Dozens of Newark Public Schools teachers got a crash course in reading instruction Wednesday that, on the surface, looked like a typical training. Seated around tables in the Elliott Street School cafeteria in Newark’s North Ward, the educators underlined key lines in a piece of academic writing — a critical skill for students trying to make sense of a complicated reading. They learned how to gauge the difficulty of a text, which they practiced on a passage from an Edgar Allan Poe story. And they watched a video of a teacher “aggressively monitoring” her students’ reading by asking probing questions and recording their answers.
But this workshop came with a twist: The instructors, materials, and videos were provided by Uncommon Schools, a network of charter schools — schools that are often viewed as district rivals, not partners.
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