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04/17/2024 08:30 AMReading is one of the most fundamental elements of a child’s education, and there are people who have a passion for helping students in that critical area of development. One of those people is Sarah Levine, the literacy coach at Grove J. Tuttle Elementary School.
Sarah, an East Haven native, came back to her hometown after having previously taught in New Haven and New York. Sarah says she connected well with Principal Chris Brown and Math Coach Kristine Austin during her interview, finding a liking for the “community-minded” approach in East Haven schools that was slightly different than what she found in larger districts.
“It’s a different kind of community when you’re in such a small district, and I wanted to see what that experience would be like,” Sarah says. “Now that I’m here, I do a combination of working with teachers and working with students, and I really love having the opportunity to do both.”
Sarah also works alongside literacy paraprofessional and office mate Melissa Bagnoli while supporting students in literacy needs.
“It’s been a great process to build relationships with the staff and to get to know everybody and the students,” Sarah says. “The students here are just wonderful, a really diverse and great group of students.”
Sarah has always been passionate about literacy, but says the “specifics of literacy” came of interest to her after her daughter was diagnosed with dyslexia. That got Sarah to start asking, “How are we going to make sure we're teaching all of our students to read and not just some of our students?”
When she was previously a reading interventionist, Sarah performed research on new methods and strategies to improve literacy of students, including the Science of Reading approach, and wanted teachers to possess this knowledge through her work as a coach.
“I felt like, wow, if I became a literacy coach, I could work with teachers and really help them to learn all these great strategies and techniques that I had learned about in the Science of Reading,” Sarah says. “I felt like I could help people expand their knowledge base in the same way that I had expanded mine.”
The Science of Reading methodology to student literacy is being considered and implemented at school districts all across the United States and has already been a part of the curriculum at Connecticut schools for over two years. Sarah explains how it works.
“It’s an evidence-based body of research about how we teach people to learn to read,” she says. “For a long time, schools were using what's called balanced literacy, and some schools still are. Balanced literacy brought us poor results. Most of our students weren't learning to read. If you look at the results, about 40% of students were learning to read under balanced literacy. This movement started about the Science of Reading, where we were going to use evidence to make sure that all of our students were learning to read, and it really gained traction.”
For an example in action, Sarah will show a student a card that has the letters “qu,” tell them the correct pronunciation, and then give them an example of a word like “queen.” They will continue to focus on words starting with those letters.
“In a balanced literacy class, it would be more like I gave you a book, and there were lots of things, and as we went along, I was like, ‘Oh, by the way, q-u says [phonetic pronunciation]’. Let’s keep going.”
Sarah has observed that the “explicit instruction” of the Science of Reading method is more helpful to improving literacy than the balanced approach, which is more “about teaching along the way.”
On a typical day, Sarah works with four to five groups of students throughout the day, typically beginning students. She is passionate about working with all students, including multilingual students, something which has become an essential part of her role at Tuttle.
“Almost 25% of our population here are multilingual learners. The majority of them speak Spanish, but there are other languages spoken, as well,” says Sarah. “So, I'm really passionate about working with that particular group of students and supporting them.”
Sarah will assist teachers on monitoring the progress of their students and how to organize them into supportive small groups during lessons.
“Often, I meet with the math coach, so we can talk to each other about coaching and what we can do to really get better at it,” Sarah says. “We’re looking at a kind of coach called ‘student-focused coaching,’ something we're trying out. So, we've been doing some research on that.”