Stretching between reading sessions are, from left, Daniel Cruz, Misoan Miranda and Lisandra Lorenzo, all age 7, at an English-as-a-second-language class at Robertson Elementary.

CENTRAL FALLS — When Supt. Frances Gallo arrived in Central Falls three years ago, she visited The Learning Community, which, at the time, was the district’s only charter school.

“When I visited, I saw kids who, by lottery, had hit paradise,” Gallo said. “I kept asking, ‘What is it?’ They have the same demographics as us. Their parents are our parents. They don’t turn away special-education students.”

Slowly it dawned on Gallo that The Learning Community, an elementary school that is in its fifth year, had put together all the pieces of a successful school.

“It’s about creating a welcoming environment and fidelity to a curriculum,” Gallo said recently. “It’s about teaching from early in the morning until late at night. And it’s about using your team to pull in a tight circle around your students.”

And so Gallo did what no other public school district in Rhode Island has ever done: she asked a local charter school to train some of her teachers.

In August 2008, Gallo created a pilot program in which instructional coaches from The Learning Community began working closely with teachers at two of the city’s elementary schools, Captain Harold Hunt and Feinstein.

A year later, 86 percent of the kindergarten students at Captain Hunt Elementary School were reading at or above the national benchmark. Each classroom at Hunt made improvements ranging from 20 to 60 percentage points.

This fall, Gallo expanded the program, called the Growing Readers Initiative, to 1,200 students in kindergarten through second grade at all four elementary schools.

Gallo admits that this wasn’t an easy sell. Some teachers resisted the notion that a charter school could tell them anything. Even today, Gallo said, “I can’t say I have the union on board. But our professional educators have embraced the work.”

Some of that work was taking place quietly at the Robertson Elementary School last month. Christine Wiltshire, an instructional coach from The Learning Community, ran a lesson called “Pretend Reading” while the classroom teacher, Cheryl Thurber, watched.

For many years, professional development for teachers took place after school in a big room with a lecturer disseminating information from on high. About 10 years ago, that model began to change on a national level. Now, teacher training often takes place in the classroom, and, in many respects, it mirrors the kind of personal, interactive approach that teachers have taken with their students.

The beauty of this type of training is that it is teacher-to-teacher: instructors share practical tactics that work in real urban classrooms. The instructional coaches from The Learning Community are reading specialists. By comparison, the typical classroom teacher is trained to provide instruction in a variety of subjects but may not have been taught how to teach reading, which is a very specific skill.

As a cluster of second graders sat on the floor, Wiltshire told them, “Smart readers read three different ways. You can picture read, pretend read and read the actual words. Today we’re going to talk about pretend reading.”

With Pretend Reading, students are encouraged to read books even if they don’t know all the actual words. Wiltshire encourages the second graders to use the pictures in the storybook to understand the story. She encouraged the students to read dramatically.

“If there’s a big, bad wolf in your book, you can use a big, scary voice,” she said.

After the lesson ends, Wiltshire and Thurber met in the principal’s office to debrief. This isn’t about pointing out the classroom’s teacher’s faults. It’s about building relationships — and trust — between the coach and the classroom teacher.

During a recent debriefing, Thurber asks most of the questions: Should the students be encouraged to read the actual words during Pretend Read? Should students with similar reading abilities be paired? What kinds of books should I use during Pretend Read?

Wiltshire focuses on the positive. Don’t be afraid to celebrate your students’ successes.

Thurber, who has spent eight years in the classroom, said teacher-to-teacher training has made her a better teacher. She said she likes that each lesson is supposed to teach a specific skill. Instead of being handed a curriculum that spells out the teaching method, teachers in Central Falls are learning effective ways to teach based on lesson plans that have been tested first at The Learning Community.

“Initially, I was nervous,” Thurber said. “Now, I feel comfortable with Christina. I feel like we have a relationship. I know she isn’t judging me.”

The Growing Readers Initiative also trains Central Falls teachers how to analyze test data and use it to decide what each student needs to improve. Students in this program are now tested more often so struggling readers can get help right way.

The district has also created a “reading safety net” that catches students before they fall too far behind. A student may be assigned to a safety net support group for a month, a semester, even a year. This is in addition to the regular classroom.

To Robertson principal Sharon Cabral, the collaboration initially represented a big leap into the unknown. How would her teachers respond to the coaching model? Would they take advice from instructors from outside the district? Would the new reading model produce results?

“My philosophy is our kids are their kids,” Cabral said. “If there is a way to provide better instruction, that’s our job. If we could just get past the notion that charter schools are better …” According to Cabral, it’s not that the charter school teachers are better educators than the ones in the traditional public schools.

“We have excellent teachers and so do they,” she said. “It’s just that the charter has a reading initiative that really works.”

She said the data speaks for itself. “It’s the follow-through that’s different,” she said of The Learning Community. “The kids are constantly moving and changing and we have a net that picks them up.”

lborg@projo.com