DIALing into Reading

DIAL/Mid-Central Educational Cooperative

Platte, SD
 

Introduction/Overview
Organizational Change
Budget & Finance
Professional Development
Technology Infrastructure
Outcomes
Evaluation
Contact Information
 

Introduction/Overview

DIALing into Reading is a professional development plan designed to build the capacity of K–12 teachers in the area of reading comprehension. This proposal is submitted through a partnership of schools that belong to a number of existing educational entities. DIALing into Reading will affect 33 school districts in the south central region of South Dakota and some tribal schools throughout South Dakota. There are approximately 1,330 educators and 15,100 students in grades K–12 who will be reached by the professional development activities outlined in this proposal.

Delivery of the professional development will be decentralized, with multiple delivery of each of the initial grant activities at three different sites throughout the region. Title II Part D Grant Application Timeline for Award Period I and II: 2004–2005.

May 1—Awarding of Grant. 10—Finalize summer and followup training dates/sites for summer workshops. 10—Facilitators/contracts distributed (return by June 1, 2004). 10—Finalize presenters/contracts distributed (return by June 1, 2004). 11—Registration for summer workshop begins. 11—Newsletter to the schools. 26—Prepare workshop materials. 28—Last day for registration 2005.

June 1—Contracts from presenters and facilitators are due. PDA training—for assessments K–2. PDA training—for Assessments 3–5.

July: Content Area Reading for English/Language Arts.

August: Yvette Zgonc, Phonological Awareness, Collect and analyze data from summer workshops.

September–December: Followup activities from summer workshops DIBELS training.

January (2005): Collect and analyze fall data.

January–May: Follow up as needed. Begin planning summer trainings for 2005. The plan is based on data analysis from the participating schools and three sources: DakotaSTEP (Dakota State Test of Educational Progress), Comprehensive Technology Plans from participating districts, and school improvement plans or the Consolidated Title Applications from each district. The overarching needs have promulgated three essential goals for the DIALing into Reading project:

1. Participants in DIALing into Reading will increase students' achievements related to Reading Comprehension I, grades K–2, as measured by the selected reading assessment by each participating school.

2. Participants in the DIALing into Reading project will increase students' achievements related to Reading Comprehension of students in grades 3–5 as measured by the DakotaSTEP.

3. Participants in the DIALing into Reading project will increase students' achievement scores for reading comprehension in grades 7–12 as measured by the DakotaSTEP.

Organizational Change

The DIAL/Mid-Central Educational Consortium has a high level of awareness of district needs. By talking individually with administrators, as well as using state agency Web sites, the consortium was able to ascertain needs of participating schools.

Because all professional development was designed based on the expressed needs of the participating schools, stakeholder buy-in and participation were high.

Budget & Finance

The overall budgets for this project are as follows:

Summer 2004: $254,342.16

School Year 2004–2005: $182,818

The project was funded by monies awarded through the Title II, Part D grant.

The professional development plan that begins with DIALing into Reading can be sustained well after the grant. All of the delivery and design components of the project call for the development of local and regional expertise within South Dakota. The resources and processes that are developed as a part of this project will be in place to live far beyond the time span of the grant. Furthermore, the DIAL Consortium has been involved in several professional development efforts and has established management and communication systems to allow for continued high-quality professional development. A fee model to cover incidental costs of training and professional development opportunities could easily be established to continue the efforts of this project.

Professional Development

The content area for the grant is reading. Different activities are planned to provide professional development for teachers at all grade levels, from kindergarten to grade 12. The prime focus for all workshops will be in helping teachers with skills and strategies aimed at improving student achievement in reading comprehension.

Improving Reading Comprehension Through Effective Reading Assessment Utilizing PDAs (Grades K–2)

Three 3-day hands-on workshops were held in summer 2004 to provide up to 90 educators of students in grades K–2 with the skills needed to help their students develop knowledge and skills to conduct three scientifically based research assessments on a personal digital assistant (PDA). Workshops held included: mClass: Reading, mClass: DIBELS; and e*Assessments. All of these programs focus on diagnosing and measuring reading achievement at an individual student level. Teachers can generate class reports for administrators as well as student reports for parents. This process will allow teachers to spend more time on instruction and less time on paperwork. Integrated into the workshop were effective reading strategies and practices based on the SD READS program.

Followup activities will occur at the local site over the DDN (see description below), through e-mail, and through site visits by the project manager or designee. The Dakota Digital Network (DDN) system is a state-supported digital communication system that delivers high-speed data connectivity to all public schools in South Dakota. In addition, the DDN Video delivers high-quality video conferencing capabilities to high/middle school facilities within South Dakota. This system, created by former Governor William Janklow, is a cooperative effort between the state of South Dakota and private corporate contributions. The objective of the DDN Video is to provide a seamless statewide educational delivery system. Benefits of using the DDN Video include sharing educational resources; broadening course offerings; allowing teacher collaboration; saving time, travel, and other resources; and removing geographic barriers. The DDN video equipment is intended for use in K–12 education. The Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) are a set of standardized, individually administered measures of early literacy development. They are designed to be short (1-minute) fluency measures used to regularly monitor the development of pre-reading and early reading skills. The DIBELS measures were developed upon the essential early literacy domains discussed in both the National Reading Panel (2000) and National Research Council (1998) reports to assess student development of phonological awareness, alphabetic understanding, and automaticity and fluency with the code. Each measure has been thoroughly researched and demonstrated to be reliable and valid indicators of early literacy development and predictive of later reading proficiency to aid in the early identification of students who are not progressing as expected. When used as recommended, the results can be used to evaluate individual student development as well as provide grade-level feedback toward validated instructional objectives. (Taken from DIBELS website, http://dibels.uoregon.edu/.)

Technology Aspect of DIBELS

• Enter student information and DIBELS benchmark assessment scores, and track those scores across years, for all grades covered by DIBELS assessments (currently K–3).
• Generate automated reports of DIBELS benchmark scores. Many reports are available, including histograms (distribution of scores), district norms, box plots (percentiles over time), individual student profiles, class list reports (name, scores, percentiles, and instructional status for all students in a class), and scatter plots. Reports can be generated by student, class, school, or district, depending on the type of report. Reports are available as Web pages (for quick viewing online) and as PDF files (for downloading, printing, and e-mailing to others).
• Track student demographic information. State departments of education can request state-specific modifications to the generic demographic profile to match up with how the state tracks demographic information.
• Enter progress monitoring data and generate graphs (progress monitoring is the more frequent assessment of lower-performing students to judge their progress toward the goal).
• Generate raw data sets for archival purposes or to run your own analyses. Data sets come in tab-delimited text format, which can be imported into most spreadsheet and database programs.

Technology Infrastructure

Existing technology to be used includes PDAs, eAssessment software, QRI software, and mClass Reading software; and word processing for journaling.

For followup activities, technology to be used includes e-mail, word processing for journaling, PDAs, and Digital Dakota Network for video-conferencing.

Outcomes

In relationship to integration of the research-based strategies, participating staff have had followup meetings and conversations wherein they collected and shared strategies, as well as shared ideas for implementation.

Specifically in relation to DIBELS trainings, staff reaction has been very positive. Through the very thorough Web site and data collecting and disseminating engine, for the first time, participating staff have had access to elements of formative assessment. Systemically, participating staff have had the opportunity to offer more levels of formative assessment for their students. In this, staffs have been able to offer more strategies and serve critical interventions more than just once per period.

Evaluation

1. DIBELS training: DIAL/Mid-Central cooperative offered several opportunities for all staff to attend training in the DIBELS program. This became very powerful, as schools were able to send great numbers of their staff members to attend the training without draining substitute teacher personnel.

2. PDA training: Although PDA training became difficult because of technical demands, training was successful and important. Throughout PDA training, the trainers demanded that all participants learn to become fluent in “paper and pencil” assessment before they were trained to perform the same or similar tasks on PDAs. In this, the staff had a thorough understanding of assessment.

Contact Information

Dan Guericke
dan.guericke@k12.sd.us
605-337-2636