Read the National Strategy of the Month!

Every strategy in the Network's National Strategy Database is relevant, practical, and user-friendly.

Relevant
We spend our days studying teacher education students, tutors and mentors’ on-the-ground goals and challenges and creating strategies to address those issues.  The Network’s unique features allow us to learn what’s going on between every educator- and mentor-student group we serve and to create specific, step-by-step resources that respond to those realities.

Student teachers, tutors and mentors are key partners.  The passion driving the thousands of educators and mentors we serve leads them to create amazing, one-of-a-kind strategies that you’ll never find in bookstores or curriculum kits.  These strategies inspire and blow us away daily; and they're backed up by the fact that they have already been successfully implemented with students.  The Network captures and distributes those strategies to all Network users, facilitating nationwide educator-educator and mentor-mentor learning.

Practical. User-friendly.
Teacher education students, tutors and mentors screen the strategies we develop to ensure they’re practical and user-friendly.  Every strategy we produce in response to an on-the-ground issue is reviewed by at least one reading or child development expert, and is then read, edited and approved by a group of student teachers, tutors and mentors.  Those reviewers screen the strategies to ensure they are free of educational jargon, make sense to individuals who are not teaching or child development experts, are succinct, engaging, and can be implemented in a variety of environments.

Scientifically-based
We ground these strategies in the best instructional practices around reading and literacy published in current academic journals.  We focus on what works, and are therefore not driven by or tied to any one curriculum, kit or instructional mindset.

Facilitating Direct Instruction
Tutors and mentors have an incredible opportunity to tailor their sessions to their students’ specific needs.  To take advantage of that opportunity, our reading strategies give tutors and mentors the ability to:

• Evaluate students’ needs and determine what should be taught based on those needs;
   

• Listen critically to students’ responses to know how to proceed and at what pace to proceed;
   

• Determine the amount of re-teaching that needs to occur;
   

• Provide opportunities for students and tutors/mentors to dialogue and write about deeper elements of stories and texts; and to
   

• Embed skills and strategy development into authentic learning experiences.

The Best Reading Strategies Are Not Enough
Academic growth happens most effectively when individuals working with students build meaningful relationships with them and have a wide range of interpersonal competencies.  Such competencies include being able to redirect distracted and active students’ energy, acknowledge students’ frustrations, understand and address racial and cultural issues, and facilitate conflict resolution and group cooperation among students and even between themselves and supervisors. 

We address these realities head on, providing the individuals we serve with comprehensive support around social-emotional development and interpersonal issues to help them avoid and overcome obstacles that often stop the teaching, tutoring or mentoring process in its tracks.  Given the breadth of these issues and the care with which they must be approached, we partner with experts in the field to develop many of these resources.  Two of our long standing partners are Peace Games and the Blue Ribbon Mentor-Advocate Program.

Respond to Your Community
Every organization and program we serve is unique in some way.  Perhaps the program works with students on math, art or high school exit exams; or maybe its mentors spend most of their time hanging out with students, taking them to cultural events or preparing for job interviews.  Maybe the program's tutors serve children in foster care or whose parents are incarcerated.  Perhaps the organization's teacher education students have a strong focus on various student assessment methods.

Programs use the Network to build their own program-focused libraries of strategies in any number of topics to best support their educators and mentors.  This way, those individuals working with students not only have access to the hundreds of top-notch resources in the Network's "National Database," but also to strategies designed just for them by their supervisors and colleagues.

Of course, programs using the Network build their local libraries without using e-mail listservs, Web-based bulletin boards or other media most tutors, mentors and student teachers just don’t have time for.