The Reading Excellence Act and multicultural literacy development in schools

Applying a literacy Policy to achieve Student Literacy Skills

The commitment and seriousness of the U.S. government is to enhance the literacy education and passage of the Reading Excellence Act 1998 is to ensure that all children and students are provided with effective readiness literacy skills. In essence, the Excellence Act is to encourage parents to work with school leaders to support literacy schools' vision as well as enhancing learning opportunities for students and children. However, integrating multiculturalism in the school literacy plan is an effective strategy to enhance students' academic needs and placement.

Objective of this paper is to develop the literacy development plan for our school using the school's cultural integration, which all students should respect.

School-wide Vision

The study believes all children have potential to learn if given the correct fair opportunities to succeed and live in an environment free of gender discrimination, and bias. Our school-wide vision is to provide bias free and equal opportunities for all children while embracing the opportunities of multiculturalism. Teachers and instructors must display sensitivity to various cultures while teaching in the classroom. Teachers are also to ensure that all assignments are based on the instructional scaffolding for the student's placement and academic needs. Moreover, both the informal and standardized assessments should be conducted using quizzes and tests within the classroom environment.

The literacy strategy is by using my ESL and special education teaching experience to implement literacy plan to the needs of students. The strategy is to apply a repetition of words, curriculum well scaffold, and shortened paragraphs. The key points are highlighted; graphs well distributed and explicit direct instructions are applied while teaching the students. The maximum attention is also provided to students to absorb a sense of control in learning to make the school culture well inviting to all nationalities. (Northern Illinois University, 2014). Stakeholders Choosing to achieve Our Vision

Both internal and external stakeholders are to be included to achieve our vision. A stakeholder consists of an individual or group having an interest in an organization or the success "of an "organization in fulfilling its mission- delivering intended results and maintaining the viability of its products, services and outcomes over time." (U.S. Department of Education, 2012 p 4).

"The distinction between internal and external education stakeholders is important. With respect to a school improvement effort, such as a schoolwide reading model, internal stakeholders clearly have greater capacity to produce positive change in schools, but they don't have all of the power needed to sustain it." (U.S. Department of Education, 2012 p 5).

Internal stakeholders are the people working with school system while the external stakeholders are the people outside the school system; however have a strong interest in the school outcomes. In essence, internal stakeholders have a greater capacity in enhancing positive changes and achieve the school improvement. More importantly, external stakeholders have critical roles to sustain improved reading outcomes and some external stakeholders have high interest in the long-term success of school to achieve positive changes. (U.S. Department of Education, 2012).

Major stakeholder to improve our students' outcome includes school staff, parents, literacy specialists, and students. While the school staff have interest in enhancing job satisfaction and achieve professional efficacy, however, the staff can only achieve their objectives in the development of literacy rich environment in collaboration of other stakeholders. Moreover, parents pride in the success of their children, and are ready to participate in the improved school outcomes to ensure students' literacy development. (U.S. Department of Education, 2010).

Students also pride in their personal success and future opportunities, which can be achieved in schools. The role of literacy specialists is to engage students in developing their literacy skills and enhancing their literacy improvement. (Lrvin, Meltzer, & Dukes, 2007). However, stakeholders still need to translate the action into a plan through effective action and methodology.

Methodologies best suited for building the Diverse Community

The integration of new technology is an effective strategy that can build diverse community.

The methodology is to motivate students to learn within a collaborative and wonderful environment using the multimedia technology. The proposal will integrate the modern technology such as projector, smart boards, light laptops and iPads to develop a literacy rich environment. We will also design, develop a website and integrate user-friendly applications, which students can be downloaded to assist them understanding the lesson and vocabularies. Moreover, the multimedia website will be developed to ease students and pupils' understanding the comprehension level.

In a new contemporary technology environment, the use of multimedia is becoming beneficial to students and young children because children watching animated story are more likely to remember the story than children not exposing to a rich multimedia learning environment. Moreover, computer programs can assist students to master their languages repeatedly. (Metis Associate, 2014). The learning program also inspires students to learn and assist parents to track the progress of the children. The learning software, DVD and learning website will be available to enhance students' literacy education, which will be useful for children no matter their cultural background. The new technology will also assist students to learn phonics, which is widely used methodology to teach writing and reading the English language. Moreover, the new technology will include an online site to support school staff, and school administrators with overall goals to motivate learning among students using the interactive instruction to improve student-reading skills. The multimedia website will also assist the students of special education to make connections between pictures. Typically, the proposal will develop the multimedia website similar to the website in fig 1 to enhance literacy development of children.

Fig 1: Sample Multimedia Website

As being revealed in the Fig 1, the website will consist of different pages that include ABCs, Learn to Read, It's Fun to Read and I'm Reading. The other part of website will consist of the pages to improve children Math skills, and all children will be trained to use the website.

Different Strategies to be employed with Different Stakeholder Groups

Different strategies will be employed to engage the stakeholders to implement the methodology. One of the effective strategies is to create a warm and welcome school environment for parents who visit the schools. For example, schools leaders will provide a welcome packet and personal greeting for all parents visiting the schools. Moreover, teachers will make a personal contact with parents through email, home visits and phoned call explaining to them an essential importance of students' literacy skill development. Establishing school-to-home communication will assist parents to participate in monitoring their children progress. Additionally, the schools will provide materials and training to assist in improving students' literacy skills. Offering a workshop for parents is a critical step in informing them about the standards and expectations children are expected to meet. The national PTA (Parent Teacher Association) can also be used to solicit parents to participate in the literacy skill program.

Other strategy is to develop the smart educational systems that consist of the school-home community partnership, which consists of a comprehensive web leaning to support students. Essentially, schools alone may face challenges in accumulating necessary resources to sustain effective school programs. Thus, the school leaders will take the initiative to form a strong partnership with other stakeholders and encourage parents to form mission-oriented outcomes. Through partnership strategy, the schools leaders will be able to empower all students to become successful readers to sustain community improvement. A strong example of parents, school leaders and community partnerships is found in Kentucky where Committee of Academic Excellence is formed to improve educational achievements of all students. Through goal setting, data sharing, lobbying and policy recommendations, the committee was able to form collaboration with other educational interest groups. The outcome of the Kentucky stakeholders initiative has demonstrated that involvement of parents and community in schools can bring an improve school literacy outcomes.

Literacy Strategies to be Introduce to Support our vision School- wide

Effective literacy outcomes involve multiple activities, and the proposal suggests different strategies to achieve students' literacy outcomes. The first strategy is by strengthening the literacy development across all content areas. The strategy is to engage and motivate students developing their literacy skills through literacy improvement outcomes. For example, school leaders will use the team leaders, teachers and literacy team members to activate writing and reading strategies for students in order to develop their literacy skills.

Other strategy to support the literacy vision is to set up a literacy intervention for struggling writers and readers through school improvement efforts. In the scenario, school leaders will collect data on the school capacity, students' needs and teacher knowledge to assist in developing action plan for struggling writers and readers. The school will use the test coordinator, reading specialists and reading teachers to purchase and implement essential reading program to meet the needs of the students who scores low scores on the reading assessment. During the summer's school years, the school leaders will assign literacy teachers to improve students' grade and assessments.

Notwithstanding, integration of school culture, policies and structures is an effective strategy to support the students' literacy because ignoring school culture in the literacy plan can impede literacy improvement and may not address the school's literacy needs. Thus, teachers will coordinate their efforts designing and implementing instructions across all subject areas to develop performance tasks. (Henderson, Mapp, Johnson et al. 2007).

The next step is to support teachers to enhance literacy development. Essentially, schools teachers are not expected to implement literacy development for students without teachers' professional support and development. An important component for the implementation of literacy plan is to organize the training and development for teachers to enhance successful literacy intervention for struggling leaders.

Intervention model or models to Implement in our School

The literacy intervention model is one of the models that the proposal will use to enhance students' literacy skill since the school leaders can sustain literacy development by implementing literacy action plan through students' engagement, motivation and achievement.

"The key components of the literacy action plan mirror components of the Leadership Model for Improving Adolescent Literacy because the action plan acts as a blueprint for implementing a school wide literacy improvement effort. Determining appropriate overall goals for literacy improvement requires the gathering and analyzing of relevant data. Then, based on the data, leaders can define and implement action steps related to each component." (Lrvin, et al. 2009 p 55).

As being revealed in Fig 2, an effective strategy to achieve our literacy objective is to allocate resources to support teachers through training and development, and engage parents and community in the literacy development plan. (Lrvin, et al. 2009).

How Technology be Integrated to support our Vision

Essential strategy to make our goal coming to reality is to integrate essential technology to support our vision. Different type of technologies such as computer laptop, software, desktop computer and internet access will be made available to all teachers. Essentially, the school will establish computer lab to achieve the literacy vision. More importantly, students and teachers will have access to wireless internet across within the school environment to enhance effective communication. The technology will also be used for the assessment and instruction. The Wifi will be available for all the internal stakeholders to have access to the multimedia website and enhance effective communication within the school environment. Technique to Scale our School model up to a District-level Program

A level of academic success, staff morale, staff productivity and feedback from all the stakeholders will be used to compare our model to a district level program. First, the academic performances of all students will be used to determine whether we are meeting our goals and vision. Typically, we will compare the academic scores of all students with other schools in the district to ascertain whether we are able to meet our target goals. Moreover, the staff productivity will be used to scale the outcome of our model. We will also use survey technique to collect the feedback of all the stakeholders regarding the success of our model. The strategy will assist in scaling our model with a District-level Program.

Conclusion

The paper develops a literacy development plan for our school using the school's cultural integration to improve our student literacy skills. Essential strategy to achieve our vision is to integrate effective technology that will assist all students to improve their literacy skills despite their cultural orientation. The study recommends a design of a multimedia website, which serves as one of the effective technologies to meet our vision. However, both the internal and external stakeholders are to be incorporated in our model because they are very important in meeting our objectives.

Reference

Bryant-Shanklin, M. & Jones, R.C. (2005). Unified Model of Language-to-Literacy Intervention Approaches. Colorin Colorado.

Henderson, A., Mapp, K., Johnson, V. et al. (2007). Beyond the Bake Sale: The Essential Guide to Family-School Partnerships. New York: The New Press.

Lrvin, J.L. Meltzer, J. & Dukes, M.S. (2007). Taking Action in Adolescent Literacy: An Implementation Guide for School Leaders. Judith Irvin.

Metis Associate. (2014). Evaluation of the Starfall Kindergarten Curriculum in Roaring Fork School District. New York.

Northern Illinois University, (2014). Instructional Scaffolding to Improve Learning. Faculty Development and Instructional Design Center.

U.S. Department of Education (2009). Engaging Stakeholders Including Parents and the Community to Sustain Improved Reading Outcomes. Sustainable Series. Number 6.

U.S. Department of Education,. (2010). Transforming Schools through Family, School, and Community Engagement. National PIRC Coordinator Center.