Our Literacy Coaching Model

The University of Akron’s Center for Literacy provides literacy coaching support as a contracted service to interested school districts throughout northeast Ohio. There are several benefits to literacy coaching in schools. In a literacy coaching model, experts provide classroom teachers and reading support specialists with resources, professional development and guidance to meet the diverse needs of students.  Our Literacy Coaches are Jen Zwick, Mija Trammell, and Rozlyn Grant.

Literacy coaches provide support in finding or creating instructional materials to target specific areas of concern in a classroom, thereby increasing the time teachers can spend directly engaging with students. Coaches also provide embedded modeling of lessons and best practices, allowing teachers themselves to observe and learn in the context of their classrooms. Finally, coaches can increase teacher efficiency and effectiveness by helping teachers revise assessment, diagnosis and intervention practices in their daily lessons.

Rozlyn Grant (below) coaches a teacher at Essex Preschool in the Akron Public School District.  Rozlyn is working with this teacher on phonemic awareness activities from curriculum by Michael Heggerty.  The activities they discuss are foundational to children’s future reading development.

Student Interns

Student interns work with literacy coaches from the Center for Literacy in school districts in Summit County and they learn valuable practices in reading assessment and instruction.  They also assist teachers with assessing their students and they plan and implement small group reading lessons and sometimes provide individual reading tutoring.

Our Literacy Coaches work with student interns to show them how to administer Fountas and Pinnell Benchmark Assessments.  These assessments help teachers determine their students’ reading levels as a result of identifying and analyzing their accuracy, fluency, and comprehension on reading passages.