Celebrating Accomplishments at the WI

Every child who struggles to read is surrounded by adults who want to help and often don’t know how. That gap is not due to a lack of care but instead is due to a complex web that consists of a lack of resources, time, and expertise. This gap is what The Windward Institute works to close. We do it in three ways: professional development that gives teachers the how behind the research, leadership support that spreads that practice across entire buildings, and family education that turns worry into an informed action plan. We measure success for each of these in the same way, by asking, was a student well served and successful?

As we embark upon a new school year, The Windward Institute has been reflecting on the ways we’ve supported educators, and ultimately the students and families they serve. In the past year, across onsite school partnerships and our workshops, we delivered 6,819 hours of professional learning to 825 educators, each of whom brings that instruction back to a classroom full of readers and writers. Below tells the story of how we helped these accomplishments.

Yearlong Coaching and School Partnerships

Our deepest work happens inside schools. Coaches collaborate with department teams, learn the curriculum a school has already committed to, and build instructional tools into it rather than alongside it. That distinction matters. Many widely adopted core programs do not connect across curriculums and across disciplines. Our coaches spend the appropriate time with each school to close that gap: naming the structures, organizers, and response strategies that support every student.

Feedback is a big part of our partnerships. In our ongoing conversations, teachers have told us that the supporting materials matter as much as the coaching itself. Annotated models and exemplars showed them what proficient student work looks like at their grade level. Templates cut planning time, letting teachers build worksheets and Lit Block materials without starting from scratch. Video walkthroughs meant that a teacher revisiting an organizer during their planning time could watch it taught before teaching it themselves.

Workshops, Courses, and Summer Institutes

Beyond our partner schools, this year we led 35 workshops and multi-session courses that brought educators together from public, charter, and religious schools, as well as independent settings. We also supported a variety or educators. In any given session, we may have special education teachers, general classroom teachers, literacy coordinators, reading specialists, and interventionists sitting side by side, learning with one another.

Throughout the year, we learned a lot about what educators really value in professional development opportunities. Feedback showed repeatedly that educators want to see instruction demonstrated, not just described, requiring live modeling and video lessons to make abstract methodology concrete. They want the reasoning behind the program, not just the procedure, because teachers who understand why a sequence works can adapt it and adjust instruction when a student needs something different. Simply put, educators  want specificity they can use the very next day.

Our Summer Institutes offered what the school year almost never does: depth and time. Across multi-day sessions, participants worked through resources and examples at length and practiced the techniques themselves rather than simply observing them, with colleagues and facilitators there to give timely feedback and collaboratively plan actual lessons participants would teach in the new school year.

Reading Screenings for the Community

Not every family has access to a school that screens for reading difficulty, an important step to identifying and addressing challenges early. Many elementary schools still lack an evidence-based literacy screener, which leaves parents to interpret school reassurances while wrestling with their own mounting concerns. Our community reading screenings exist to close that gap. In a single session, families receive objective, specific data about how their child decodes and comprehends text. Screenings identify which skills are secure, which are shaky, and what that pattern suggests about next steps.

This year, 92 students were screened across three sites, drawing from 37 zip codes and 10 home languages—a reach that says something about how many families are looking for answers and how few have a straightforward place to find them. Delivering this free resource were 31 Windward staff and faculty members, with each screener completing 12 to 15 hours of required professional development before working with a single child. Reliable data depends on trained administration, and we treat that preparation as non-negotiable.

The results of these screenings make the case for why this work matters. Roughly half of the children screened fell below benchmark on core measures: 49 percent on nonsense-word reading, which isolates decoding skill from vocabulary and memorization, and 51 percent on comprehension questions. These are not children whose difficulties had been identified and addressed. They are children whose families would not otherwise have had this information at all.

A screening does not diagnose a child or resolve a reading difficulty on its own, but it converts a vague fear into an actionable picture, and it gives parents language and evidence to bring to their child’s school. Families this year told us the data helped them target foundational skills directly. More than one case confirmed that their children made real progress when taught through a systematic, explicit, multisensory approach. The most common request we received was simply to keep offering these free screenings. We intend to, thanks to the support of The Early Literacy Endowment.

Valuable Feedback

The Institute just received important information from one of our school partnerships that helps us further quantify our impact. Because of our targeted support last year, consisting of close collaboration with school leaders and consistent professional development sessions with each grade team, test scores showed more than 50% of students were meeting expectations. Scores overall showed a 4% increase in ELA. One educator challenged us with a hope for our future work with schools.

“It might be helpful to spread the expertise of The Windward Institute into all content areas in our school: math, science, and electives.“

This educator is right. Reading and writing are needed in every discipline, not just ELA, and the case is easy to make: A lab report demands the same claim-evidence-reasoning structure as a literary analysis, and a short-answer response in science calls for the same strategies students practice in ELA. Skills and strategies are better generalized when there are shared practices in evidence-based instruction. When there is whole-school adoption of the science of literacy, science, math, and elective teachers reinforce the same skills and strategies. The strategy stops being what we do in English and becomes how we plan and deliver instruction in every classroom. For decades, The Windward School has had this mindset and has always trained every teacher in every discipline in this methodology. The Windward Institute advocates for this larger school implementation. 

The People Behind the Work

None of this happens without the people who plan the coaching cycles, build the materials, run the screenings, host the READ Podcast, and show up in classrooms and workshop rooms all year long. Here’s who you’ll be learning alongside.

A Note from Our Acting Director

Marcus Soutra, a leader with more than 20 years of nonprofit leadership experience, stepped into the role of Acting Director of The Windward Institute earlier this year at what he describes as a pivotal moment for both the Institute and the field of education.

“As The Windward School celebrates its 100th anniversary, the Institute has an opportunity to carry a century of evidence-based practice beyond the School’s walls to educators, schools, and families across the country. As someone who is dyslexic, this work is personal. I understand firsthand how transformative it can be when a young person is truly understood and given access to the right instruction and support.”

That conviction shapes how the Institute is growing. Our focus—as we partner with our Advisory Board on strategic planning—is on widening access through professional development, family education, research, and partnerships with public, charter, and independent schools; these efforts center on a single question: What can the WI uniquely do for students, families, and educators nationwide? The numbers above are just one measure of what this team has accomplished this year. What follows in the coming months will build the rest of the story.

To every teacher who tried a new organizer in front of a room full of eighth graders, and every family who showed up for a screening: Thank you. Steady progress happens after much practice. We hope you’ll join us again this year, and we look forward to partnering and learning with you.

Together, we can ensure that every student succeeds.