A Case Study to Explore the Implementation of Read to Be Ready in a Rural Middle Tennessee School District

In 2016, the Tennessee Department of Education launched the Read to be Ready initiative in an effort to reach the goal of 75% of third grade students reading at a proficient level by 2025. The purpose of this study was to describe how Read to be Ready was implemented in one middle Tennessee school district. The participants in this study included a state level reading coach, a district level administrator, two district level reading coaches, one site administrator, and one classroom teacher. Data sources included interviews with each of the participants, observations in a second-grade classroom, and a collection of artifacts from the Tennessee Department of Education and the classroom teacher who was a participant in this study. The research question that guided this study was “How was the Read to be Ready initiative implemented and enacted in a rural middle Tennessee school district?” Insight into the implementation process was revealed through an inductive analysis approach to the data collection. The analysis of the observations and interviews provided themes to assist in answering the research question. The findings from this study may be key in the decision-making process as the implementation moves forward. Several conclusions were drawn based on this study of the implementation of Read to be Ready including: 1) students are spending more time every day reading, writing, talking about and listening to text; 2) classroom teachers are intentionally selecting appropriate texts based on levels of complexity; 3) teachers are intentionally thinking about questioning, vocabulary selection, and writing tasks; and, 4) teachers are developing tasks that challenge students’ thinking. In addition, recommendations for further research have been included