Teachers’ New Learning – Teacher participants embraced new instructional strategies with their struggling students. The growth in the teachers’ mindsets, beliefs and practices was evident. Teachers appreciated that formative feedback during a lesson was helpful for students’ immediate improvement. Other new learnings included the realization that reading and writing do not go hand and hand in English assessment. Independent and guided reading pedagogies, matching tasks and texts to learners’ needs were also new learnings.

Students’ Success and Accountability – Students in applied and locally developed English classes were using metacognitive language and were aware of how they were becoming active listeners. Students were more engaged in tasks, returning to texts for answers, asking questions of the text, seeking help, using strategies to increase their reading time and managing their own time.

Teachers’ Reflections and Concerns – An abundance of meaningful teacher reflection occurred through probing and good questioning from the coaches. Teachers discussed strategies for grouping students and encouraging self-regulation. Some teachers expressed concern about covering all aspects of the curriculum. Coaches encouraged teachers to articulate their change in practice and intentions to spread and build capacity.

Teacher Engagement – Coaches encouraged an environment of trust and all teachers were supportive of one another. They were all engaged in the professional learning process.

Coaching Role – Coaches were extremely skilled in eliciting responses, keeping teacher participants on task, asking questions to elicit critical thinking and encouraging teachers to ground their practices on students’ needs.

Emphasis on Assessment to Inform Instruction – The facilitators emphasized strategies for teachers to use to align assessment with differentiated instruction with their struggling readers. Teachers were encouraged to consider assessment as they were engaging with lesson planning resources. It took teachers some time to recognize how to integrate assessment into their regular practice.

Enhanced Instructional Strategies – Facilitated sessions included professional discussions on utilizing students’ prior knowledge to inform appropriate learning activities.  Teachers were encouraged to explicitly articulate clear learning goals to students and select resources to supplement these goals. They were challenged to consider ways of individualizing scaffolding to promote student learning.

Cross-Curricular Connections – A novel consideration for secondary teachers whose subject areas included English, Math, Science, and/or Geography, was the importance of including disciplinary literacy strategies in their teaching. They were aware that their struggling readers encountered challenges in content areas related to literacy, but found it challenging to teach students to infer across disciplines. The professional learning facilitators saw the need to address this with struggling students, however, teachers were on a more rudimentary level of delivering skill-based reading instruction.

Knowing the Resilient Reader – Teachers began to appreciate the common challenges that their students were facing related to literacy learning. They recognized the inherent stigma of students being labeled as resilient or struggling readers, adjusted student groups, and set goals to reinforce students’ perseverance and increase their self-regulation in learning. The teachers built into their lessons, applications of text to real-life situations, so that students could see value in learning activities that were difficult.

Working with Teachers’ Beliefs and Self-Efficacy – The professional learning facilitators began working with teachers’ personal biases in utilizing and prioritizing particular resources. The professional learning facilitators worked to build comfort among the teacher participants, such that they would value the learning community. There was continuous validation and building on individual teachers’ responses during the sessions. Consequently, teacher participants’ own confidence to engage students grew.

Elasticity of a Professional Learning Program – An operational barrier to school boards’ programs of professional learning was the lack of occasional teachers available to cover classes during planned teacher release time to attend group sessions. This resulted in very few formalized professional learning sessions. Of the formalized sessions, teachers expressed a need for defined structures of these opportunities with regular follow-up by a coach/facilitator. The professional learning facilitators were also aware that effective support is relationship-based, invested, and included engagement, provocation, reflection, and collaboration.