Clinton Ave. School Makes Time For Reading

Can an extra half-hour each day make a difference in teaching kids to read?

Based on what’s happening at Clinton Avenue School — which was once a struggling K‑8 school in Fair Haven and is now becoming an instructional model for the district — the answer seems to be yes.

With a new principal and a turnaround grant, Clinton Avenue has achieved the largest consistent gains in reading test scores among all New Haven’s grade schools. The portion of students on grade level has grown from 22 percent in 2015 – 16 to 39.3 percent in 2018 – 19.

Kristina DeNegre, the principal, credits that to the way that the school redid its entire schedule to make time for what she calls a ​“stop and drop.” For up to 45 minutes, classes break up into small groups, with no more than five students, for an extra lesson around whatever difficulties came up that week.

“The reality of it is that our kids have gaps, and we’re closing those gaps,” she said. ​“The best way to do that is to give them very targeted and specific instruction. That happens during that block.”

Teaching kids to read is no easy process. Students need to know how to pronounce syllables and spell sounds, how to decode vocabulary words and arrange them in a sentence, how to read a paragraph almost automatically and still grasp its point.

Figuring what part of that process isn’t getting through can be even harder, especially in a class of 27 students, where many also don’t speak English at home. Just over one-third of Clinton Avenue’s students are English language learners.

Clinton Avenue’s ​“stop and drop” gives teachers that extra time to focus on a specific aspect of literacy.

“When we say ​‘we stop and drop everything,’ I could be in the middle of a Foundations test. I say, ​‘Alright, we gotta stop, and we’re going to finish this at 12 o’clock,” said Brenna Roberts, a second-grade teacher. ​“There’s a phonics piece, there’s reading, there’s writing, there’s comprehension questions.”

In her class, for example, some students might work specifically on phonics, the explicit instruction of how sounds match up with letters that’s routinely overlooked in classrooms across the country, while an advanced group might do a research project or hold a book club.

“They might get a double of that,” DeNegre said. ​“The small group instruction is all based on the needs of the students.”

During a visit, students focused on a variety of different assignments.

In a first-grade classroom, some students went through a phonics module on the software program Lexia, while the teacher, Julia Evola, asked a group to come up with words that had an ​“eel” sound.

“So we have ​‘seal’ and ​‘kneel,’” Evola said.

“Meal?” a girl ventured.

DeNegre gave a hint. ​“If it’s not fake, it’s…”

“Real!” a boy shouted.

In the second grade, students worked on comprehension skills. After reading short passages, they answered questions about the setting, the character, and the main problem.

One worked alone, reading through an 11-sentence story about a boy looking for bugs in the grass who couldn’t see anything until he used a magnifying glass; others circled up, underlining key sentences in a story about a boy who felt anxious about taking a swing at a piñata at a birthday party.

And in the third grade, a group read a chapter from ​“The Chalk Box Kid,” a 64-page book about a student who draws a garden, before Jenna Holmberg asked them about how the character has changed through the story.

Roberts called the stop-and-drops ​“a huge success” that’s led to ​“tremendous growth.” She said she likes that they give her a chance to work with a wider swath of kids throughout the grade, including from two other dual-language classes, and collaborate with other teachers.

“It’s just not my kids,” she said. ​“When we meet, we talk about all the kids.”

DeNegre tried to build on that by scheduling in time for collaborating during morning prep and holding ​“learning walks,” where teachers observe each other once a month.

After spending about a month on it, the students are given a quick assessment known as a ​“running record,” where a teacher follows along with a passage to see if a student mixes up letters, skips words, makes up ones that aren’t there, and knows to self-correct. They also measure how many words they read per minute.

Recently, Roberts administered one of those tests to a student, asking the student to read about a sick dog. ​“Molli is good to the vet,” the student read, mistaking the word ​“going” for ​“good.” ​“And vet is a doctor for pets.” Distracted, the student stopped reading and started talking about a grandmother’s dog.

Based on results like that, along with all the other student work and teacher notes, students will be regrouped for the following month’s interventions.

Students who are behind might visit an interventionist one-on-one in what DeNegre calls a ​“triple dip.”

English language learners and special education students get even more time. But, surprisingly, the school has fewer students referred for tests of learning disabilities.

All those observations are collected together in ​“building-wide progress monitoring sheets” that allow the school to chart how what a fourth-grader knows ties back to earlier grades, beyond just one test score, DeNegre added.

“That comprehensive look lets us find patterns in what we’re doing really well and what we need to work on,” she said. ​“So a teacher might have a student who is showing, let’s say, difficulty in fluency, she can go back and look over the course of the two years prior to see if that’s something that they’ve been struggling with.

“Where is that disconnect?” she added. ​“They might pull an assessment and look at the running record. They might look at work. They might do an additional assessment. Those discrepancies can get very granular, because it could be something simple or something more complex. That allows them to take that deep dive.”