Accelerated Learning

To accelerate learning, students need to be able to relate to what is being taught. That means getting to know your students and providing culturally responsive literacy instruction to every child. Here’s how:

Aim for Equity: Equity means meeting the needs of all children, including their academic, physical, social, and emotional needs. When we understand the needs and interests of the whole student, we can find ways to make education meaningful and increase learning gains.

By overcoming complacency and bias, including racial, cultural, and linguistic bias, schools and districts can create the conditions to meet the needs of our students.

Go Beyond Teaching Skills: To keep instruction culturally relevant, educators need to supplement skills instruction with more intellectually stimulating teaching. In her book, Cultivating Genius: An Equity Framework for Culturally and Historically Responsive Literacy, Dr. Gholdy Muhammad draws on the work of black literacy societies, which had five central goals for learning or “pursuits” that she says every student should have:

• Identity: Helping students learn about who they are and who they want to become, as well as about others who aren’t like them
• Skill: Literacy skills like decoding and vocabulary, and how students can use these skills to elevate their intellect
• Intellectualism: Teaching about new histories, people, and places to expose students to a world of ideas outside their own thinking
• Criticality: Helping students learn about anti-racism, power, privilege, inequities, oppression, and anti-sexism, so we can cultivate children who don’t contribute to harming others
• Joy: Finding ways to “animate” your students’ souls through literacy

Build Better Relationships with Students: Getting through to your students starts with building strong relationships. That means knowing the answers to three important questions:

1. Who am I?
2. Who are my students?
3. Who are we together?

Educators who share their own experiences provide students with more opportunities to relate. They should also get to know more about students’ fears, hopes, and dreams, and talk about what they know during instruction so students will feel like their learning is relevant.

2022-2023 National Lexile Study Shows Accelerated Lexile Growth Across All Participating Racial and Ethnic Groups

While many secondary educators might not be familiar with teaching foundational literacy skills, they still need to be able to help students struggling in this area. Often, these students’ foundational reading skills are not strong enough to successfully navigate the increased rigor of academic content in grades 6-12. Without targeted intervention, these students will continue to fall behind, lose confidence, and are likely to eventually drop out of school.

Achieve3000 Literacy WordStudio makes it easy for teachers to provide instruction in phonics, decoding and word recognition through teacher-led instructional videos that can be used to support individual or group instruction. This foundational literacy collection provides many opportunities for guided and independent practice, as well as engaging lessons to test skills. It also includes extensive support materials for teachers.

To determine the most impactful skills for inclusion in the WordStudio lessons, Achieve3000 completed a literature review that included some of the most recognized experts in foundational literacy, such as Foorman and Torgesen, Beck, Denton, and Slavin. Achieve3000 also worked with licensed reading intervention specialists to identify the key foundational skills that challenge secondary students who have difficulty with reading comprehension and fluency. Each skill is addressed individually and comprehensively, offering students opportunities to apply their knowledge of the skill in various ways throughout each lesson.