MENLO PARK, CALIF. [July 16, 2019] — Open Up Resources has partnered with Moving Forward Institute to provide a high-quality SEL literacy program called Reading with Relevance for elementary, middle, and high school. The supplemental program is standards-aligned and seamlessly integrates academic literacy instruction with social emotional development.

Reading with Relevance provides easy-to-implement, standards-aligned teacher’s guides for exploring culturally diverse texts, inspiring students’ active participation and authentic engagement, and bolstering their social and emotional skills by igniting their intrinsic motivation to explore meaningful topics that are relevant to their lives.

The program has earned the highest level of CASEL certification and was explicitly created to embed the five SEL competencies into classroom discussion, reflective writing, and creative activities centered around daily reading of culturally relevant and diverse texts. By integrating intentional social/emotional development into every lesson, the program helps learners understand, question, and remake the world around them.

“We’re so excited to partner with Moving Forward Institute to provide Reading with Relevance to students across the country,” said Jessica Reid Sliwerski, CEO of Open Up Resources. “The program is modular so that educators can teach a single title or a series of titles to best serve their students. This flexibility makes Reading with Relevance perfect for book clubs, summer reading programs, a supplemental SEL program, and even as a foundation for a full literacy program. We’re excited to provide not just a stellar SEL literacy program that engages students, but one that has been shown to drive strong student outcomes.”

A recent efficacy study showed that students who used Reading with Relevance improved their academic performance—as measured by the Scholastic Reading Inventory (SRI)—by 48.29% between pre-test means and adjusted post-test means compared to the control group’s improvement of 19.34%.

The program fueling student growth spawned out of educators’ needs to better support students and a massive gap in the market.

“We developed Reading with Relevance with a group of progressive educators on a mission to inspire relevant reading experiences, heartfelt conversations, and instructional breakthroughs in classrooms across the nation,” said Lacy Asbill and Elana Metz, the Founding Directors of Moving Forward Institute. “We couldn’t find the tools we needed to effectively teach students. Most of the young people in our classrooms came in two to four years below their grade level, and with social and emotional struggles that sometimes felt more important than school. It was obvious that meeting students’ social and emotional needs is the key to unlocking their academic potential.”

The program is available today through Open Up Resources with 33 titles spanning grades 2–12. The Moving Forward Institute is authoring additional resources for new titles to expand and enhance the library.

About Open Up Resources

Open Up Resources is a nonprofit improving equity in education by making the highest quality K–12 curricula more accessible to all districts. Open Up Resources partners with the country’s foremost experts to create superb instructional materials, and then equips districts with the support they need to implement with success.