Educators can use a variety of resources, frameworks, instructional guidelines, and other approaches to develop the best teaching strategy tailored to the needs of their students. Apart from the knowledge and skills necessary to carry out classroom activities, teachers have to show their leadership capacity in an educational setting to ensure adequate learning. This helps them structure their lessons in a manner that addresses all the essential topics that students have to master and choose a framework that will help students, even those falling behind, gain knowledge.
The five resources that will be reviewed in this paper are pacing guides, leveled literacy intervention (LLI), literacy model – word study, structured literacy, and Beth Estill word sorts. Table 1 presents a summary of these resources and critical features, as well as an outline of how educators can use them to support learning. This paper summarizes these tools and explains how they should be used to develop and supervise the instructional and leadership capacity of the school staff.
The school’s staff can apply LLC to help the groups of students that are falling behind and are unable to achieve the same reading capability as their peers, which should result in better learning outcomes. LLC can aid in improving classroom literacy, and the main benefit of using it is the work in small groups. This resource should be used to enhance the leadership and instructional capacity of the staff by addressing the reading difficulties of some students. Due to the fact that LLC is a method developed for ensuring that all students reach their grade-level reading capacity, teachers can use it to monitor these students closely and provide them with daily practice.
More importantly, this approach helps “elevate the expertise of teachers” (“Leveled literacy intervention (LLI),” n.d., para. 15). This method should be used to develop teachers’ ability to work with struggling readers and supervise the progress that is made as a result of these interventions. Teachers, as leaders, take responsibility for evaluating student’s reading skills, examining the gap between the current state of reading and requirements, forming groups based on students’ needs, and working on these gaps.
Teachers can use pacing guides as the primary source of information regarding the set expectations for the learning because they can use this resource to plan their lessons and to ensure that they focus on the information that will be a part of student testing. As a result, they can balance the coverage and pace of their lessons, which is often a challenge, because they know what topics are more relevant and should be the focus.
Davis (2008) argues that teachers rely on pacing guides as the primary source of information regarding the topics that they teach to students. Mainly, this is connected to the fact that textbooks and other resources contain a lot of material that can overburden students, and they may overlook the topics that will be a part of the annual test. This tool can enhance the staff’s leadership capacity by ensuring that they help their students focus on the essential topics the knowledge of which will be tested since evaluation is an important aspect of education.
There are two approaches to literacy teaching – word study and structured literacy. In structured literacy, a systemic approach is a key that helps school teachers to aid students with conditions or other issues. They obstruct them from improving their reading and the program moves from understanding the smallest units to decoding words and sentences. Structured literacy can be used as a method for creating lesson plans that are sequenced and include a step-by-step learning process.
Word study has a similar approach, however, it emphasizes the relationship between different elements of a language. Word study is a more sophisticated method when compared to a more traditional memorization approach. However, it is more effective, because educators help students develop a deeper comprehension of language structures, which they can further apply in the learning process, as oppose to memorization where the main goal is to remember words or phrases. This method can be used to develop instructional and leadership capacity of school staff by instructing educators to focus on engaging students in the process of learning and helping them create connections between different concepts.
Finally, Beth Estill Word Sorts helps teachers leverage student’s visualization skills to develop a better understanding of texts. For example, Estill (n.d.) suggests that teachers can use pictures of words when reading a text to help students understand the context better. The main idea is that instructional capacity can be enhanced if the students understand the concepts since they comprehend a general idea aids in creating connections in one’s mind (Estill, n.d.). Educators can use this approach to engage students in proactive work when providing instructions for a lesson and for structuring the lessons as a sequence of steps.
In summary, all of the examined tools allow educators to be more effective when teaching and choosing from a variety of methods that improve the learning process. All five of the examined and available resources help develop and supervise the leadership capacity of staff, because they help distinguish the topics that should be included in the lesson plans and address problems of students struggling with literacy. By using these tools, teachers become leaders since they identify a problem area and choose an appropriate instructional technique to address it.
ELS 728/828 Review of Instructional Resources
Table 1. Review of instructional resources (created by the author).
References
David, J. L. (2008). What research says about… / pacing guides. Educational Leadership, 66(2), 87-88.
Estill, B. (n.d.). Integrating English language arts standards with content using mentor text. Web.
Leveled literacy intervention (LLI). (n.d.). Web.
Lynch, D. (2019). What you must know about structured literacy program. Web.
Williams, C., Phillips-Birdsong, C., Hufnagel, K., & Hungler. (n.d.). Word study instruction in the K-2 classroom. Web.