A REAL ‘BIGGS’ IDEA

St. Thomas principal develops successful program to boost reading comprehension

Adam Biggs, the principal at St. Thomas the Apostle School in Delmar as well as the eighth-grade English teacher, received his master’s in educational leadership from the Mary Ann Remick Leadership Program at the University of Notre Dame this month. (Photo provided)

Adam Biggs is the principal at St. Thomas the Apostle, but he has also been the eighth-grade English teacher at the school in Delmar for the past four years.

In that time, he has noticed that his students were struggling with reading comprehension and testing below grade level.

“COVID and technology made it worse,” Biggs said. “Students have shorter attention spans and getting them to read is more challenging.”

So Biggs decided to do something about it. 

For the past three summers, he has attended the Mary Ann Remick Leadership Program at the University of Notre Dame, in which he earned his master’s in educational leadership, graduating on July 12. While the program is renowned for forming the next generation of Catholic school leaders by integrating spiritual leadership components with traditional coursework (more on that later), the cornerstone of the program is the Capstone project, which is akin to a thesis. Biggs, focusing on reading comprehension, titled his project “Making Sense of the World: How Engagement and Instruction Transform Informational Text Comprehension.” 

While the title sounds positively academic, Biggs has already put what he has learned into the real world with amazing results. 

“One of the things that we looked at was building engagement strategies in the classroom,” Biggs said. “Looking at our instructional methods, we added word walls to all of our classrooms to build vocabulary.”

The seventh- and eighth-grade St. Thomas students, who were previously struggling to meet grade-level expectations, are now testing at 100 percent on grade level or above after having completed the program.

“Being the principal of a Catholic school is a unique role and it’s a blessing that we have access to degree programs like Notre Dame to better equip our school leaders. I’m proud of what Mr. Biggs has earned and we at St. Thomas the Apostle Parish are honored to have this new credential!” said Father Matthew Duclos, pastor at St. Thomas. “St. Thomas School is such an integral part of our parish and surrounding community. The takeaways he brings with this new degree will undoubtedly help lead us into the 70th year of our school, continuing to bring Jesus Christ into the academic and spiritual lives of our students.”

Biggs, who is going to expand the program at the school to include all elementary and middle-school students for this coming school year, would love to see the program expand beyond St. Thomas.

“I have been working with them all year and we have already made some changes at the school on the project that I was working on and we are going to continue that work, building on the ideas that already had an impact and adding some new ones,” he said.

Biggs also is giving a talk about his work at a Leadership Summit in Syracuse in the coming weeks in which principals from five New York State dioceses will be attending. 

The other part of the degree focused on strengthening Catholic school educators. That was what originally drew Biggs to the program.

“(We) focused on different aspects of leadership,” Biggs said, “How to build your teams, how to build culture and every semester there was a course on spiritual leadership. That was how to grow Catholic identity not only at our schools but also how to grow my own spirituality as a leader. That certainly is what made the program stand out with its focus on Catholic school leadership.”