Northwest Education

Fall 2006 / Volume 12, Number 1.

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An Early Reading First grant helps five Oregon Head Start programs implement an innovative curriculum.

Story and Photos by Bracken Reed

PORTLAND, Oregon—Given the option, few people would choose to spend a sunny summer day in a windowless church basement, but the two dozen preschoolers and four adults crowding into classroom B of the Albina Head Start Lutheran Center don’t seem to mind. The cement walls are covered with brightly colored posters, artwork, and curriculum materials, and “outside time” will come soon enough. For now, the three- to five-year-old students are abuzz with excitement—remarkably so, considering they’re about to begin several hours of intensely structured, literacy-oriented activities. Within this academic approach there will be a whole lot of fun—singing, dancing, laughing, and playing—and the students know it. What they don’t know is just how unique their classroom is.

Albina Head Start is a partner site in Project ExCEL (Excellence in Cultivating Early Literacy), a three-year project funded by a federal Early Reading First grant and directed by the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory. Early Reading First is a federal initiative that focuses on developing the early language, cognitive, and prereading skills of children in order to prepare them for continued school success. As a preschool literacy program, it is intended to complement the K–3 Reading First initiative. Unlike that initiative, however, it is not directly administered by the state. Early Reading First grants—which have totaled about $370 million so far—typically go directly from the U.S. Department of Education to school districts or organizations at the local level.

Awarded in October 2005 and funded at almost a million dollars per year, Project ExCEL involves five Head Start programs across Oregon, and includes a research component. As part of the research, 13 individual classrooms will receive training, technical assistance, and curriculum materials. Five other classrooms with closely matched demographics will serve as a comparison or “control” group and will receive annual incentives in place of the treatment.

In addition to the quasi-experimental study, several other features of the project break new ground. Each partner site, for instance, runs full-day, full-year. “That was a requirement of the grant,” say Steffen Saifer, the director of Project ExCEL. “It’s very intentional, and it comes from the belief that the kids need that amount of time in order to get the full benefit of the program and to make the gains they need.”

The defining feature of the project is its blending of two distinct curricula, Tools of the Mind and Building Language for Literacy. Tools of the Mind includes clear guidelines for content delivery, but its main focus is to foster self-regulation skills, such as the ability to sit still, pay attention, ignore distractions, take turns, cooperate, and reflect before acting. Building Language for Literacy is a more traditional core literacy curriculum published by Scholastic, Inc., and designed specifically for preschool children. Combined, the two create a comprehensive program—called Building Language for Literacy Plus (BLL+)—that promotes the simultaneous development of the two skill sets most often cited as necessary for success in kindergarten. “It’s a really thoughtful combination of those two things,” says Saifer. “The elements of self-regulation are built right into the literacy activities, but also into all the other activities in the day, including some that are purely about self-regulation.”

The idea, says Saifer, is that a student who learns to have those self-regulation skills—to be attentive and cooperative—will be better able to learn the literacy skills that the teacher is working on. “It’s common sense,” says Saifer, “but it’s not typically done in such an intentional way.”

Another unusual feature of the project—and a key component in helping teachers skillfully blend the two curricula—is the inclusion of literacy coaches. As with the federal K–3 Reading First initiative, Early Reading First requires literacy coaches at all grant sites. Accordingly, all five of the Head Start programs involved in Project ExCEL have a part-time literacy coach who visits each classroom at least three times a month.

At Albina, the literacy coach, Amy Enninga, is also a teacher in the program. Enninga, it turns out, is one of only a handful of preschool teachers in the country already familiar with the Tools of the Mind model, having taught it for three years in Denver—where it was developed—before moving to the Portland area.

That familiarity has been a major asset for the Albina program. “She really serves as a kind of peer coach,” says Saifer, “rather than purely a literacy coach. She’s available to the other teachers more frequently than a literacy coach would typically be. It’s worked out really well.”

With a full staff to cover for Enninga in her own classroom, she’s able to visit each of the other classrooms in the Albina program three times a month. Following her on such a visit makes it clear why literacy coaches are an essential part of the project, as well as how unique the BLL+ program can be.

Everybody’s Clapping Hands

Parents can bring their children to this old brick church just off North Portland’s Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard anytime between seven and nine a.m., but at nine the real day begins—Artchla Fay Glenn, the lead teacher in “Lutheran B” classroom, starts the clean-up song. Clapping rhythmically, Glenn soon has the students singing and clapping along as they put away their toys and crayons and gather in the center of the room.

Glenn’s fellow teachers, Wilma Piggee and Nallely Martinez, also clap and sing along as they shepherd the students into a semicircle on the floor. As Glenn brings the clean-up song to a close, she swiftly moves into the first part of the group-time routine—taking attendance—and with it comes another song. “Joshua’s here today, Joshua’s here today,” the whole groups sings and claps in time, “everybody’s clapping their hands ’cause Joshua’s here today.” And on it goes—everybody clapping their hands—until each beaming child has been acknowledged.

With Enninga sitting unobtrusively at the back of the group, Glenn moves quickly but deliberately through a set of scripted routines. Students clap in time as they count how many days of the month they’ve had school. As Glenn moves on to counting how many days of sunshine there have been—the daily weather report—she forgets to clap as she counts. Enninga mimes a clapping motion clear enough for Glenn to see, and soon they have the students clapping and counting through the sunny days.

For Glenn, who was just hired at the beginning of the summer, even the smallest bit of coaching is appreciated. “It’s a lot to remember,” she says with mock exhaustion. “We’ve got a whole notebook of activities to learn, and each one is specific about how it’s to be done. I’m getting it, but it really helps to get some guidance from someone who’s used it before.”

As Glenn moves into the “message of the day” activity, the subtle blending of literacy and self-regulation becomes more obvious. Each day, the students have a new message, which always begins with the phrase “We are going to ....” Each word is underlined and the students say the words along with Glenn, word by word. “We start the school year with really simple messages,” says Enninga, “and then we introduce the alphabet chart a couple of months into the year.”

With the chart behind her, Glenn slowly guides the students through the message: “We are going to walk down the hallway.” When Glenn comes to the word “walk,” Enninga interrupts in a way so subtle that the students don’t seem to notice. “What do we notice about walk and we?” she asks. Glenn picks up the cue without missing a beat and draws the students’ attention to the initial consonant of each word, using the alphabet chart behind her to drive home the point.

“The trainers have talked with us about being more directive as coaches,” says Enninga, reflecting on this small intervention, later in the day. “Rather than taking notes and providing feedback later on, they want us to be really hands on—to draw a teacher’s attention to something right at the point of instruction or to model it for them in the classroom.”

In Project ExCEL, both teachers and coaches receive ongoing training. NWREL Program Advisor Lena Ko, herself a coach at one of the other partner sites, serves as a lead coach, offering advice and information. Saifer also provides feedback. “There’s quite a bit of coaching of the coaches,” says Saifer. “Between Lena and myself and then the [Tools of the Mind] trainers who come from Denver once a month—they go to the classroom with the coach and observe them in action.”

That training is essential, says Saifer, partly because some of the coaches don’t have a lot of experience in that role. “We focused on hiring people who had two areas of expertise,” he says, “and those were child development and early literacy. All of our coaches have lots of experience as teachers, working with preschool-age kids, and two are college instructors. What they didn’t have, necessarily, was experience coaching other adults or experience with this particular curriculum.”

According to Ko, one of the challenges of both teaching and coaching the BLL+ curriculum is that it differs from the typical early literacy program in subtle but significant ways. “Other programs typically teach students how to build words by starting with sounds and letter names,” says Ko. “They usually start with the alphabet—singing the ABCs—and then get kids used to the idea that the letter ‘A’ is the symbol that represents a specific sound, and so on. This program is constructed very differently.”

Learning Through Play

The best way to understand the BLL+ approach to literacy is to look at how it incorporates play into the curriculum. “Play is really at the heart of this approach,” says Enninga. “The whole idea is that kids at this age learn best through interacting with each other in ways that are natural and fun, but also structured—what they call ‘mature play.’”

Both the approach to literacy and the idea of learning through play are most visible in the piece called “center time” and in the planning that leads up to it. Center time is 90 minutes of uninterrupted play, during which small groups of students stay in one theme-focused center. Each day, students can pick which center they want to be in—the blocks center, the literacy center, the science center, the dramatic play center, and so on. There are six centers—with an average of four or five students in a center—and the themes change every three to four weeks.

To prepare for the center time, each student completes a play plan, which echoes the earlier message of the day, but starts with “I” instead of “we.” Students draw a picture of the activity they are going to do and then “write” the sentence by putting a line for each word: “I am going to build a skyscraper.”

Each plan is as individual as each child: So is the help the teachers provide to make a clear plan that can be “read” by the child the next day. This individualized literacy teaching or scaffolding is another unique aspect of the curriculum and an important skill that teachers are trained to use.

“The whole idea of the literacy piece is that children will learn through writing and through representation or symbolic literacy,” says Ko. “What we want them to understand is that an idea they have—that they can say—can also be represented in written form. You start with drawing and then you focus on getting a good message out of that drawing—a clear, short message that they can break down into the next part, which is the sentence. Then they show their sentence by putting a line down for each word, and they read it back to you. So, it builds—one piece at a time. Once they have the ability to write their own lines, then you start with the individual sounds that they hear, beginning with the initial consonant. And from there they begin to understand that not only can their words be represented by these lines in a sentence, but that there are also symbols and letters that they can use to represent those words.”

As the students in Glenn’s classroom hunch over their drawings and make their lines, one thing is clear—they haven’t forgotten that this is about play. By the time they get to their centers, the students have been through an entire routine of group-time activities. Some, such as the “freeze game,” included music and dancing, and were almost entirely about self-regulation. Others incorporated specific content—such as math and science or literacy. But center time is clearly the heart of the day. For these kids, learning is playing and playing is learning. Literacy, self-regulation, laughter, song, and dance are all part of the same grand experience. Time flies. Before they know it, they’ll be back out in the afternoon sun. And before long, they’re off to kindergarten. With the help of Project ExCEL, they’ll have everything they need to find success.