Spotlight on Woodbridge School District: Hear how James and his team launched fluency as a secondary amplifier.

You never know what each person can bring to the table until you bring them to the table!

What does it look like to pilot fluency protocols in the secondary space? In this blog, we highlight the work of the brilliant James Weiler, the 6-12 Literacy Specialist for Woodbridge School District in Greenwood, Delaware. He shares how he garnered interest for this approach through a literacy coalition and how his teachers are currently implementing fluency across disciplines during a year 1 pilot.

How did you form the literacy coalition, and who did you intentionally bring to the table?

The coalition evolved from previous professional learning experiences undoubtedly familiar to most, if not all, educators: an instructional initiative is introduced in August only to fizzle by January and disappear by May. While these initiatives were staff approved, they were not staff developed, thereby lessening school-wide ownership and, more importantly, omitting student considerations known only by those doing the work, so to speak, in classrooms and other instructional contexts.

As a result, I established the Woodbridge High School Literacy Coalition (WHSLC), a comprehensive stakeholder group dedicated to improving student achievement and instructional efficacy. WHSLC comprised the Board of Education, Director of Curriculum and Instruction, high school administrators, department heads, multilingual learner lead teacher, special education coordinator, and school psychologist representing their respective areas of expertise. When inviting stakeholders, I followed a simple philosophy: WHSLC must have an advocate for every teacher and student. 

How did you position this work so teachers saw it as meaningful rather than “one more initiative”?

Consolidation and cohesion! When WHSLC convened over the summer, members recognized its value enough to transition from “one more initiative” to “the one initiative” for the school year. Consequently, most professional learning opportunities funneled into WHSLC’s priorities, particularly around fluency instruction. For example, school leaders facilitated a whole-school fluency instruction session to begin the school year, teacher leaders facilitated more specialized fluency instruction sessions during the second marking period, and both teacher peer review opportunities have encouraged classroom visitation during fluency instruction. To reflect and plan, WHSLC also meets quarterly. 

What made you realize fluency was a critical need at the high school level, and why does it matter beyond elementary grades?

Over the summer, WHSLC conducted a student needs assessment revealing several growth opportunities involving literacy. Unsure of a starting point, the English Language Arts Department Head recommended reading fluency, which triangulated both teachers’ empirical observations and student assessment data. WHSLC then achieved consensus on reading fluency as the initiative for the school year.

Often described as the bridge between decoding and comprehension, fluency optimizes the reading process and, therefore, facilitates engagement with complex, disciplinary texts common at the high school level. For this reason, fluency is paramount beyond elementary school and - in a similar development to literacy - beyond the confines of the language arts classroom. 

Tell me more about the fluency pilot.

We began the fluency initiative as an inquiry cycle for the school year. In practice, WHSLC learned about fluency instructional strategies over the summer and a pilot group of volunteer teachers developed and implemented fluency instruction in designated classes, with progress checks and student artifacts shared quarterly. In a coaching capacity, I then observed and facilitated refinements to the fluency instruction. Notably, the pilot study assessed the feasibility (not quality, yet) of fluency instruction within existing high-quality instructional material and school systems, allowing WHSLC to recognize and address concerns before school-wide implementation next school year. 

How do you define fluency for adolescent learners across different content areas?

WHSLC defines fluency as the ability to simultaneously decode and comprehend text with appropriate accuracy, pace, and prosody (Rasinski et al., 2012).

While our definition of fluency remains consistent across content areas, the definition of a text does not. At the beginning of the school year, each content area defined a text by the type, content, vocabulary, features, and text-dependent tasks common in their respective disciplines, shown below. These definitions informed instructional approaches targeting reading fluency. 

Figure

Text Definitions by Content Area (Rough Draft) - Woodbridge High School Literacy Coalition

Source: Adapted from Rasinski, T., Blachowicz, C., & Lems, K. (2012). Fluency instruction: Research-based best practices. The Guilford Press.

What do these fluency protocols look like in practice? 

The following fluency protocols are the products of my exceptionally talented and dedicated colleagues, so all of the praise belongs with them. I am just fortunate enough to share their creations. 

Most of the fluency protocols adopted a deep reading approach, whereby students engaged with a relatively short text chunk through layers of increasingly rigorous tasks. 

• In Geometry, students began each unit with a short text about to-be-learned concepts, like transformation types or triangle congruence criteria, with accompanying equations and figures common to the discipline. Students followed along to a teacher's reading of the text, conducted a paired read, and answered questions on identified vocabulary and their properties, often by synthesizing the written text with the equations and figures.

• In Agricultural Science, students engaged in dynamic jigsaw readings about meat production and other job-embedded practices. To do this, students were assigned one of four roles - Partner A, B, C, or D - with a respective text chunk, often decided by the text’s headers. In pairs, Partners A and B and Partners C and D read and identified the gist of their respective text chunks in a modified peer-assisted learning strategies (PALS) model, and then all four partners convened to understand the full text. For accountability, each student submitted interesting facts, new understandings, and remaining questions about the text.

• English Language Arts, Biology, and World History adopted a weekly protocol similar to the Tight 10. On Monday, student pairs read a short text related to that week’s instruction without context as a cold read. On Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, students engaged with the same text through increasingly independent oral reading fluency practices - teacher reading and gist summary on Tuesday, choral reading and sentence completion exercises on Wednesday, and paired reading and analytical questions on Thursday - until Friday, when student pairs read the text a final time with the now-learned context as a hot read. Notably, students graphed their cold read and hot read reading rate to measure progress as a form of self-reflection. 

How does fluency work look different (or similar) across subjects like science, social studies, math, or CTE?

As a pilot study, the fluency protocols are constantly evolving, but one enduring difference is the texts for each content area. To reinforce authentic literacy, each content area utilizes texts appropriate for their respective fields: language arts reads literature and poetry, science reads information and charts, social studies reads historical summaries and primary documents, career and technical education reads directions and specifications, and math reads descriptions, equations, and figures. 

What is the overall impact of this approach on teacher learning? Student learning?

Overall, WHSLC has established a culture of professional learning by uniting stakeholders, student needs, and instructional best practices to improve literacy achievement. School leaders and teachers now communicate more precisely and intentionally about literacy instruction. As the fluency protocols show, teachers want and have the capacity to support students and often just need some facilitation, as we have offered with WHSLC. 

Empirically, I experience more robust coaching conversations around reading instruction than in year’s past, with my colleagues across content areas excited to share their instructional practices. Of these colleagues, the fluency pilot study participants are perhaps the most awe-inspiring, as they earnestly share, listen, and learn from each other during our quarterly meetings to maximize student success.  

For student data, we are too early in the school year (and, really, this whole literacy initiative) to have valid achievement data, but a few colleagues have discovered statistically significant (>.5) improvements in student midterm performance between last year and this year potentially attributed to the fluency pilot, though more rigorous testing must be done before drawing conclusions. 

Any advice for others who may want to try fluency at the seconday level? Any lessons learned?

As I discussed in my philosophy for WHSLC, bring all stakeholders to the table. Here is a fun anecdote why:  When initializing the fluency pilot study, I only had a handful of volunteer participants who altogether instructed too few students to represent the school population. However, that changed with the Visual and Performing Arts Department Head, who, by heading the district mentor program, recruited mentee teachers requiring participation in a school initiative - like the fluency pilot study. Suddenly, the pilot participants more than doubled, creating a movement that has sustained the pilot study and, to a larger extent, WHSLC throughout the school year. Had I omitted the Visual and Performing Arts Department Head - as I’m sure many do - from the literacy initiative, the fluency pilot study would have potentially failed by this time in the school year. You never know what each person can bring to the table until you bring them to the table!

How do you plan to scale beyond the pilot group?

Pending the pilot study’s success, fluency instruction will be scaled across high school classrooms next year. To support teachers, WHSLC will refine the piloted fluency protocols, develop accompanying resources, and plan professional development over the summer. Refinements will prioritize reading practices related to accuracy and prosody to align with best practices. 

Amidst these overarching goals, I am also developing text selection criteria for a weekly reading protocol in English Language Arts (my teaching background). Specifically, I want the selected literature and/or poetry to evolve alongside students’ new understandings throughout the week, so that the cold read on Monday provides a significantly different reading experience than the hot read on Friday, similar to how the first half of a film changes for viewers who have already watched the ending. If successful, this text selection criteria will further communicate the benefits of repeated reading to students and teachers. 

We are so grateful to James and his stellar team at Woodbridge for sharing their insights and reflections. James reminds us that meaningful change often begins with a clear vision—and a few committed educators willing to take the first step. His perspective shows that fluency work is not only possible in the secondary space, but that it can serve as a powerful entry point for learning more about how to support all students as readers.