At Palo Alto High School, students with learning disabilities and language barriers are rewriting their academic stories, thanks to various literacy programs that turn challenges into opportunities for success.
Palo Alto Unified School District’s goal is to have students reading at their grade level by the end of third grade, according to the Every Student Reads Initiative. However, some students fall behind and do not reach the district’s goal until much later.
Palo Alto High School is lucky to have a program that is designed to help teach and improve both language and literacy skills. Paly literacy teacher Kindel Launer’s role is to ensure students are getting the instruction and support that they need to succeed in and outside of the classroom with reading, writing and comprehension skills.
Launer said that many students view engaging in school as unimportant and she believes this is because of their limited language skills.
“Oftentimes for folks who struggle to access the academic language in their classrooms, it isn’t a great place to be, yet it’s their job [as students],” Launer said.
Most of the students that Launer supports have dyslexia, a learning disability that makes it difficult for the brain to process written language.
According to KQED, everyone has electrical circuits in their brain. Those with dyslexia have a different way that those circuits move in their brain. Someone with dyslexia has “markers,” or challenges with the task at hand like understanding that consonant blends have a certain sound, meaning how quickly the person retrieves information.
Launer explained the pathways children with dyslexia must navigate through and the distinction between typical learning pathways and those of the 20% of the population with dyslexia.
“For most people there is a particular pathway, and then for the 20% of us [the dyslexic population], there’s a different pathway,” Launer said, “And then within that pathway there are different markers.”
Launer says that by high school, most students with dyslexia have learned to bypass the marker challenges in their brain, but that may require them more study and test time. This is called compensatory learning.
“The brain circuitry can take a bit longer to get through, so students might be studying for longer than their peers,” Launer said.
The literacy program, implemented at Paly, gives extra support to the students who need it. Launer and the literacy specialist teachers at Paly work with the students who have learning disabilities, such as dyslexia, to ensure a positive and effective learning process. This has improved both literacy skills and more broader skills like reading comprehension.
Not only does the Paly program help with native English speakers, but it also supports those who move from abroad. Gunn High School offers the “official” language program in the district to new English as a Second Language students.
Students who move from another country with little to no experience in speaking English are enrolled in the literacy program to help them learn and progress in the language and their learning.
“Regardless of where they go to school, the challenges around the words, having parts and words having sounds and letters matching, is like a whole new ball game for folks who speak Mandarin [a foreign language],” Launer said.
In addition to Paly’s literacy classes, various literacy programs play a crucial role in the data gathering process, helping teachers to identify which students require the most support.
To build on these efforts, the Multi-Tiered Student Support System works alongside the regular literacy program to provide targeted instruction.
The purpose of the MTSS program is to structure a plan for teachers who have students that require extra support in their studies.
“MTSS supports teachers in delivering the instruction that students need to make progress,” Launer said. “That’s what MTSS does, tries to figure out when a student has a particular need.”
Along with the MTSS program, i-Ready, a web-based program for students, has been a core tool of aiding student support. i-Ready helps teachers assess reading and math levels, identify learning gaps and provide personalized instruction to meet individual needs.
During freshman and sophomore year of high school, students are required to take the i-Ready diagnostic so that administrators and teachers are aware of the students who require the extra support, and they are able to provide for those students. Students take the diagnostic over the course of a week, with each session lasting the entirety of a class period.
To lighten the work to sustain the information, Paly is looking at another, quicker option to gather information about student’s skill levels called Renaissance which would keep student’s attention and not feel demanding.
“It’s 25 questions, 30 minutes,” Launer said. “And I think that at the high school level, it’s more manageable.”
Compared to i-Ready, Renaissance is a much quicker and more efficient option.
The results of these efforts to impove litteracy can be seen in testing from the District’s California Assesment of Student Performance and Progress.
CAASPP, a state assessment for math and English language arts, showed a significant increase in the percentage of students meeting or exceeding English proficiency standards in 2023.
English learners had a 10% increase, Hispanic or Latino students had an estimated 18% growth and socio-economically disadvantaged students showed a 5% goal increase.
With these learning programs increasing rates of literacy, Paly has implemented a database, Panorama, which profiles each student with their literacy levels, attendence, and overall performance to help teaches help students with their specific needs.
Assistant Principal Rebecca Shen-Lorenson said that this is the second year that Paly administration is using Panorama as a tool.
“This [Panorama is], a platform where it collects students’ information from different places,” Shen-Lorenson said. “It puts it into one place for our teachers and school administrators to look at.”
Administators share this information with teachers and counselors to help ensure that the right amount of support is given to a student if they are in need of it.
“We’re looking at everything from student grades across their course subjects to attendance, even looking at their surveys that you all [students] submit to us, and kind of getting a good picture of what a student looks like,” Shen-Lorenson said.
Overall, the literacy program at Paly which has been built with different platforms, databases and focused support, results in students showing more success with their academia and regular life skills.
“It’s very exciting to think that we have support for students at all levels,” Launer said.
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