A Year of Impact

Message From Suzanne Donovan, Executive Director

We completed a STARI program—Series 4— explicitly designed for high school students!

STARI was first developed in collaboration with the Boston Public Schools; then-Superintendent Tom Payzant told us that BPS high school students couldn’t comprehend their textbooks. He wanted help addressing the underlying problem—reading stagnation in the middle grades. But as we invited other districts to participate in the evaluation of STARI, or to use the freely downloadable materials, many asked for a program specifically for high school students. Learn more about STARI Series 4.

We learned from these interactions to think differently. STARI was initially only two series: we considered series 1 as appropriate for 6th and 7th grades, and series 2 for 8th and 9th grades. But through a practitioner’s lens, middle school programs should have three levels—one per grade. So a third series was created. While some schools did use series 3 for high school students, the requests for a program designed specifically for high school continued. And after several years of work, the STARI team has now published series 4! It is now available for purchase through SERP, or as a free download through the SERP download center.

We completed two professional learning courses for K-2 teachers now available to elementary schools everywhere!

One course is on Effective Literacy Workstations and the other is on Developing Student Discourse. These courses are the culmination of years of partnership work with the DC Public Schools. We at SERP have been impressed by the quality of the DCPS leadership team, and the thoughtfulness of their decision-making. Many of the messages researchers would give districts about high quality practice are followed in DCPS, and over the years the gains on NAEP scores have offered proof of their effectiveness. But the gap between the highest and lowest quartiles widened. To shore up performance in the highest poverty areas of the city, DCPS leaders asked SERP to look at the high and low growth schools and classrooms within those areas and identify the sources of variation that could explain the different outcomes for students with the similar demographic characteristics. 

After extensive research in classrooms and analyses of data, we homed in on a set of differences that both appeared to be important in the observations, and that emerged in analyses of district data as related to gains in students reading achievement: the effective use of time during literacy workstations, and the engagement of students in classroom discourse. To spread the effective practices more broadly, the partnership team set out to develop courses for teachers that called out these practices, why they are important, and how they look in authentic classrooms—no staging, no researcher involvement; just teachers who had mastered effective practices over years or decades, and maintain those practices within the structures of the classroom and school.

It is always a challenge for districts to get teachers to do new things; implementation is still a work in progress. But course pilots received rave reviews from teachers. An effectiveness study is now underway. Learn more about the K-2 Literacy Professional Resources.