Improving Literacy Achievement in a High-Poverty School: Empowering Classroom Teachers Through Professional Development

For the past decade, governments around the world have put an unprecedented focus on educational policy, to ensure the acquisition of literacy skills for all students (e.g., No Child Left Behind in the United States; the National Literacy Strategy in the United Kingdom; Delivering Equality of Opportunity in Schools in Ireland). Such initiatives often reflect efforts to narrow the achievement gap between students in high-poverty schools and their more affluent peers, as many students in these schools perform below their potential. Although the goal of closing the achievement gap, on a national level at least, has remained an elusive one, some schools have managed to "beat the odds" and have succeeded in helping the majority of their students to perform well in relation to literacy, despite the demographics of the students attending school. In this study, the author, a teacher-educator, collaborated with a high-poverty school to address the complex problem of underachievement in literacy.