In anticipation of the OHRC Right to Read Inquiry recommendations, KPDSB began a strategic plan implementing evidence-based approaches that emphasize direct, explicit, and systematic instruction and an understanding that reading comprehension is the product of word recognition and language comprehension. There has been a system-wide focus on building educator competency using structured, explicit, multimodal literacy practices, including phonemic and phonological awareness, decoding skills, and matching articulation of speech sounds/phonemes to the letters/graphemes that represent those sounds.
As a component of the strategy, practices were examined that historically have negatively impacted marginalized students. Through the work of destreaming, teachers were provided with increased opportunities to learn about differentiated instruction and universal designs for learning, examining, and changing processes that have impacted academic outcomes.
Over the past year, working with experts in the field in the area of structured literacy, a tiered instruction and intervention model has been built at KPDSB, providing teachers with a literacy screening tool, diagnostic assessments, instructional strategies, and interventions that target student needs, provide intervention, and aim to achieve maximum growth in learning for all students.
