What are the responsibilities and job description for the Reading Specialist - Creekside Primary School position at Alabama State Department of Education?
“Focused on Quality: Committed to Excellence.”
Job Title : READING SPECIALIST
Supervised by/Reports to : Principal
FLSA Status : Exempt
Job Goals :
Qualifications :
- Bachelors Degree in Early Childhood or Elementary Education and/or Reading Specialist Degree.
- Teaching experience in an elementary setting preferably in grades K-3 and additional training in reading and/or Reading Specialist degree or certification.
- Completed (or will complete) the Alabama Reading Initiative K-3 Module Training.
Performance Responsibilities and Essential Functions :
Teaching Struggling Readers
- Demonstrates high level of skill to accelerate the learning of struggling readers.
- Work with struggling students: determine interference.
- Promotes specialized reading instruction in which struggling readers thrive: instruction that is explicit, intensive, accelerated, and provides ample practice.
- Monitor and analyze student progress and assessment data in ways that informs teaching and motivates learners.
- Creates practices that motivates struggling readers and rewards their progress.
Ensuring Ongoing Professional Development
- Spend at least 50% of time coaching.
- Facilitate professional development at schools: structures professional activities that are research-based, ongoing, coordinated, and responsive to student needs revealed by data (e.g., workshops, book studies, classroom coaching)
- Become an expert in SBRR (Scientific-based Reading Research) programs and instructions to help teachers select materials and instructional strategies that fit students’ needs.
- Models research-based instructional procedures and helps teachers implement these procedures.
- Provides teachers with feedback and coaching that impacts student learning.
- Organizes professional materials to enhance a system of ongoing learning.
- Assists teachers in overcoming problems they encounter in their classrooms.
- Models ongoing learning (e.g., participates in self-reflections or teaching; reads professionally; participates in professional meetings; stays current with national, state, and local initiatives.)
- Lead grade-level meetings in which instruction is planned and adjusted.
Influencing School Climate and School-wide Commitment to 100% Literacy
- Exhibit winsome human relations.
- Collaborates effectively with faculty and administrators on a professional basis to achieve literacy improvement in their schools.
- Nurtures supportive, respectful behavior in all interactions among adults in the school.
- Influences school-wide procedures and practices that prompt proficient reading for all students.
- Provides an essential link among teachers on a grade level or within a department; across grade levels and across departments; and between faculty and administrators.
- Builds collaborative, professional relationships among administrators, faculty, and staff.
- Adhere consistently to an approved schedule.
- Be the hardest working individual in the building.
Partners with the principal to:
- Motivate teachers to achieve 100% literacy.
- Arrange for the organizational features needed to increase the achievement of struggling readers: more time with more highly skilled teachers and flexible/varied grouping.
- Coordinate across instructional settings the instruction provided to struggling readers (e.g., intervention teacher collaborating with classroom teacher).
- Create an environment in which all adults in the school know the struggling readers by name and collaborate in increasing their reading achievement.
- Facilitate a school-wide commitment to reach all readers at their individual level.
- Identify teachers’ strengths and areas for improvement based on student performance data and classroom observations.
- Ensures that research-based literacy strategies are implemented effectively in classrooms.
- Organize literacy leadership teams that review assessment data and develop literacy plans for the school.
- Organize (with the principal) a K-3 intervention effort.
- Report the progress of the ARI Literacy Site to the State Department of Education.
Partners with the curriculum director to:
- Make available student materials that ensure students read at their instructional reading level throughout the school day.
- Organize and make accessible instructional materials (e.g., leveled text, electronic sources, and content-related texts).
- Work closely with teachers and administrators helping them to understand the system’s literacy program and their roles in it at the local school.
- Align reading standards, instruction, and measures of learning.
- Select reading programs based on their compatibility with scientific-based reading research.
- Participate in all ARI reading coach trainings both state and district meetings.
- Facilitate and/or participate in professional development for literacy.
- Performs other job-related duties as assigned by Supervisor(s).
Physical Demands :
While performing the duties of this job, the employee is regularly required to sit, stand, walk and use hands to finger, to handle, or feel objects, equipment, or controls. The employee frequently is required to talk and hear. The employee is occasionally required to reach with hands and arms, climb stairs, bend, stoop, squat, crouch and kneel. The employee must occasionally lift, push, pull carry and/or move up to 50 pounds. Specific vision abilities required by this job include near vision, distance vision, peripheral
vision, depth perception and the ability to adjust focus.
Salary : Salary to be established by The Limestone County School’s District Salary Schedule.
Terms of Employment : 202 days
AEA Approved: 6/10/2025
Board Approved: 6/10/2025
The statements included in this description are not intended to be representative of the duties and responsibilities of this job. They are not to be interpreted as being all-inclusive. The employee may be assigned other duties that are not specifically included in this job description.
LIMESTONE COUNTY BOARD OF EDUCATION IS AN EQUAL OPPORTUNITY EMPLOYER