Innovation Video Series, Episode 9—No Band-Aids

• July 24, 2015

Martha Ann Todd knows her way around a classroom. She’s been a principal and a teacher, participating in the academic development of every grade level, from kindergarteners to high school seniors. Great qualifications for a leader of a program like Governor Deal’s Reading Mentors. As executive director of the Governor’s Office of Student Achievement, Todd implements this ground-level, practical approach to improving reading results in areas of the state where improvement is needed most.

Highly skilled mentors are further trained and paired with schools to focus on the basic building blocks of reading instruction, including phonemic awareness, fluency, vocabulary development, word recognition, and reading comprehension.

“This is not a Band-Aid,” Todd tells us about GOSA’s work. “It is a capacity-building program to help schools, classrooms, and teachers build up their instructional abilities.”

The long-term social problems associated with not reading on grade-level are almost too complicated to fix after they’ve already occurred. That’s why the Governor’s Office of Student Achievement is tackling this on the front-end, with a dedicated and effective hands-on way to build teachers’ abilities, and students’ confidence.

Then go back to hear Episode 8, about Florida’s no-excuses approach in the classroom.