UMSL’s full-time literacy team (from left to right) Leslie Hamm, Nancy Singer, Jasmin Easterling, Shea Kerkhoff, Tracy Brosch, Diana Hammond, Katie O’Daniels and Astri Napitupulu will continue its work to provide professional development and literacy tool to Missouri educators. (Photo by August Jennewein)

The University of Missouri–St. Louis is continuing to support literacy education in the St. Louis region with another substantial award from the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.

Co-principal investigators in the College of Education – Shea Kerkhoff, Katie O’Daniels and Nancy Singer – have secured $5.1 million from DESE to continue promoting evidence-based literacy strategies in Missouri schools and to continue creating literacy resources available online.

The funds are part of a larger initiative by the U.S. Department of Education, which awarded 23 state and federal district education organizations sizable grants for its 2024 Comprehensive Literacy State Development program. In total, DESE could potentially receive up to $49 million from the U.S. Department of Education to be distributed statewide over a period of five years.

This recent round of funding supports the second iteration of the CLSD program. In 2020, the U.S. Department of Education awarded funds to 11 states, including a five-year, $18 million grant to Missouri. Kerkhoff, associate professor of literacy; O’Daniels, associate teaching professor of literacy and director of the Gateway Writing Project; and Singer, the interim dean of the College of Education, had also previously secured $5.1 million as part of the first cohort.

The new grant will help UMSL’s co-principal investigators and their collaborators at the University of Missouri–Columbia and the University of Central Missouri to continue and expand their work.

“We will be providing professional learning on ‘literacy that works,’” Kerkhoff explained. “We will be looking at evidence-based literacy, including the science of reading, the science of writing and culturally responsive strategies for instruction, and working with teachers to implement literacy throughout the students’ day.”

The first grant allowed UMSL to build a full-time team dedicated to implementing several projects aimed at educators in St. Louis-area schools. The team includes staff members Tracy Brosch, Diana Hammond and Jasmin Easterling as well as graduate research assistants Leslie Hamm and Astri Napitupulu.

The team plans to build on the strong foundation it has laid over the past several years. UMSL specifically worked with 40 of the 80 K-12 schools that received literacy education services because of the initial funding in 2020. This work has reached approximately 35,000 children in the state, including metropolitan St. Louis as well as the Greenville, Potosi and Williamsville areas.

The multifaceted program offered several avenues for UMSL literacy experts to coach local educators on culturally relevant practices and concepts such as the science of reading – an approach to literacy education that includes explicit phonics instruction, reading practice with varied texts to develop fluency and the development of vocabulary and content knowledge to improve reading comprehension. These professional development opportunities were available in schools, on the UMSL campus and online.

Kerkhoff said a key pathway for teachers has been a professional learning program that focuses on source-based argument writing within different academic areas such as English language arts, science and social studies in grades 4 through 12. The program is run in coordination with the National Writing Project and pulls from the organization’s College, Career and Community Writers Program, which provides teachers with tools for teaching evidence-based argument writing. Teachers participate in online guided learning along with in-person meetings and options for classroom support from the UMSL team.

An analysis on the practice shows that it’s making a difference, even amidst the challenges of remote and blended learning after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We conducted a research study with a pre- and post-assessment on source-based argumentation,” Kerkhoff said. “Our students in Missouri did better than the control group, and they did even better than the previous experimental group in the study that was done before COVID.”

Local educators were also encouraged to participate in the Summer Writing Institute, which has been offered by UMSL’s Gateway Writing Project, part of a network of 175 sites that make up the National Writing Project, since 1978. The intensive clinic is open to educators of all subjects and grades and focuses on the pedagogy and practice of writing. Traditionally, it’s held Monday through Friday over four weeks in the summer, but the team also piloted a yearlong Writing Institute to provide more options to teachers. They were able to choose from a yearlong weekly evening class or a yearlong monthly full-day program with a three-day launch in August.

The team also built a virtual learning community for educators, the Show Me Literacies Community, which is hosted on the Participate platform. The community is free for all Missouri educators to join and features research-based resources on popular topics such as word study, motivation and engagement.

As teachers participate in the various professional learning programs, they develop a network of colleagues across the region, the state and the country. This is an important, but underappreciated aspect of their work, according to O’Daniels.

“We firmly believe that having access to a professional network improves sustainability and well-being in the teaching profession, something that is much needed right now as we continue to face a teaching shortage,” she said.

Going forward, the UMSL team aims to evolve and expand the program. This will include placing a greater focus on secondary schools and career and technical education centers and integrating literacy instruction into more classes.

“We are adding more foundational literacy components and bringing in the career and technical educators as well,” Kerkhoff said. “The first round, we worked mostly with English, science and social studies teachers, although we did have a couple math teachers, a couple health teachers as well. But the biggest focus was English, social studies and science. This round, we’re expanding to include even more teachers, content areas and including some more foundational literacy first and then the source-based argument second.”

Kerkhoff believes the second round of funding, which will allow the team to devote resources to more secondary schools, will be pivotal to improving literacy proficiency in the coming years.

“What we’ve seen in the state of Missouri is that our literacy proficiency has remained stagnant for many years, and then with COVID interrupting education, we actually saw a bit of a dip, using standardized scores to assess that,” she said. “We are starting to see that, because children are resilient and educators have been resolute, they are starting to rebound and the scores are starting to look more like what they had before. But we don’t want stagnation, and we want to be continuously improving education so that our students are continuously making the best possible strides that they can.

“We know that what works for some students doesn’t work for every student. While some students pick up the knowledge and skills that they need for reading and writing in early grades and then they’re set, other students continue to need support for those foundational skills. All students need to be able to access the more complex texts that we find in middle school and high school.”

DESE will soon be opening applications for public and charter schools to become part of the 80 schools selected to participate in the second round. A review team will choose approximately 40 elementary schools and 40 secondary schools and area career centers. Up to 20 early learning programs will also be selected to participate.

“This grant illustrates DESE’s trust in UMSL’s knowledge of research-based literacy practices and our ability to deliver programming that improves education for children in our state,” Singer said.

Kerkhoff and her colleagues are excited they will be able to continue their vital work in the community.

“It’s like I’m going to Disney World – that’s the feeling,” she said. “As a collaborative team, we got $18 million for the first round and now potentially $49 million. That’s $67 million of resources for education that we’ve been able to bring to the state. It’s just remarkable.”