Deep Dive into Literacy
Suany Ramos • Cahn Fellow 2018
Educators at PS/MS 188’s PreK-Grade 8 school on Manhattan’s Lower East Side have struggled, for years, to go beyond showing student “growth” to closing the achievement gap. Serving a most-risk population (99% free-lunch eligible, 49% temporary housing; 33% SWDs and 31% ELLs), administrators and teachers had become frustrated. Despite our lauded community school model (NYCDOE Showcase School), and despite an increase of 15.5% school wide on the 2016-2017 NYS standardized ELA test, 61.1% of our students performed below grade level on that test.
Believing that all teachers must be invested in literacy instruction, and with a personal goal of increasing distributed leadership, I led our Middle School faculty in investigating a unique literacy program offered by the NYC DOE, simply called the Middle School Quality Initiative. Taking a deep dive into literacy, every Middle School teacher committed to teaching reading in addition to their regular subject areas, and to using MSQI pedagogy to purposefully embed reading and writing into their content area instruction. In addition to shifting teachers’ mindsets, and to providing differentiated pedagogical training, MSQI required a complete overhaul of the Middle School schedule.
