Literacy Program Adoption and Teacher Change: Understanding the Conditions that Promote Teacher Investment in an Instructional Mandate

In an effort to reverse an ongoing trend of stagnant literacy proficiency rates for students, federal and state governments have developed laws to codify approaches for literacy instruction based on The Science of Reading, including The Virginia Literacy Act (Bechtold et al., n.d.). School divisions, such as Mountain Valley Public Schools (MVPS), a medium-sized Central Virginia public school system, were required by this act to adopt approved literacy resources aligned to this research (Virginia Literacy Act | Virginia Department of Education, n.d.). The MVPS School Board adopted HMH Into Reading as their primary English Language Arts instructional resource, although teacher use of their prior reading resource was scattered and inconsistent. A neighboring public-school division, Ridgetop Public Schools (RPS), had been utilizing the HMH program for several years, and employed teachers who successfully changed their literacy instructional practices to align with the requirements within HMH. Through a descriptive case study, I interviewed three of these teachers and three RPS literacy change leaders, and conducted document analyses, to identify themes that I then used to form recommendations for the MVPS roll-out. Findings suggested that supportive conditions that ultimately contributed to program implementation included: 1) addressing the substantial breadth of the program’s requirements, 2) clearly communicating program expectations through coaching and training, and 3) providing opportunities for teacher agency. These findings informed recommendations that support the MVPS adoption of the HMH Into Reading program.