Reflect on your structured literacy practice 

An organization building a full structured literacy system will need to be able to understand what components you have in place, what is currently being developed and what is necessary to bring key elements together to achieve targeted proficiency rates. This reflection exercise can help you document what is currently in place and is a great tool to revisit a few times a year to update. This also can be a basis for a broader literacy framework when you are ready.

Objective:

  • Reflect on the current status of your overarching system elements in a living document that can be revisited periodically as you bring many elements together. Overarching elements with sub-elements:

    • Instruction

    • Professional Learning/Empowerment

    • Assessment

    • Collaboration

Overview

1) Empowerment

3) Assessment

4) Collaboration

  • Talk with your fellow literacy leaders and determine who the right group is to reflect together on your current status. You want the group to be relatively small (five or less) and the goal is to document current practice with some reflection as well as what is being planned for the future. This is NOT a full literacy framework or comprehensive plan process, but a high level reflection of current and future practice.

  • Download this document and re-title to fit your organization name. You will want to put a date window (ex. January 2025) in the title to know when it was last updated. You may want to version future documents and save old versions for comparison.

  • Prompts and questions will guide you through each section of the document. Remember, this is your literacy story and your document! If you have different components, sub-components or ideas, feel free to change and adjust. However, the current questions should give you a solid understanding of current status!

    1. Overarching questions

    2. Professional Learning/Empowerment

    3. Instruction

    4. Assessment

    5. Collaboration

  • PLEASE NOTE: We do not include separate questions for emerging bilingual students, students with disabilities, students above grade level or other students with unique instructional needs. ALL questions should consider the needs for ALL students. If you have assessment, instruction, professional learning or collaboration methods that are not considering all students all of the time, you will fall short of serving all of your students and not be targeting a full system. We know you know this, just putting that out there since there aren’t separate questions.

2) Instruction