What are the real keys to success in helping schools improve, and sustain, effective teaching and learning practices?  Through its partnerships with schools, Lindamood-Bell is helping to identify those factors to improve student outcomes.

Chris Mayberry, Manager of Development for Lindamood-Bell® for Schools, recently paid a visit to Cañon City School District in Colorado to provide support for literacy coaches.

Lindamood-Bell’s Manager of Development Chris Mayberry (second from left) meets with literacy coaches at Cañon City School District in Colorado.

Cañon City is in the second year of a three-year Colorado Department of Education literacy grant initiative. With the goal of changing outcomes for struggling readers, the district partnered with Lindamood-Bell to provide teachers with workshops and job-embedded professional development to expand their skills in Seeing Stars implementation. The Seeing Stars® program develops symbol imagery as a basis for decoding, spelling, word recognition, and reading fluency.  Teachers are also receiving professional development in the Visualizing and Verbalizing® program, which helps to develop concept imagery for language comprehension.    

In his recent visit, Mayberry shadowed coaches, modeled lessons, and met with instructors at four elementary schools. Each school implements Seeing Stars instruction as part of its Tier 3 intensive intervention, while two schools implement the program in Tier 2 targeted intervention.

A major focus was lesson plan development for groups receiving Seeing Stars instruction. “Micro-changes to lesson plans can result in significant impact for students receiving intensive daily instruction,” Mayberry commented. “Coaches learned how to assess students’ responses during instruction so small adjustments could be made to target their deficits.”  

Mayberry also met with district and school administrators to identify instructional trends in each building and to suggest ideas on how coaches can provide differentiated support for instructors. It’s this type of collaboration that contributes to the transformative results that Cañon City is achieving. As a district, student achievement has improved from Low Status to Normal Performance and symbol imagery, which correlates highly to overall reading ability, has improved from the 13th to the 45th percentile.

“The Cañon City team continues to excel at being proactive in identifying potential challenges and drawing on their collaborative support structure to develop solutions,” said Mayberry. Lindamood-Bell’s commitment to relationship-building and program support is a key element in helping to improve and sustain effective learning practices in Cañon City.

To learn more about high impact professional development, join Lindamood-Bell for their Leaders in Literacy webinar series, featuring Cañon City Superintendent George Welsh.  Mr. Welsh will discuss transformative practices that significantly increase student achievement. For more information or to register, click here.