Benchmark Education Provides New York City Schools Common Core Support with Early Childhood Literacy Professional Development

NEW ROCHELLE, NY, Oct. 28, 2014— Literacy specialist Benchmark Education Company announced today that it is providing a series of professional development sessions to over 2,000 New York City Early Childhood teachers. The first “Early Childhood Language and Literacy” sessions took place last week in Brooklyn and Staten Island. More trainings are scheduled in the Manhattan, Bronx and Queens boroughs starting in November and January.

Training supports the city’s educators to address the needs of diverse learners to achieve Kindergarten Readiness based on the NYC preschool foundation for the Common Core State Standards. The series is sponsored by The Division of Early Childhood and is free to teachers and members of community-based organizations who would like to attend.

Benchmark Education’s professional development focuses on using interactive read alouds to engage all young learners and build their literacy foundations. Reading aloud to students daily helps teachers to achieve the outcomes outlined in the New York State preschool foundation for the Common Core. Strategies enable educators to support the range of students in a given classroom—low-performing or high-performing students, atypically developing learners, English language learners, and students with disabilities. Strategies for engaging parents in reading to their children at home are also addressed.

“It is an exciting opportunity to work with New York City Schools in helping teachers improve strategies for preparing early learning students for success in literacy through our professional development series,” said Tom Reycraft Benchmark Education President. “Our training series is valuable to the school district because the early childhood classes are the first step in building the foundation for learning in primary and secondary grades.”

Each session includes content presentations, modeling/demonstration lessons, and hands-on experience to support proper implementation of interactive read alouds in the Kindergarten readiness classroom. The professional development sessions are designed for all instructional staff, including teachers, coaches and administrators.

Trainers model with fiction and nonfiction read alouds, and they share strategies for setting up classroom environments to promote language and literacy growth. Technology is integrated in order to meet the needs of all students present in the classroom. These strategies are aligned with the NYS Common Core Learning standards, and the national professional development standards for adult learning. Teachers are given read aloud classics and a subscription to over 250 digital texts published by Benchmark Education to help implement strategies learned in the training. For information, visit www.benchmarkeducation.com or call 877-236-2465.

ABOUT BENCHMARK EDUCATION COMPANY

Benchmark Education has provided Professional Development and training services to all levels of educators since the founding of the company in 1998. The company’s PD division focuses on creating systematic change by providing ongoing teacher training in literacy development, differentiated instruction, English language acquisition, and the Gradual Release of Responsibility instructional model. It addresses effective Response-to-Intervention strategies, developing content-area concepts, metacognition, and successful comprehensive literacy instruction, based on careful observation of student’s reading, writing, language proficiency stages, and learning behaviors. Benchmark Education’s Professional Development has resulted not only in students showing significant achievement gains, but also in eliminating achievement gaps for at-risk populations in research studies.