Carter & MacRae Teachers Adopt a Common Language Through eMBEDDED LEARNING™

At Carter & MacRae Elementary School, getting all teachers across the school on the same page in reading instruction has been a powerful experience that has been extremely beneficial to the school in just a short amount of time. With each discussion in and outside of the school setting, a professional learning community is building each day, improving teacher practice and accomplishing milestones, with the help of the eMBEDDED LEARNING courses.

“By using the eMBEDDED LEARNING™ that is in the course, we have seen results. The reflections have been incredible; it’s been a tremendous experience,” reports Bob Slamp of Carter & MacRae Elementary School. The Guiding Principles: Early Literacy and Language Development course has been a powerful tool, fitting perfectly in alignment with its current professional development plan. Teachers have begun to enhance their reflection and get a commonality of explicit reading instruction while relating to their students at a deeper level.

Carter & MacRae Elementary School, located in Lancaster, Pennsylvania has successfully completed its first course using eMBEDDED LEARNING.  At this unique school, children are transient and many have significant gaps in their education as a result. Carter & MacRae caters to these children by filling those educational gaps and providing them with a safe place to learn. Because of this, teachers have a great responsibility to these children.

Before engaging in this form of professional development, however, some of Carter’s teachers had little or no phonics instruction. Now, they are seeing vast improvements in what they have dubbed the “nitty gritty of reading instruction.” For other teachers, this course has been an affirmation and validation for what they are already doing. It has been a valuable experience for teachers at all levels of expertise. From this level of professional development, teachers at Carter have been able to get a common language of what reading instruction is, what it looks like and what it sounds like.

“Teachers are more aware, more explicit with their instruction. They understand the purpose and the results they should get, and it’s a matter of progress-monitoring those results. We as a school do this, but this [course] really pin-points it. It really puts it in the cross hairs of the scope,” said Bob Slamp, Instructional Facilitator at Carter & MacRae Elementary School.

Reflection has also been a huge aspect of the improvement at Carter & MacRae. “Research has shown that reflection is a valuable tool to learning. The course forces them to take that time to think about it and our teachers really do think about their practice and the lesson that they did. What went well, what didn’t go well, what do I need to improve, how am I going to monitor the improvement and the achievement, how will I adjust? It keeps them cognizant of what they’re doing and why they’re doing it and how they’re going to do it. We have teachers that have really taken advantage of it and even take it further with journaling outside of the courses.  It gets them thinking deeper about their practice,” stated Mr. Slamp.

With the deep reflection, sync-point discussions, mini-studies and in-class activities, these courses allow learners to study reading instruction with Scientifically-based Reading Research and apply it directly to their classrooms. Teachers are achieving improvement breakthroughs with these courses, focusing on student achievement.