What Is Your Role?

The ultimate goal of every elementary school teacher should be to ensure that every student reaches high levels of literacy.

You can achieve this goal by:

• instilling in your students a lifelong love of reading and writing
• building a community of learners in which students feel safe and are comfortable taking risks
• delivering a balanced literacy program that is relevant to your students’ lives
• building strong home-school-community connections
• ensuring that ongoing, equitable assessment drives your instruction
• ensuring that talk is the foundation of all literacy activities
• building on your students’ unique identities and diverse experiences to ensure that they are motivated and actively engaged in their learning
• building critical-thinking and critical-literacy skills into your program so that students will become active and responsible citizens
• participating with your colleagues as an active member of a professional learning community