DA Changemakers

We’re talking music and other topics with Craig Witherspoon, a former band teacher who is now superintendent of Richland County School District One in South Carolina. He was just namwed ssuperintendent of the year by the South Carolina Alliance of Black School Educators

"Emotional intelligence" is not only a vital part of Superintendent Atiya Perkins' leadership philosophy, it's how she stays in touch with her own humanity.

CAST's Lindsay E. Jones shares how the Universal Design for Learning is helping educators personalize rigorous instruction for an ever more diverse population of students.

What do you learn when you sit down to chat with 15 superintendents at all stages of their careers and from districts of all shapes and sizes? 

In the District Administration podcast, literacy experts Dr. Lynn Kulich and Dr. Robert Zewiecki from Renaissance Learning stress fluency's importance for reading comprehension and proficiency. Despite frequent assessments, fluency is rarely taught explicitly. The podcast covers evidence-based fluency practices, its impact on multilingual learners, and insights from the book "The Fluency Development Lesson: Closing Reading Gaps."
Key points include the stagnant progress in reading proficiency over the past 40 years, worsened by the pandemic, and the need for equitable access to complex texts for marginalized students. The discussion highlights the interdisciplinary nature of the "science of reading," debunking the misconception that it solely focuses on phonics.
Dr. Kulich uses the acronym CAP—Comprehension, Accuracy, Automaticity, and Prosody—to outline fluency's components, emphasizing that fluency bridges decoding and comprehension. Effective fluency instruction involves teaching these components and includes a balanced approach with decoding and context clues.
Research shows that 75-90% of students struggling with high-stakes reading tests have issues with word recognition and fluency. Improving fluency can significantly enhance reading comprehension, accounting for 20-70% of variance in comprehension from grades one through nine. Effective methods include interactive read-alouds, choral reading, echo reading, phrase reading, partner reading, and repeated reading.
Dr. Kulich's book, "The Fluency Development Lesson," offers five-day units tied to poems by David L. Harrison to improve fluency through diverse and engaging activities. The book targets teachers, literacy coaches, parents, and caregivers, providing structured lessons and a framework for customized instruction. It integrates phonics, phonological awareness, vocabulary, and comprehension, and has been successful with multilingual learners and diverse classrooms.

If you’re a superintendent or administrator trying to tackle public relations, this week's guests on District Administration's "Talking Out of School" podcast are here to help. Lynette White is the district and community relations coordinator at the Banning Unified School District and Renae Bryant is the director of plurilingual services at Anaheim Union High School District.

In this episode, we have a chat with InnovateEDU's founder and CEO Erin Mote, who shares some exciting news in the edtech space and advice for leaders on closing the digital access divide for students.

In this episode, we sit down with the NASSP's 2024 National Principal of the Year Andy Farley to learn more about his leadership philosophy and his advice for current and aspiring principals in this age of the principalship.

Tiffany Shlain's new documentary, "The Teen Brain," looks through the lens of neuroscience to help teens—and their parents and teachers—better understand the upsides of an intense period of growth and development.

Preventing violence in public schools has been Sandy Hook Promise co-founder and CEO Nicole Hockley’s mission since 2012, when her son Dylan was among the 20 children murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. She and the team at Sandy Hook Promise are now a leading voice on making schools safer places and providing mental health support for students by focusing on "upstream violence prevention."