Following our fall reading assessments (Acadience and RFRA), Whiteside teachers and staff identified a need to be more explicit in their teaching practices towards reading comprehension strategies.

This year, our new RFRA (Richmond Formative Reading Assessment) provided insight into multiple reading comprehension strategies. 

As such, we started our 2025-2026 year by focusing our professional learning on reading comprehension strategies.

• Accessing targeted professional support for our primary and intermediate teams during our first professional development day.
• Provided collaboration support with our teacher consultant for our intermediate teachers to review their data and create learning plans that directly address the comprehension needs in their classroom.
• Our primary teachers have undergone training and professional learning to provide targeted small group instruction during our Primary Reading Intervention program. This program is done in collaboration with their regular literacy program.

At the beginning of the school year, we reviewed our shared collection of reading comprehension strategies to ensure that each classroom used the same language and strategies. Our most important strategies are:

• Connecting: This means relating what you're reading to your own life, other things you've read, or the world around you. It helps you understand the text better and makes it more meaningful.
• Inferencing: Like a detective, you use clues in the text and what you already know to figure out things that aren't directly stated. This helps you "read between the lines" and understand the deeper meaning.
• Predicting: You make educated guesses about what will happen next in the story. This keeps you engaged and helps you anticipate what's coming.
• Visualizing: You create a picture in your mind of what you're reading. This helps you understand and remember the story better.
• Questioning: You ask yourself questions about the text. This helps you stay focused, identify important information, and deepen your understanding.
• Comparing: You find similarities and differences between characters, events, or ideas in the text. This helps you analyze and make connections.
• Drawing conclusions: You put together all the information you've gathered to form your own understanding of the text and its message.
• Applying: You use what you've learned from the text in a new situation, like solving a problem or understanding a real-life event.

Although the lessons and language may change, we believe that every child at Whiteside should be able to share their reading in each of these areas.

To develop literacy programs that focus on reading comprehension strategies, we will:

• Engage in ongoing professional learning as a staff
• Build consistency among grade levels by collaborating
• Access collaboration support from our district teacher consultants
• Connect with local resources (libraries, authors, district specialists, colleagues) to provide to our students
• Continually assess student learning and refine our instruction to meet their needs.

We look forward to sharing our students’ growth throughout the school year.