Early Literacy Tutor Continuous Learning Resource Bank

How Children Learn to Read and how to Teach Them

Resources from the most time intensive training scope and sequence in the recipe book are also included in this resource bank. Providers that use the ~72 hour (or more) sequence will see some resources reappear in this bank.

Resources Your Organization Can Have Tutors Learn from to Accomplish Goals:

Comprehensive Resource

  • Reading Rockets’ Reading 101: A Guide to Teaching Reading and Writing is an online course that presents some of the core information that educators need to help young children learn to read and write well and to support the children who struggle.

Print and Phonological Awareness; Alphabet Knowledge

  • Cox Campus’ Early Literacy: Print Awareness, Phonological Awareness, and Alphabet Knowledge is a 2.5 hour online course intended for educators working with K-2 students. The course helps educators understand print awareness skills, phonological awareness skills, and alphabet knowledge skills, and apply those to teaching practice and plan for the teaching of early literacy skills.
  • Cox Campus’ 44 Phonemes is a brief video that models the correct pronunciation of the 44 phonemes of the English language.

Fluency

  • Student Achievement Partners’ Fluency resources, including:
  • Tim Rasinski’s Fluency Rubric, a rubric that assesses multiple dimensions of students’ oral reading fluency and can help build a tutor’s complete understanding of what fluency includes
  • UnboundED ELA Guide: Building Fluency: Unbound A Guide to Grades K-2 ELA Standards is an online guide that defines reading fluency and why it matters to overall reading proficiency, offers insight into how fluency develops, and provides proven and practical activities to build fluency, tied to the Common Core State Standards. Though intended for classroom use, it can be adapted to the tutoring context.

Vocabulary and Oral Language

  • The Meadows Center’s 10 Key Vocabulary Practices for All Schools is a brief guide outlining instructional practices supported by research to build students’ vocabulary. Though intended for classroom use, it can be adapted to the tutoring context.
  • Reading Rockets’ Choosing Words to Teach, a brief excerpt from ​​Bringing Words to Life: Robust Vocabulary Instruction that outlines principles educators might use to select which words to explicitly teach.
  • Isabel Beck’s, Margaret McKeown’s, and Linda Kucan’s Taking Delight in Words: Using Oral Language to Build Young Children’s Vocabularies is an article that offers ways PreK through elementary educators can enhance the vocabulary development of children. It focuses on teaching words from texts that are read aloud to children and presents activities that help young children make sense of new words.
  • Dr. Tim Shanahan’s Vocabulary Teaching is a blog post with straightforward recommendations for teaching vocabulary to students.
  • Reading Rockets’ and Colorín Colorado’s Vocabulary Development with ELLs, an article offering a variety of instructional methods to teach vocabulary to English Language Learners.
  • Edutopia’s What Productive Talk Looks Like in the Elementary Grades is a brief article describing how to use sentence stems to scaffold student discussions, guide students to speak, actively listen, and build on each others’ ideas. This article is most relevant to small group tutoring contexts but talk moves can also be adapted for use in one-on-one tutoring.

Reading Comprehension

  • IES/WWC’s Foundational Skills to Support Reading for Understanding in Kindergarten through 3rd Grade Practice Guide offers educators specific, evidence-based recommendations for teaching foundational reading skills to students in Kindergarten through 3rd grade. After an introduction, the guide outlines four recommendations (pp. 6-37). For each recommendation, the guide briefly summarizes the evidence, offers an implementation timeline, and explains and illustrates how educators can carry out the recommendation.
  • IES/WWC’s Improving Reading Comprehension in Kindergarten through 3rd Grade Practice Guide offers educators specific, evidence-based recommendations for teaching reading comprehension to students in Kindergarten through 3rd grade. After an introduction, the guide outlines five recommendations (pp. 10-38). For each recommendation, the guide briefly summarizes the evidence, explains and illustrates how educators can carry out the recommendation, and describes common roadblocks and possible solutions.
  • Building Standards-Aligned Read Alouds, from UnBoundEd’s Winter 2019 Standards Institute
    • This set of resources includes a presentation, handout, and sample read aloud. It could be used to prepare tutors to do the significant intellectual work needed to develop their own standards-aligned read alouds. It is appropriate only for those programs that are asking tutors to plan cognitively complex read alouds and would likely need to be facilitated by an expert in a formal professional learning setting.
  • Duke, N. K., Ward, A. E., & Pearson, P. D. (2021). The science of reading comprehension instruction. The Reading Teacher, 74(6), 663–672 is a lengthy but accessible journal article detailing what decades of research have taught us about the nature of comprehension and how to develop students’ comprehension in schools.

Supporting English Language Learners

  • Colorín Colorado’s Using Read-Alouds with English Language Learners, a blog post describing how an educator engaged students, brought in content-area connections, and included informal assessment to check comprehension in a first grade read-aloud.
  • August, D. (2018). Educating English Language Learners: A Review of the Research. American Educator. This article summarizes the most recent research on how best to educate English Language Learners from early childhood through high school, including seven principles from a recent consensus report released by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
  • IES/WWW’s Teaching Academic Content and Literacy to English Learners in Elementary and Middle School offers educators specific, evidence-based recommendations for teaching English learners in the elementary and middle grades: building their English language proficiency while simultaneously building literacy, numeracy skills, and content knowledge of social studies and science. After an introduction, the guide outlines four recommendations (pp. 13-68). For each recommendation, the guide briefly summarizes the evidence, explains and illustrates how educators can carry out the recommendation, and describes common roadblocks and possible solutions.

PreK Specific Guidance

  • (PreK only) Cox Campus’ Meaningful Conversations is a 1.5 hour online course that prepares learners to apply complex vocabulary in conversations in a meaningful way; build connections with children and invite them into conversations; and modify the TALK strategy to each child’s unique needs.
  • (PreK only) Cox Campus’ Transforming Story Time is a 3.5 hour online course that prepares learners to read interactively with preschool and PreK children; identify a focus book and explain why it should be read three times in a week; determine what to focus on during each of your three story reads.
  • (PreK only) Cox Campus’ Building World Knowledge is a 3 hour online course that will help learners choose REAL Time topics and identify the components of informational texts and choose appropriate informational texts to use with their children.
  • (PreK only) Cox Campus’ Sharing Ideas Through Writing is a 4 hour online course that will help learners describe the different stages of emergent writing for children; integrate strategies to support children’s writing skill development; and design fun and exciting emergent writing activities to do with children.
  • (Pre-K only) Cox Campus’ Supporting Dual Language Learners Right from the Start is a 4.5 hour online course that prepares learners to describe dual language development, the benefits of bilingualism, and the role of first language in DLL’s development; identify and explain the six essential ecosystem elements that contribute to an ecosystem for dual language learners to thrive; design culturally and linguistically responsive learning environments for dual language learners; and apply teaching practices that specifically support DLLs’ development and build their foundation in language and literacy.

Tutoring with Explicit Instruction and Gradual Release of Responsibility

  • Rosenshine, B. (2012). Principles of Instruction: Research-Based Practices That All Teachers Should Know. (12-19, 39) is an article presenting 10 principles of instruction that come from research in cognitive science, research on the classroom practices of master teachers, and research on cognitive supports to help students learn complex tasks. While principles #3 and 6 are highlighted in the area of tutor learning directly below, all other principles are relevant to explicit instruction and gradual release of responsibility.
  • MTSU’s Center for Dyslexia presents Dr. Anita Archer sharing a brief 5:46 minute video explaining Why Explicit Instruction? Dr. Archer explains the continuum between explicit instruction and discovery learning; the three major pedagogical steps in explicit instruction (I Do, We Do, You Do), the importance of adequate practice and the three types of practice (deliberate, spaced, retrieval); and the importance of all instruction being interactive so students are actively engaged and receive feedback throughout.
  • Reading Rockets features Dr. Tim Shanahan blogging about Gradual Release of Responsibility and Complex Text. This brief piece provides useful insight on how the gradual release model applies to text comprehension and can help your tutors avoid some common errors educators often make in trying to force-fit “I Do, We Do, You Do” onto text instruction. It is highly recommended for tutors supporting students to build language comprehension.
  • The website https://www.retrievalpractice.org/ offers free research-based practice guides and teaching tips related to how to help students get information out of their brains… rather than how to put it in. The information is neutral to content and grade-level, tutors will learn useful information for structuring their practice and feedback.
  • Saga Coach is an online evidence-based tutor training program that gives educators tools they need to assist their learners. Recommended modules include:
    • Tools for Tutoring: Ratio (5 minutes) teaches tutors seven practical tools for making the most of every tutoring session.
    • What Makes a High Quality Tutorial (25 minutes) examines what a high quality tutorial looks like and explores the concept of ratio - the amount of time a tutor spends speaking to the amount of time students spend talking and thinking.
    • Collaborative Learning (10 minutes) teaches tutors practical tips for managing a small group so that everyone is participating.
    • Tools for Tutoring: Rigor (5 minutes) teaches tutors nine practical tools to keep a high level of rigor and not settle for less than students’ best, all designed to help students succeed and grow in every tutorial.
    • Rigor (45 minutes) teaches tutors the key elements of rigor and some Mastery moves to increase the rigor of tutorials.

Checking For Understanding, Giving Feedback, and Adjusting to Meet Student Needs

  • Teach Like a Champion’s Positive Cold Call Culture is a 15-minute online training that allows tutors to learn how to establish a positive cold call culture in tutoring sessions, a technique particularly relevant to small group tutors. Resources exist for tutors to step into a classroom, study the technique, practice, and review and share their work. This training features classroom footage from a second-grade small group reading lesson.
  • Teach Like a Champion’s No Opt Out Options Flowchart outlines how a tutor might support a student who responds to a check for understanding with “I don’t know” or “I can’t” to end the sequence with a valid response.
  • Rosenshine, B. (2012). Principles of Instruction: Research-Based Practices That All Teachers Should Know. (12-19, 39) is an article presenting 10 principles of instruction that come from research in cognitive science, research on the classroom practices of master teachers, and research on cognitive supports to help students learn complex tasks. Principles #3 (ask a large number of questions and check responses of all students) and #6 (check for understanding) are relevant to this area for tutor learning.
  • Payne, B., & Swanson, E. (2021). How to Provide Meaningful Feedback: Teacher’s Guide. The Meadows Center for Preventing Educational Risk. This brief guide describes components of effective feedback, offering examples and non-examples of each, explains types of feedback, and explains how to make feedback specific and constructive.
  • Charter School Growth Fund’s “I See You. I Care. How Can I Help You Grow?” is a blog post that uses Zaretta Hammond’s asset-based feedback protocol to analyze a virtual feedback conversation between an educator and student about a piece of writing. Though the virtual meeting features an older student, tutors can learn from the general principles and concrete examples of how to offer culturally responsive and asset-based feedback to students.
  • Saga Coach is an online evidence-based tutor training program that gives educators tools they need to assist their learners. Recommended modules include:
    • Checks for Understanding (CFUs) (15 minutes) teaches tutors a key strategy for assessing students’ mastery real-time. Once you complete this module, you will understand how to implement CFUs to ask the right questions at the right time, use the data you gather to assess student understanding, and adjust instruction based on that insight. This helps you make every moment of the tutorial count.
    • Tools for Tutoring: Rigor (5 minutes) teaches tutors nine practical tools to keep a high level of rigor and not settle for less than students’ best, all designed to help students succeed and grow in every tutorial.
    • Analyzing Student Work (15 minutes) teaches tutors how to analyze student work during the tutorial to determine their understanding or missteps.
    • Maintaining High Expectations (10 minutes) teaches tutors four leadership styles that tutors adopt and help you identify when you are in each role. Tutors are challenged to find the balance of high challenge and high support to help students grow.

Virtual Tutoring Session Implementation Best Practice