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Reading Professional Interviews:

Instructional Coach:
Shonda Callhoun is an Instructional Coach for Inglewood Unified School District with
over 15 years of classroom experience. Prior to being an Instructional Coach, she was a 4th and
5th grade teacher with a strong focus on classroom management and curriculum design across the
subject and content areas. Instructional Coaches like Reading Specialists wear many hats, and
although the responsibilities of both professionals vary, they share many commonalities that
relate to the development of literacy curriculum and its implementation. I sat down with Ms.
Calhoun to discuss her role as an Instructional Coach and asked her modified versions of the
interview questions provided.
Callhoun was asked to step into the position for IUSD after complaints from primary
teachers across the district, regarding lack of administrative support. She happily accepted the
role over a year ago, though lamented over leaving the classroom after so many years. However,
she finds that as an Instructional Coach there is a behind the scenes approach that makes her feel
more involved in the academic decision making and uses her voice to ensure an equitably
approach to curriculum design. An Instructional Coaches main duty is to provide instructional
support, instructional strategies, facilitate Professional Development, demonstrate effective
research-based lessons and support teachers on special assignment. Each day is different for an
Instructional Coach for Inglewood Unified; it ranges from troubleshooting online access to
Ellevation, a web-based software platform specifically designed for ELL educators and the
English Learners they serve, planning lesson demonstrations, liaison between the district and the
school sites she serves or planning and facilitating Professional Developments. Callhoun does
not communicate with parents or to the students, though she will at times come into a classroom
upon request to team with a teacher in the implementation of a proposed academic strategy. She
develops her lesson demonstrations based on planned observations of the teachers, these lessons
and strategies are all aligned with Common Core Standards and are evidence based. After
demonstrating lessons, she communicates with each teacher regarding their progress using
suggested strategies or the adopted curriculum. A significant difference between Instructional
Coaches and Reading Specialists is the administering of assessments. Though Instructional
Coaches heavily rely on academic measures as an implication of the schools overall academic
progress, they do not administer any assessments, nor do they choose assessment instruments.
Unlike Reading Specialists, who lean on diagnostic and standardized assessments to determine
areas of challenge and student progress.
Ms. Calhoun uses several academic models to help guide her lesson plans and PD’s. The
Gradual Release Model for example, is an instructional process where teachers strategically
transfer the responsibility in the learning process from the teacher to the students (Fisher, 2008).
Universal Design for Learning also supports her instructional approach; UDL is s an educational
framework based on research in the learning sciences, including cognitive neuroscience, that
guides the development of flexible learning environments that can accommodate individual
learning differences. Ms. Callhoun is also an advocate of the AVID strategy for Emergent
Bilinguals. AVID is an acronym which stands for; Advancement Via Individual Determination.
AVID is a 5-step instructional strategy which incorporates (www.avid.org):
 Peer tutoring - students learn how to ask questions that go beyond memorization and
encourage higher-level thinking collaboratively.
 Focused notetaking - a college level notetaking strategy where students learn to recognize
the most important parts of a lesson, create questions to guide their studying, and revisit
and refine their notes to solidify learning.
 Collaboration - students demonstrate a strong sense of mutual respect and support,
engaging in rigorous discourse and building on each other’s thoughts.
 Embedded Soft Skills - Students learn “soft skills” like public speaking, self-advocacy,
time management and organization.
 Classroom Set-up – the classrooms desks and chairs are arranged to best suit the learning
activity and to encourage students to talk and to work more effectively together.
Overall, Ms. Callhoun finds that curriculum and instructional coaching is only effective if the
relationship between the Instructional Coach or Instructional Specialist and the school
community is one of mutual respect and support.

Reading Specialist:
Professor Andrea Steinfeld is a Reading Specialist at Burton Elementary School in
Panorama City, where she has been the Reading Specialist for over 9 years. Prior to being a
Reading Specialist, she taught in the classroom for 10 years before being nominated to take part
in an intensive reading intervention training with LAUSD in 1996 which laid the path for her to
become a Reading Specialist. Her initial role however was not labeled at the time as a Reading
Specialist, she was a pull-out reading teacher who had a designated number of students. From
there she became a Literacy Coach, working with teachers and implementing the program Open
Court, a research-based comprehensive K–5 reading, writing, and language arts program.
Currently, her role has shifted this school year from working directly with students to overseeing
all 385 students in intervention. There are four different blocks that receive intervention,
Kindergarten is first to receive reading intervention, first-grade is next, second and third-grade
receive intervention simultaneously, and at the end of the school day are the fourth-and fifth
grades. This system of reading intervention allows for each student to receive best evidence-
based reading instruction that is specifically tailored to grade level needs. Professor Steinfeld
throughout the day visits teachers and classrooms and ensures that the small groups are running
effectively and that students are getting everything that they need in terms of intervention,
targeted at the lowest skill deficit.
Recently Burton Elementary became an IDEC program affiliate; IDEC or Intensive
Diagnostic Education Centers is a program designed for grades 4-12 students that are reading
three and four years below grade level. This system has been newly adopted by the school and is
being actively implemented for 45 minutes daily. Now that Professor Steinfeld no longer directly
works with students her typical day ranges from; assisting teachers with correct assessments
administration, meeting with behavioral therapists to discuss students with severe needs and
making rounds throughout the classrooms to ensure that the intervention assistants are doing
what is expected of them, and overall assisting teachers in the reading strategy implementation
process and setting up a routine for reading instruction.
As mentioned, Reading Specialists and Instructional Coaches differ in their approach to
assessment measures. The students at Burton Elementary receiving intensive intervention are
assessed every 3 weeks and the other students are assessed every 4 weeks, though there is a lot of
data collected, Professor Steinfeld would like to be more conscious of implementing more data
informed intervention using the school’s predominant assessment tool, DIBELS. Additionally,
the reading materials and ELA programs used for intervention have been curated by Professor
Steinfeld and vary among the grade levels:
Kindergarten - Heggerty Phonemic Awareness Program, Explode the Code (leveled book
curriculum), Montessori app, an app that covers phonics, reading, writing, numbers, colors,
shapes, nursery rhymes and coloring, and Benchmark Guided Reading.
1st grade – Recipe for Reading a skill sequence and lesson structure designed for beginning, at-
risk, or struggling readers, Talking Letters a program designed to teach children letters, sounds,
and sight words in a fun and effective way as they learn to read, Explode the Code, Heggerty
Phonemic Awareness Program and Readers Theater.
2nd- Explode the Code, Benchmark Guided Reading,
3rd – Fluency practice using various tools and Benchmark Guided Reading
4th/5th- Guided reading, Word Sorts, Explode the Code and Just Words a highly explicit,
multisensory decoding and spelling program for Tier 3 students.
In addition to implementing intervention strategies, assessing and coaching teachers,
Professor Steinfeld leads and runs SSTP meetings. Her main responsibility is to direct the
meeting and input all of the pertinent documentation into Misis, (a LAUSD student record
database) print the SSTP form, which is distributed to the parent, classroom teacher and placed
into the Cum (cumulative folder). Lastly, Professor Steinfeld prefers the role she is in now in
comparison to begin relegated to as a pull-out teacher, she now has the opportunity to work in
larger detail with the teachers and ensure that reading intervention is made a priority school-
wide.

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