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The purpose of this article is to describe the professional development plan for an elementary school receiving federal funding through the Reading Excellence Act (REA). The Reading Excellence Act provided the school with a two‐year plan for literacy improvement. During the first year of the grant, assessment‐driven instruction and flexible grouping for instruction were the focus of professional development. This article focuses on the professional development of the second year of the grant during which school‐based data provided the REA grant coordinator with instructional needs of the staff, and disaggregated data provided specific needs for each grade level. Based upon the analysis of student achievement data, professional development for kindergarten and first grade teachers focused on training in word study to improve phonics and spelling achievement. Professional development for second through fourth grade teachers focused on fluency instruction and comprehension instruction, including nar...

This is a study of the utility of Lexile scores for predicting adequate oral reading accuracy and oral reading rate in a tradebook. A Lexile score is a quantitative measure of readability that can be applied to texts and also a metric for describing reading achievement through the use of standardized reading comprehension measures. Participants included 47 second‐grade readers who took a group‐administered reading comprehension test, yielding individual Lexile scores. Trade book titles were randomly selected to correspond to their Lexile scores. After a controlled story introduction, each participant read a single text orally, and researchers calculated oral reading accuracy and rate. Results indicated that 93% of the participants read their Lexile‐identified trade book with oral reading accuracy > 90% but only 57% with reading rate >70 words per minute. Implications for using Lexile scores as part of a school‐level assessment plan are discussed.

Learning to read is the number one education priority in this nation. For the most part, upper-elementary students with language-learning disabilities (LLD) have not been included in the many regional and state initiatives to improve reading achievement and instruction. This article discusses how our knowledge and research about teaching beginning reading effectively to young children in the general education classroom can be applied to students in Grades 4 through 6. Stages of reading acquisition in LLD, key transition points, and a comprehensive set of strategies for general and special educators and other professionals (e.g., speech—language pathologists) to foster literacy in older beginning readers are offered.

A team of first-grade teachers began to question their literacy/phonics program, which used a whole-class format for instruction. The teachers felt that teaching the whole class did not allow them to meet the diverse needs of all their students. One of the teachers introduced the rest of the team to developmental-spelling research (i.e., research on the development of spelling proficiency that builds on linguistic interpretations of students' unconventional spellings as they change over time) and, specifically, to an approach to phonics and spelling instruction called word study. By using developmental-spelling assessments, the teachers believed they could better meet their students' needs through differentiated word study in small groups. The new school year began with qualitative spelling assessments and subsequent grouping plans. Many issues arose quickly. When teachers placed their students along a developmental continuum of spelling features, they saw that many students could bypass earlier features that, according to assessment results, they had already learned. The idea of having a group of students skip over easier features made them anxious about meeting the Reading First criteria for systematic phonics instruction. In their previous whole-class teaching, everyone started in the same place and proceeded systematically through the curriculum. Now the teachers were uncertain about choosing different spelling features for different groups. They found themselves spending more time preparing when they were used to depending upon an already prepared program. Management issues associated with differentiated groupings proved to be challenging. They wondered how teachers could take developmental-spelling research and make it practical for the classroom.