How can we build improvement skills in educators that change students' experiences?

The Baltimore Secondary Literacy Improvement Community (BSLIC) is dedicated to holistic student support that helps young people reach their goals. The Literacy Improvement Fellowship at Baltimore City Public Schools (BCPS) incorporates Continuous Improvement (CI) to build educator skills and confidence in addressing students’ literacy, a major cross-cutting issue for student success.

Literacy is often reduced to reading and writing, leaving the skill of comprehension overlooked. Literacy Improvement Fellows work to build student comprehension across subjects from art history to biology. Focusing on middle and high school students, fellows design, test, and develop interventions to address student needs in five categories: phonics, fluency, vocabulary, writing, and virtual student engagement.

our approach

Shift has partnered with BCPS to explore how CI helps educators and school officials improve student experience in four schools with distinct student populations.

Shift is interviewing Literacy Improvement fellows to learn more about their practice, how virtual learning has impacted their work, how they fellowship has changed their process, and how CI is showing up in the wider school environment. Through a series of cases studies, we will illuminate key contributing factors to successfully implementing CI as well as important considerations for preparing educators to teach in a new way.

partners

Baltimore City Public Schools
Catalyst:Ed