Implementation is the word used to describe how well recommended reforms are actually put into practice. Too often, promising reforms that are found effective in small, experimental conditions will fail to have widespread positive effects because of weak implementations. The breakdown in replicating promising reforms is a major problem when teachers are asked to try new and unfamiliar instructional practices in their classrooms, such as requiring high school English teachers, who are trained to teach literature, to also teach reading skills, in which they are not well trained. The research staff from Talent Development High Schools (TDHS) is at the midpoint of a study to evaluate the best ways of supporting teachers to implement the Strategic Reading (SR) approaches from the TDHS model. This study, supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the U.S. Department of Education, will involve 54 high schools over three years. The schools are randomly assigned to one of three experimental conditions designed to support ninth-grade English teachers as they implement the major classroom practices of Strategic Reading.  Schools in the first experimental condition offer teachers intensive workshops to learn the recommended practices for teaching reading. These teachers receive two full days of training at the start of the school year and two full days at the midpoint of the year.
Schools in the second experimental condition have similar workshops and receive complete daily lesson materials with selected texts and discussion guides. Schools in the third experimental condition receive the same workshops and materials, plus weekly visits from well-trained coaches who provide assistance to teachers in their classrooms. Each school is expected to implement the same Strategic Reading classroom approaches, including teacher read-alouds to orally demonstrate effective thinking processes during reading; student team discussions of comprehension questions from shared readings; interactive mini-lessons to prepare students for readings with background knowledge; vocabulary practice, and self-selected independent readings from classroom librarians with follow-up activities. These recommended practices for teaching comprehension strategies and building fluency are quite different from the traditional instructional activities that rely upon teachers’ lectures and student seat work with practice sheets on specific knowledge or component skills. Our preliminary results are showing the need to go beyond workshops alone to help teachers implement these practices, although the relative benefits of lesson materials and coaching are complicated by the particular instructional approach. Data from 36 schools show that using recommended adolescent literacy practices increases as schools move from Condition 1 to Condition 2 to Condition 3, with a corresponding decline in the use of traditional practices. But preliminary data also show that adding daily lesson materials is much more beneficial for student team discussions of literature than for incorporating read-alouds into classroom activities. There is no difference in the effectiveness of read-alouds between Conditions 1 and 2, but in Condition 3, with coaching, the improvement is significant. Providing students and teachers with lesson materials to guide discussions is a significant implementation tool that is further enhanced by coaching,  but only coaching adds to the use of teacher read-alouds. Figure 3 shows the student learning gains on Gates-MacGinitie Reading Tests in 18 first-year schools across the three conditions. Students are gaining relative to national norms in every condition, but there are major additional gains when lesson materials are combined with workshops and further gains when regular coaching is added to the mix. We still have schools to add and much more data to collect, so these are preliminary findings. But so far, the value of additional supports for teachers is evident, especially the added use of well-trained literacy coaches. | 
