Sherwood Forest Students are Reading their Way to the Top

Examples of RSN classroom activities | Related Resources

Principal Antoinette Boissierre gets into the spirit of the “Read Across America” week celebration at Sherwood Forest Elementary.

Have no doubt that Antoinette Boissierre is a principal focused on reading. Greeting visitors to Sherwood Forest Elementary last April, wearing a big red-and-white striped 'Cat in the Hat' hat, she explains, "We're all caught up in wanting everyone to be successful readers!" She also explains that this East New Orleans elementary is celebrating "Read Across America Week," albeit a little late in the school year.

Her bright office is a haven for young readers with its comfortable chairs and storybooks everywhere — on shelves and in baskets. Boissierre is fond of having story time in her office with small groups of children. She points out an apron and chef's toque, decorated with hand-painted phonics-related sayings and graphics. She often dons the apron and toque for phonics activities.

Boissierre speaks proudly of her students: "They know the emphasis here is read, read, read."

And she has reason to be proud. This year, for the first time, Sherwood Forest received a "Recognized Academic Growth Rating" from the Louisiana Department of Education. The school's 1999-2000 Louisiana Educational Assessment Program (LEAP) scores indicated 27 percent of students were performing at the Basic level in Language Arts; the 2000-2001 scores show that 34.5 percent scored at the Basic level. The 2000-2001 results also showed a considerable decrease in the number of students performing at the Unsatisfactory level, dropping from 43.7 percent in 1999-2000 to 32.7 percent in 2000-2001.

The reasons for increased achievement at Sherwood Forest are many. The primary one is Boissierre's leadership. The school has instituted a number of strategies and approaches to support reading, including 90 minutes of reading a day for every child and the Open Court phonics program for all grade levels, K-5. Under Boissierre's direction, the school has also become a Comer school, which provides a structure and process for adults — administrators, faculty, staff, parents — to collaborate to support student learning and overall development.

Sherwood Forest teachers Jeanine Boutte, Tiffanni Shaw, and Christian Arceneaux participate in a summer Reading Success Network activity.

SEDL's Southeast Comprehensive Assistance Center (SECAC) has worked with Sherwood Forest staff for three years, through the highly successful Reading Success Network (RSN). SECAC's professional development in reading strengthens teacher instruction by providing strategies and tools that can be used with a school's existing reading program and aligned with district and state standards and goals. Teachers also learn to use reading assessment tools and data collection and analysis to inform instruction and determine appropriate intervention strategies. RSN includes a coaching process that builds professional relationships and expertise within the school through the use of study teams. These teams of teachers collaboratively examine student work and data to make instructional decisions. The RSN has been a valuable experience not only for the Sherwood Forest staff but also for the 30 or so core reading-intervention teachers hired by the New Orleans Public School System to provide additional reading support at several elementary schools.

Boissierre says reading activities and strategies given to her teachers by SECAC "push the idea that you don't stop with teaching skills, you provide as much practice with skills as possible." RSN activities have helped bring an enthusiasm for reading and an ease to classroom interaction, too. "Our children are freer in their reactions and responses in the classroom now," says the veteran principal. "They are deriving so much pleasure from reading and they know now that their teacher will be patient with them as they are learning to read."

Part of this more-relaxed classroom atmosphere comes from using centers to allow small groups of students to work together. It also comes from RSN instruction such as a recent questioning workshop which helps teachers change their way of questioning to encourage responses from children who may be hesitant to participate and encourage children to think more deeply about what they have read.

Third graders in Jeanine Boutte’s class listen to one last Dr. Seuss story before the dismissal bell rings.

With the New Orleans Public Schools' emphasis on reading at the third-grade level, all third-grade teachers have been active in RSN for several years along with Tradonya Domingue, the school's on-site staff developer and some teachers from other grade levels. Domingue reports, "Teachers who are participating in RSN are more innovative and open to change. They are sharing more professional development, relying on rubrics more, and using different forms of assessments." Domingue shares RSN training and models activities with teachers throughout the school. Third-grade teachers Jeannine Boutte and Tiffani Shaw also demonstrate RSN strategies they have integrated into the reading curriculum to other Sherwood teachers.

Domingue works especially closely with the fourth- and fifth-grade teachers, who traditionally have not had to focus on phonics. "Upper-level teachers sometimes have problems teaching reading because they haven't received as much training in reading. They don't expect children in upper grades to have problems reading," she says. "There are also challenges because usually the struggling readers are low-functioning in many ways. You have to try to keep the content at their higher level, but focus on needed skills."

Many of the RSN activities are easily adaptable to meet the needs of older struggling readers and help teachers address reading skills without sacrificing subject-matter knowledge. For example, WordSplash (see page 29) for older students can include key terms or concepts in a textbook chapter, newspaper, or magazine article the students are about to study; or it can be used as a summarizing strategy, in which students read and then create their own WordSplash of what they consider to be the key terms or ideas in the passage. Sentence Elaboration can also be adapted by extending sentence length and increasing the number of missing words.

Jeanine Boutte notes teachers often feel overwhelmed using assessments and data. But she says SECAC's assessment training has helped — the RSN teachers have shared what they have learned with Sherwood Forest study groups. "Now we're able to look at the data and see where we should change our instruction."

Since becoming involved in the SECAC training, Boissierre tries to get other principals involved as well. "It's not costing you anything except time," she says. "And SEDL has taken me up the ladder where I like to be anyway — with others who like success."

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