Ms. Taylor explains why the Orange County Literacy Project, a program for middle school students struggling with literacy, was highly successful with both students and staff members. TEACHING STUDENTS who arrive at middle school and either can't or won't read presents a serious challenge for teachers and administrators, and there is certainly no easy fix, no one solution. While we expect students to learn to read in elementary school, we know that many students do not read well when they enter middle and high schools. Our secondary teachers - well trained in the developmental needs of adolescents - generally lack the knowledge and experience to help their charges develop skills. In 1993, while I served as director of secondary education in the Orange County (Florida) Public Schools, I had an opportunity to lead a task force to develop a intervention program for middle school students. With the support of school-based, district-level, and university experts, we designed the Orange County Literacy Project, a research-based intervention for our middle school students who were struggling with literacy. We defined literacy as reading, writing, speaking, listening, viewing, and thinking. With the support of Janet Allen, then of the University of Central Florida, and Ted Hasselbring, then at Vanderbilt University and now at the University of Kentucky, we designed a 90-minute block that replaced language arts and one exploratory or elective class. During the block, the participating students had whole-group instruction that included read-alouds, shared reading, and direct instruction in reading, writing, listening, speaking, and grammar. Following the whole-group instruction, the class divided into three smaller groups and rotated through a sequence of independent reading, instructional reading via the Peabody Learning Lab, and small-group work with the teacher. Each block concluded with whole-group instruction that included shared reading, read-alouds, daily evaluation, and celebrations of the day. For the remainder of the school day, the students attended regular classes with their heterogeneous teams. Staff Development Design From this brief overview, most readers will have surmised that our secondary teachers wouldn't have had much training or experience for this type of setting - one that required them, in addition to giving reading and writing instruction, to manage stations and rotations, match students to text, and use technological tools. And most readers would be right. So we considered what kind of staff development the teachers, the technology support staff, and the administrators would need. The district had already committed funds for staff development that would include teachers and administrators, and we decided that the alignment of the instructional design, materials, and staff development would be critical to the success of the project. Knowing that one-shot staff development would not help in such a complicated situation, we developed a multi-year plan. Our plan focused on the problems of intervention that were specific to the students, teachers, technology support staff, and principals directly involved with the project. However, we also knew that, if the project proved successful, it could rapidly expand to other schools and even other levels. That would mean that the teachers and principals from the original sites would have to become the learning leaders for the expansion. During the first summer of staff development, we relied on our expert colleagues to help with the development of content and process expertise for the teachers and principals, as well as with the training in the use of the project software. Moreover, the district had committed itself to support teachers through follow-up coaching in class during the school year. …
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Apr 1, 2012
Cynthia F Dicarlo + 4
Open Access