Ubah District 4121 puts emphasis on Reading Literacy as one of its core missions in preparing students for their career aspirations after high school.  Each week there is a dedicated Advisory period where students in all grades focus on their reading skills.  We call this the Drop Everything And Read time.  It is otherwise known as DEAR time.  The emphasis is on instilling the love of reading of all kinds of material for our students so that they will not only become better readers, but find reading more enjoyable as a pursuit of lifelong learning.  Learning to read is the most important skill that a student will use throughout their life.  Teaching staff will be trained during the professional development week prior to the beginning of the 2024-2025 school year.   

Ubah District 4121 recognizes the importance of professional development  and its impact on student learning.  Ubah is committed to professional development and common planning time to promote professional development for teaching staff.   Each professional learning community will meet bimonthly on Fridays during asynchronous learning time.  Teachers will have workshops prior to the school year acquiring literacy teaching skills. One of these skills that will be emphasized will be the importance of goal setting in regards to EL students.  The aim of these goals will be focused on growth of the student’s reading abilities.  These workshops will be followed up by bimonthly professional learning community meetings where teachers will collaborate on literacy best practices through the content areas and the grade level areas.

NWEA Literacy Assessment data will be collected in the 9th, 10th, and 11th grade levels in the fall.  Those students who do not obtain a valid score or are new to the district will be required to take the NWEA in the winter.  Students will then be assessed in the Spring to measure their literacy growth.   English teachers will also be screening for any reading abnormalities should the NWEA test score data warrant a closer look due to a lack of academic progress.  Classroom observational data will also be taken into account as well as Interventions and Instructional supports provided for the students.

The district currently assesses all English Learners using ACCESS for ELLs. The ACCESS Assessments helps educators accurately assess the academic language skills of English 

language learners.  This assessment provides teachers with reliable data to make solid literacy decisions regarding the learners' literacy needs.  Materials purchased will be based on this data, as well as demographic information to make culturally appropriate instruction. EL curriculum materials and interventions , used to develop language skills, will be updated as needed or developed on-site.  Teachers will use this assessment data to improve instruction for the needs of their students.   

Ubah teaching staff will use the data gleaned from the NWEA assessment data, formative assessment data, as well as classroom observational data to drive instruction.  Teachers will target their literacy data to those literacy areas of the greatest need.  Whether the data will show inferential reading skills or literal comprehension skills, there will be a primary focus in the literacy objectives that will be taught to students.  The literacy instruction will be scientifically and evidence based with a multi-tiered approach to engage the learners in many different ways.

SAVVAS and IXL will be used for students who have been identified through classroom observation and assessment data.  The emphasis will be on improving literacy skills in students for those areas that have been identified by staff members.  For example, if a student is struggling in identifying the main idea of a passage, a teacher will assign the student(s) a lesson and exercise in either the IXL system or the SAVVAS system.  The student(s) will be supported by a educational assistant trained in helping with literacy deficiencies..