Helping Students Succeed With Literacy Coaching

Learning to read is one of the most important skills a child can learn. Unfortunately far too many kids are not reading at their grade level. There are many possible reasons for this, but whatever the excuse, most adults would agree that something should be done to solve this problem. School teachers are working hard to help each individual child learn to read, but they can’t do it by themselves. One way to help our teachers is through literacy coaching.


What Does a Literacy Coach Do?

A literacy coach is someone who works with teachers to look at each child individually and assess that child’s strengths and weaknesses when it comes to reading and comprehension, grade level vocabulary, and whether the child is accomplishing his or her reading goals. After reviewing every individual child, the literacy coach will help the teacher create a class wide reading profile that incorporates the needs of each and every individual student. After teaching the students and reviewing the concepts through schoolwork, teachers can then receive information from the coaches that includes data about how the class collectively, and each student individually, is doing in each reading category.


Why Hire a Literacy Coach?

When a school hires someone to help with literacy coaching you get someone that can use data to help teachers in their class. When teachers receive this data they can see whether students understand the concepts. If some students are not learning the information, the teacher has statistics they can show parents so they will know what they can do to help their children learn the concepts while at home. Also, unlike other classroom assessments, this data is available immediately so that teachers can see where their students are in real time, instead of a few weeks or even months down the road. By that time it is too late to create specific lessons geared toward each individual child.


Helping Each Child Succeed

Literacy Coaching is a tool that teachers can use to help their students ultimately become better readers. Using the information that the coach collects will also help teachers create lesson plans that are geared for the whole class with each individual student in mind. If implemented correctly, the data gathered by literacy coaches gives teachers information that can help all students succeed and read at grade level.