Post Research Next Steps

     Before embarking on my research project back in September, I knew I wanted to focus on finding a way to help our struggling primary students who entered school already far behind their classmates in early literacy skills.  My research study developed into a parent led literacy program for Kindergarten students. After all the hard work of doing the research and developing a program for families to follow, I was thrilled to discover a positive relationship between time spent doing the program and student improvement in letter-sound fluency!  I now knew that a parent led intervention program focused on letter-sound knowledge could positively affect intensive students’ letter-sound fluency. However, what I discovered along the way put a damper on my celebrations. I learned that even though the program seemed to have a positive effect, I couldn’t get everyone to participate regularly enough to help their children.  It reminded me of medication. You can give patients the medication, but you can’t make them swallow the pills. Although that realization was a bit disheartening, it reminded me about why I became a teacher in the first place. I became a teacher to work with children. I had previously been a health educator for low-income pregnant women for many years and after a similar realization described above, I decided that I really wanted to work with children directly.

---

With all this in mind, my next steps will still focus on these students and helping them improve their early literacy skills.  Considering that my position as an Academic Specialist is not directly with students or parents, but more with teachers, here are the questions that will guide these next steps:

• What literacy teaching strategies work best for primary students struggling with learning to read? 
  
• What can be done to assist teachers in implementing these strategies?

I went back to my first driving question from our homework spreadsheet in course 790 and happily found that this driving question was still applicable, even though I want to come at it from a new angle:  “How can we help our earliest learners who enter and remain in the ELA gap?” I think my new angle will require me to do some more research about effective classroom techniques, and how to support teachers from my position as an Academic Specialist.  I am excited that we have an option to read Hattie, and anticipate that his work will be valuable to me in this work. As far as data collection for this round of research, I imagine that I will continue to use DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills) data to measure skills and growth.  Perhaps I will also need to collect data from teachers about how to best support them in this work. I am hoping that the work we are doing in our courses this semester will lead me to discover innovative, new ways to accomplish my goals in the questions I have laid out above. I know how busy teachers are and innovation is sorely needed in order to provide support in the most efficient way possible.