New 'Michigan Literacy in 3D' Offers Teachers a Passport to Excellence

Michigan's eight Regional Literacy Training Center (RLTC) directors are collaborating on the design of a new professional development passport for Michigan's teachers.

The new Michigan Literacy in 3D passport will allow teachers to collect endorsements as they learn to use Data-driven Decision-making to Differentiate instruction. Passports will be available through the RLTCs as teachers continue to participate in professional development around each of the following Michigan literacy assessments.

According to Faith Stevens, Michigan Department of Education's (MDE) Reading First coordinator, the passports will include endorsements for the following "3Ds":

Data-driven—includes assessments that collect information about the child's strengths and needs:

• Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS)
• Michigan Literacy Progress Profile (MLPP)
• Playful Literacy and You (PlaY)
• Additional assessments that collect information about student strengths and needs

Decision-making - involves a deep understanding of how to teach reading:

• Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling (LETRS)

Differentiating instruction - includes the use of best practices for literacy instruction.

• To learn more about Michigan Literacy in 3D, contact your intermediate school district or regional educational service agency.

What Is MLPP?

The Michigan Literacy Progress Profile (MLPP) is a research-based testing tool used to measure students' oral language, comprehension, and writing ability. The goal is to have students become independent readers and writers by third grade. The MLPP covers:

• Literacy attitudes. Teachers learn what students know of their own literacy attitudes and performance.
• Oral language (using language to communicate).
• Phonemic awareness (ability to distinguish sounds used in language).
• Comprehension strategy assessment/retellings. Students make predictions, retell familiar stories, and tell stories using the pictures.
• Writing. Using a prompt, children discuss, plan, and write about a topic such as "Something I do very well."
• Concepts of print. Teachers learn what students know about handling books.
• Oral reading. Teachers observe a student reading aloud to measure fluency, rate, accuracy, and use of reading strategies.
• Letter/sound identification (ability to recognize letters and sounds in isolation and high frequency and unfamiliar words at appropriate grades) and word recognition.
• Known words (ability to write words that occur in students' daily lives, such as family members' names; colors; and high frequency, high interest, and number words; and to generate new words using analogies).
• Hearing and recording sounds (ability to hear and record sounds in words from adictated sentence).

To learn more, contact Faith Stevens at (517) 241-2479 or StevensF@michigan.gov.

What Is DIBELS?

The Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) is a set of standardized, individually administered measures of early literacy development. The set is designed to offer short (one minute) fluency measures used to regularly monitor the development of pre-reading and early reading skills.

The measures were developed by the Institute for the Development of Education Achievement at the University of Oregon. Based upon the essential early literacy domains discussed in both the National Reading Panel (2000) and National Research Council (1998) reports, DIBELS measures are designed to assess student development of phonological awareness, alphabetic understanding, and automaticity and fluency. The assessment tool is available free for downloading at http://dibels.uoregon.edu.

To learn more about DIBELS, visit http://dibels.uoregon.edu/.

What Is LETRS?

Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling (LETRS) is a set of modules designed to help teachers understand the language structures they're teaching, how students learn to read and write, and the reasons why some students fail to learn. The 12 LETRS modules teach teachers the meaning of scientific findings about learning to read and reading instruction. The modules address each component of reading instruction: phoneme awareness; phonics, decoding, spelling, and word study; oral language development; vocabulary; reading fluency; comprehension; and writing. Modules also address the foundational concepts that link these components. LETRS also covers the characteristics and needs of English language learners (ELL), dialect speakers, and students with other learning differences throughout the modules.

To learn more about LETRS, visit http://www.letrs.com/.

What Is PlaY?

Playful Literacy and You (PLaY) is a training program designed for people who work with children birth through age five to increase awareness and understanding of what literacy is all about and how to teach literacy in a child-centered way using play as the vehicle.

To learn more, contact Faith Stevens at (517) 241-2479 or StevensF@michigan.gov.

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