow 1 and Flow 2.
  6. Silent E Rule. 
  7. Vowel Reference Card: Flow 1 and Flow 2, including the deep dive video: One of my students, Joseph, in addition to my other students was required to say all of the possible sounds for the common vowel sounds and circle them on his papers, because by doing so, even if he knew the word, he was practicing the possible vowel sounds for the letter/letters over and over. When students did come to an unknown word, and the first sound didn’t work, they could quickly try the other possible sounds to figure out the word. English is a guessing game! Just because you see the letter "a" in a word doesn’t mean it will say the short a sound as in apple /a/. It might say the long a sound as in maple or even the short "u" sound as in around. If students learn to guess and guess quickly, they can figure out how to read a word without having to look that word up in a dictionary.  
    Once my Vowel Reference Card is mastered students can learn to read easy words such as Joseph was required to read, nonsense syllables as “com” in the word combination, and later multisyllabic words. I use the same Vowel Reference Card to help students learn to spell. For example, a student who doesn’t know how to spell the word “flown” as in, “The airplane had flown over the house three times,” but knows that long "o" could be spelled with just an "o," with an "e" added at the end (silent e rule), "oa," or "ow," is taught to write out those sounds as "flon," "flone," "flown," and "floan.” Most times, once written, the student can pick the correct spelling because a student’s reading level is often one to two years higher than their spelling level.
  8. Reading Multisyllable Words.

Step 2: We created Parent Reading Coach™ as an online accessible platform for Schuler Phonics where each level is accompanied by a tutorial video. This tutorial is targeted for the parent/teacher and is in the format of a short training video. Essentially it provides the parent with the logic behind the construction of the English reading building blocks.

Step 3: We created the Parent Reading Coach™ practice application to ensure fidelity to the process. Altogether, the Parent Reading Coach™ practice application takes a student through eight levels, 13 reading building blocks, leading to their ability to read many English language words. Upon completion of the activities in the practice application, Parent Reading Coach™ sends the parent an email to assess mastery before the student can move onto the next level. Mastery Assessment Guides are in the parent log-in platform in the form of pdf files.  

Note: A parent can bypass this process by simply logging in and assigning the student a new level. However, we strongly recommend that the parent print out the Mastery Assessment Guides and complete them with the student. Key to success in the reading process is having a student practice the skills in a “pencil/paper” environment, one-on-one with the parent. These Mastery Assessment Guides are taken from my Schuler Phonics CORE (2nd Part) materials. 

Step 4: Aware that holding a physical book is still an important aspect of learning to read, we are publishing early literacy books that follow my systematic, sequential approach. After an exhaustive search, we found that many early literacy books are frustrating to kids because the words are not well-controlled, some being difficult even in beginning books. Some books have controlled vocabulary and do an excellent job of introducing the consonants, short vowels, and silent e rule, but then they jump and add multiple vowel sounds with little or no instruction as to how the students are to remember all those vowel sounds. Our early literacy books, not only are written with the short vowels and silent e words, but using the Vowel Reference Card, give the readers a way to sound out and remember those more difficult vowel sounds. Our favorite literacy series is the SRA Dolch Readers, but this series does not cover the beginning stages of reading so it is too advanced for beginner readers. Students need something before this series. Our “Learn to Read Phonetically” series of books feed into this Dolch series, providing pre-requisite skills as an early essential step. 

Step 5: We are offering virtual webinars at an affordable cost to parents to support our providing an in-person expert and contact to answer any questions regarding their children’s learning. 

Conclusion

Parent Reading Coach™ offers an evidence-informed (Orton-Gillingham), virtual training and early literacy platform for students with learning disabilities. The program is both accessible and affordable, and it is targeted directly towards parents and caregivers. This type of learning system offers promising, new ways of learning that could transform those currently labeled as “non-academics” into flourishing, confident self-learners. 

Ultimately, Parent Reading Coach™ envisions a world in which all children are literate. This model also pushes for motivated teachers to acquire early literacy training, which is often excluded from their higher education degrees. Parent Reading Coach™ might not ensure literacy for everyone, but it does provide the essential knowledge and tools necessary to eliminate the hopelessness that many parents experience when their child does not fit into the traditional educational system. 

Parent Reading Coach™ continues to evolve based on consumer-driven feedback. For more information on Parent Reading Coach™ visit: www.parentreadingcoach.org.