Early Literacy Tutor Training Recipe Book

Recommended Training
(approximately 32 hours)

Content Areas:

 

How Children Learn to Read and How Adults Teach Them to Do So

Suggested Learning Goals Training Resources

Our primary responsibility as early literacy tutors is to accelerate children’s language and literacy skills. We do so by implementing instructional activities, interventions, or routines that are built on what psychology, linguistics, neuroscience and instructional research has taught us about how children learn to read and write and how adults teach ALL of them to do so. The resources in this module will support you to:

  1. Describe the components of word recognition and language comprehension and explain how they weave together into skilled reading.
  2. Describe what makes instruction explicit and systematic and why that type of instruction is essential in order for all children to learn to read the English language.
  3. (K-3) Define each of the big five areas of reading instruction for grades K-3, as determined by the National Reading Panel, and describe several evidence-based strategies for teaching reading skills in each area.
    OR
    (PreK) Describe the 11 skills or abilities of young children that predict later reading, writing, or spelling outcomes and describe several evidence-based strategies for teaching those skills.
  4. Prepare to implement the instructional activities, routines, or interventions of your program and explain how they exemplify the principles of evidence-based reading instruction.
  5. Explain how assessments allow you to monitor student progress and determine the specific activities, routines or interventions within your program to deliver to students (or the content to plug into those routines), so that your tutoring is responsive to their demonstrated needs. Prepare to administer the assessments your program uses.
  6. Describe research-based ways to support English Language Learners most effectively.

Schoolkit has developed ​​a Canvas-based Reading Foundational Skills Course to support tutors in building knowledge about reading foundational skills. The course focuses on the "what" of reading foundational skills, including defining the four foundational skills, understanding a scope and sequence to learn how they are acquired across the grade levels, and beginning to understand what they look like in action as students begin to master them. Because this course is meant to serve as a primer for tutors to better understand what research tells us about how kids acquire reading skills, instructional strategies, assessment, and lesson planning are not the focus of this course. The course aligns will help tutors meet portions of objectives 1 & 3 and all of objective 2. Specific modules include:

  • Module 1: Equity and Foundational Skills (60 minutes)
  • Module 2: Introduction to the Science of Reading (75 minutes)
  • Module 3: Introduction to the Foundational Skills (30 minutes)
  • Module 4: Foundational Skills Part 1: Emergent Skills (15 minutes)
  • Module 5: Foundational Skills Part 2: Phonological & Phonemic Awareness (140 minutes)
  • Module 6: Foundational Skills Part 3: Phonics (60 minutes)
  • Module 7: Foundational Skills Part 4: Fluency (70 minutes)
  • Module 8: Performance Task & Additional Resources (60 minutes)

For objectives 1 & 2, choose one resource from those listed below:

  • Amplify’s Center for Early Reading’s Learning to Read, A Primer: Pt 1 AND Science of Reading, A Primer: Pt 2 are beginner level handbooks that break down the many components of how children learn to read.

    OR
  • TN State Collaborative on Reforming Education’s (SCORE ) The Science of Reading is a report sharing problematic misconceptions about reading instruction and critical research headlines that should inform instructional decision-making. It offers suggestions to carve a path forward that leads to the end of the reading crisis in Tennessee. Though performance data is specific to TN, the report shares information with broad applicability, particularly through page 13.

    OR
  • Student Achievement Partners’ Early Reading Accelerators Prezi and Early Reading Accelerator Slide Summary offer a detailed overview (the prezi) and a research recap (the slide summary) of two critical pieces in systematic early reading instruction: securing foundational skills and building knowledge and vocabulary. These tools offer information about these critical concepts and resources to use to turn the ideas into actions.

    OR
  • Deans for Impact’s The Science of Early Learning is a brief summarizing existing research related to how young children (from birth to age eight) develop skills across three domains: agency, literacy, and numeracy. Questions 5-8 are most relevant to early literacy tutors. This document is intended to serve as a resource to anyone who is interested in our best scientific understanding of how young children develop control of their own behavior and intentions, how they learn to read and write proficiently, and how they develop the ability to think mathematically.

    OR
  • (PreK only) Cox Campus’ Foundations of Learning to Read is a 4-hour online course that teaches educators to formulate a three-part teaching strategy for teaching children specific skills; builds understanding of the components of phonological awareness, alphabet knowledge, and concepts of prints; and build judgment about how to teach those concepts at different development stages.

(K-3 only) For objective 3, use all resources listed below, which are sections of a National Institute for Literacy’s guide summarizing the findings of the National Reading Panel Report and providing analysis and discussion in each of the five areas of reading instruction. Each section defines the skill, reviews the evidence from research, suggests implications for classroom instruction, describes proven strategies for teaching reading skills, and addresses frequently raised questions. 

(Pre-K only) For objective 3, use the resources below:

For objective 4, use resources that you must provide:

  • The specific instructional activities, routines, or interventions that tutors will likely implement with students in the first 2 weeks of tutoring

For objective 5, choose resources from below, one of which you must provide if your tutors will assess students:

  • Reading Rockets’ Reading 101: A Guide for Parents is an online guide designed to give parents key information about what it takes to learn to read and write and how to help children grow as readers, writers, and learners. It includes very brief but accurate information about how children learn and how adults can support them, in very brief paragraphs and bullets and short videos. It includes links to additional resources, including those in multiple languages. 
    OR
  • Cox Campus’ Assessing Our Students is a one and a half hour online course that equips learners to outline the big 5 components of readers, compose a drill down method to identify areas of growth for students, and learn to backfill for students who need growth. 
    • Cox Campus’ Virtual Assessment Toolkit contains downloadable resources connected to the online course, including an assessment flowchart, universal screeners, and assessments you can deliver to students.

    AND
  • The specific assessments that tutors need to administer to students in your program (if relevant).

For objective 6, choose resources from set 5:

  • The Meadows Center’s 10 Key Policies and Practices for Teaching English Language Learners is a 12-page guide outlining practical guidance for educators of English Language Learners. Each instructional practice includes a concrete illustration of how an educator might apply it. The guide is developed for classroom educators and illustrations span K-12 grade levels, but tutors will still be able to learn from it.
  • AFT Magazine’s Supporting English Learners’ Oral Language Development is an article that describes a framework for oral language production; teacher’s moves that encourage productive student talk; six guidelines that promote quality language interactions; and five pitfalls to avoid in language learning. While some of the article’s illustrations feature secondary school classrooms, the content is still applicable to tutors teaching younger students. 

Supporting the Whole Child

Suggested Learning Goals Training Resources

Our primary responsibility as early literacy tutors is to accelerate children’s language and literacy skills. Though most of our time and energy goes directly toward this aim, we are most effective when we realize that literacy skills are a subset of the critical skills that children are building during the PreK and early elementary years. To be primed to do this cognitive work, children have other needs that also need to be addressed. The resources in this module will set you up to:

  1. Describe the critical socio-emotional and executive functioning skills that develop across childhood and how they can be enhanced
  2. Explain the neurosequential model and the basics of how to use the brain’s “regulate, relate, and reason” sequencing to help children learn 
  3. Use specific strategies to help children regulate
  4. Be aware of signs of abuse, depression, or anxiety

Choose 2-3 resources from below and any specific strategies or routines you expect tutors to implement with students:

  • The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning’s The CASEL 5 SEL Framework is a 4-page overview of what socio-emotional learning is and why it matters; definitions of the five broad, interrelated areas of SEL competence and examples of each, and the settings in which these competencies are enhanced for students.
  • PBS Learning Media’s The Neurosequential Model: Stress, Trauma, and The Brain is a 7:03 minute video in which Dr. Bruce Perry describes his neurosequential model and its significance on how we interact with students and each other.  
  • Harvard Center for the Developing Child’s Infographic: What is Executive Function? And How Does It Relate to Child Development? Is a brief infographic that defines executive function, explains when it typically develops in children, and describes the scaffolding that adults can use to help children develop it.  The Center’s Video: How to Build Core Capabilities for Life is a 5:34 minute video that explores the development and use of core capabilities — known as executive function and self-regulation skills — from early childhood into adolescence and adulthood.
  • Deans for Impact’s The Science of Early Learning is a brief summarizing existing research related to how young children (from birth to age eight) develop skills across three domains: agency, literacy, and numeracy. Questions 1-4 are most relevant to how children develop important skills that are not directly related to literacy but have significant impact on their ability to learn to read. This document is intended to serve as a resource to anyone who is interested in our best scientific understanding of how young children develop control of their own behavior and intentions, how they learn to read and write proficiently, and how they develop the ability to think mathematically. 
  • Edutopia has developed a series of videos called How Learning Happens, which explore teaching practices grounded in the science of learning and human development. The videos linked below are from this series. Though they feature classroom teachers, the practices they highlight can be modified to the early literacy tutoring context and include: 
  • Praesidium has variety of tools and resources to prevent, foster awareness of, and respond to abuse
  • (For virtual tutoring contexts) University of Florida’s Virtual Teaching Resource Hub offers:
  • The specific strategies your program supports tutors to implement to help children regulate

Culturally Responsive and Sustaining Education

Suggested Learning Goals Training Resources

Understanding CS-SE: When we become tutors, we begin working in (or near) public education systems that have the responsibility to educate all children. Unfortunately, we know that these systems do not support all children to achieve and thrive to their full potential. Culturally Responsive and Sustaining Education is a framework that helps us take into account the historic and contemporary ways that educational institutions participate in the production of an unequal society where opportunities and resources are unevenly distributed along the lines of race, socioeconomic status, gender and sexual identity, language and other socially significant identity markers.

 

The resources in this module will support tutors to develop as Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Tutors in the following ways: 

  1. Learn the orientations and mindsets of culturally responsive-sustaining educators with a focus on examining how those mindsets influence the ways educators approach two important areas of their work -- relationship-building with students and families and holding high academic expectations for students.  
  2. Build emerging critical awareness of their beliefs and assumptions about schooling and the world.

READ: Explore Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education as a framework. 

  • The New York State Education Department’s Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education Framework is a booklet offering a vision and definition of culturally responsive and sustaining education, as well as recommendations for how students, teachers, school and district leaders, family and community leaders, higher education faculty and administrators, and policy makers can contribute to a CR-SE environment. We recommend the executive summary (p. 3-15) for building understanding of the framework.

    AND
  • In “Yes, but how do we do it?” Practicing Culturally Relevant Pedagogy, Gloria Ladson-Billings discusses the components of culturally relevant teaching and provides practical examples of how teachers might implement it. This 13-page chapter from a text is intended for classroom teachers but is instructive for tutors.

    OR
  • Transforming Our Public Schools: A Guide to Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education is a 16-page infographic booklet from NYU Metro Center’s Education Justice Research and Organizing Collaborative that defines culturally responsive and sustaining education and offers illustrations of what it looks like in practice.

WATCH: The Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education introductory videos contained in this section offer examples to see the model in action. Watch either the short or long version of the “Quick Intro on CRE” video, both produced by NYC Coalition for Educational Justice. The videos feature educators, parents, students, and community activists.

  • A Quick Intro on CRE (short version: 2:09)
  • A Quick Intro on CRE (long version: 7:55)

AND

Choose at least 1-2 additional videos to “see” CR-SE in action. 

  • From the Culturally Responsive Education Hub, Raising a Critically Conscious Teaching Force (5:51) highlights the work being done to build individual and district-wide understandings of race, power, and privilege. 
  • From the Culturally Responsive Education Hub, Practicing Culturally Responsive Education (9:57) features current and former teachers who share their experience learning and practicing culturally responsive education in their classrooms and beyond.
  • From Dr. April Baker-Bell, Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, Pedagogy (4:58) describes a framework ​​​​and pedagogical approach that intentionally and unapologetically centers the linguistic, cultural, racial, intellectual, and self-confidence needs of Black students. 
  • From Learning for Justice, second grade classroom teacher (5:07) Karen Schreiner, a winner of the Teaching Tolerance award in 2016, is an anti-bias educator with a firm and vocal commitment to racial equality. In her role as a second-grade teacher in a majority Latinx school, she developed a literacy-based curriculum that strengthens students' social-emotional skills, sharpens their sense of fairness and justice, and challenges them to engage in purposeful social activism to challenge the status quo and create change in their communities. 
    • For more information on Teaching Tolerance and the awards process (including past award winners to study and learn from) click here

REFLECT: Reflection questions are critical ways to get learners to process their own learning and apply those lessons to their own context. Consider offering 3-4 sample reflection questions for reflection after tutors watch the videos and engage with the readings. 

  • What are your reactions to CR-SE as a model? 
  • How does this compare to your own school experiences? 
  • Where do you see educators leading with a commitment to CR-SE? How are they...
    • Maintaining high academic expectations?
    • Creating a welcoming and affirming environment?
    • Demonstrating an ongoing commitment to their professional learning?
  • What underlying mindsets, beliefs and attitudes do you see teachers exhibiting? 
  • What can make CR-SE as a pedagogical approach effective in improving student outcomes? What can make this approach challenging?
  • How can you imagine applying what you’re learning to your tutoring context?
  • What concerns / questions do you have?

Reflecting on your own schooling: To relate authentically to others, including young children, it helps to have insight into who we are and the cultural forces that have shaped us. Doing so helps us develop as Culturally Responsive and Sustaining tutors. Once we meet the children we will tutor, we can act on a humble desire to learn about the cultures and contexts in which they are growing up, consider the similarities to and differences from our own, and discern the implications of those for relationship-building with and academic support for students. Before we meet the students we’ll tutor, we will use the resources in this module to:

  1. Understand the cultures and sociopolitical contexts in which you were schooled.
  2. Consider the impact of your own schooling on your role as a tutor. 

Tutors can explore the social, economic and political forces that shaped both their schooling and their decision to become tutors by taking two different training modules. 

  • Saga Coach is an online evidence-based tutor training program that gives educators tools they need to assist their learners. Developed by Saga Education, a leader in high-impact math tutoring, the modules below are also relevant to early literacy tutors:
    • What does it mean to be a tutor? (10 minutes) offers tutors insights from others about what it means to them to be a tutor and prompts them to reflect on what motivates them to become a tutor. Key to this module is an introduction to the five guiding principles of high quality tutors.
    • Your Education Experience (10 minutes) supports tutors to consider how your lived experiences influence how you show up in the world and for your students. Understanding this helps make it possible for you to create a culture of inclusion and equity in your tutorials. 

AND 

choose at least one video from the set below to supplement the above modules. All videos are from the Culturally Responsive Education Hub. 

  • The Archeology of the Self (3:23) uses an archaeological approach to demonstrate to educators of all backgrounds how to do the “deep work” of excavating their personal histories and activating their racial consciousness as a precursor to working with students. 
  • Seen in the Classroom (3:14) offers the experience of a teacher of color in the classroom, and how race and ethnicity inform the role educators play in their students’ lives.

Review + Write: Intentional self-reflection provides an opportunity for tutors to deepen their understanding of their own stories by examining their experiences with inequity and privilege. Use or adapt the questions in the self-reflection exercise linked below to support tutors in creating their own archeologies of self. 

Debrief: Debriefing offers an additional opportunity for tutors to process their own experiences in comparison to others. It invites opportunities for tutors to make connections between their stories and the stories of their peers / colleagues, while also providing space to challenge unexamined racial and cultural biases. In addition, it provides tutors with an opportunity to notice how their biases are connected to larger structures of oppression (i.e. white supremacy, anti-Black racism, hetero-patriarchy) that manifests in institutional racism. 

  • What did you notice as you listened? What stood out to you? 
  • How do my experiences compare to the experiences of others?
    • Where did we see similarities?
    • Where did we see differences?
  • How does this connect to our work as tutors? 

Building Relationships with Young Children

Suggested Learning Goals Training Resources

With greater insight into what has shaped us, we can consider the importance of relationships as a foundation for learning. We will engage with the resources in this module in order to:

  1. Explain how neuroscience helps us understand the importance to their learning of children having empathic bonds with adults who teach them. 
  2. Describe what adults can do to build connected, empathic relationships with students.

Choose from 2-3 resources below and any relationship-building activities you provide, that tutors will implement with students:

  • PBS Learning Media’s The Power of Connection is a 7:03 minute video featuring Dr. Bruce Perry explaining the important role relationships have in learning and the practical ways to make true empathetic connections to students in academic settings.
  • Edutopia has developed a series of videos called How Learning Happens, which explore how teaching practices grounded in the science of learning and human development. The videos linked below are from this series. Though they feature classroom teachers or school-based staff, the practices they highlight can be modified to the early literacy tutoring context and include:
    • The Power of Relationships (3:41) includes science-based explanations of the power of relationships and illustrations of relationship-building in practice in classrooms.
    • Making Connections with Greetings (2:44) takes us to Van Ness Elementary School and demonstrates the power of greetings at the door to begin the day. 
    • Cultivating Trust (3:28) highlights the importance of one-on-one time with a trusted adult as a key component of relationship building.
  • Search Institute’s Five Elements of Developmental Relationships Overview Video  is a 2:30 minute video that introduces the five elements that the Search Institute’s research has determined are critical to strengthening and forming developmental relationships that young people need to grow and thrive. Kindergarteners share the five elements (express care; challenge growth; provide support; share power; expand possibilities) and 20 actions adults can take to create lasting developmental relationships.  Developmental Relationships in Real Life Video is a 5-minute video that shows practitioners from five organizations that have partnered with Search Institute to implement the elements and actions of the developmental relationships framework. The video shows how leaders, youth, and practitioners grew as they put the practices into action. The Developmental Relationships PDF summarizes the five elements and 20 actions adults can take to create developmental relationships on a one-page document.
  • (For virtual tutoring contexts) In a blog entry, Dr. Bevin Reinen offers 33 adaptable strategies for building relationships with students in a K-12 virtual environment.
  • Colorín Colorado offers 8 Strategies for Building Relationships with ELLs in Any Learning Environment, a compilation of brief videos, tips, and links for additional information. 
  • Saga Coach is an online evidence-based tutor training program that gives educators tools they need to assist their learners. Developed by Saga Education, a leader in high-impact math tutoring, the relationships modules below are also relevant to early literacy tutors:
    • Right Relationships, Part 1 grounds tutors in five key beliefs of tutors who will be champions for each student they tutor and highlights three relational pitfalls to avoid.
    • Tools For Tutoring: Relationship Building teaches tutors seven practical tools for building strong relationships with students.
  • The specific relationship-building tools or routines tutors will likely implement with students in the first two weeks