Longest Elementary is located in rural Muhlenberg County in Western Kentucky. More than 90 percent of the students are Caucasian and about 40 percent receive free or reduced lunch.

In 2005, the school staff took a hard look at their students’ reading skills and discovered numerous deficiencies. They decided to institute a new schoolwide literacy program. The school had been assigned a curriculum specialist, Diane Bowles, but with no grant money for a large-scale overhaul of their literacy instruction, Longest called on the expertise of a literacy consultant from the Western Kentucky Educational Cooperative, Carolyn Downing. Ever since, Carolyn has been assisting Longest with data analysis, helping design a new literacy curriculum, modeling best practice instruction, and providing embedded professional development – all services provided by the Kentucky Department of Education (at no cost to the school).

As a result of these efforts, Longest has achieved double-digit improvement in its KCCT reading and writing scores.

Components of the schoolwide literacy program include:

• Teacher mentoring
• Progress monitoring using charts and individual student profiles that provide a visual record of how students are improving. Teachers meet monthly to review the data and determine students’ individual and group instructional needs.
• Tier grouping described in detail on the video.
• Having a shared vision of good teaching is one of the essential principles for a successful literacy program. Longest provides teachers with the support, time, and professional development to meet that goal.

This video was originally part of a multimedia professional development resource, Literacy Leadership: Stories of Schoolwide Success, produced by KET in 2008 in collaboration with the Kentucky Department of Education.

Literacy Leadership

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