Literacy Learning (NZ) Ltd professional development is founded in strong beliefs that a long term, responsive, site-based and schoolwide approach brings about the most enduring changes and improvements in teaching, learning and ultimately student achievement.

The following workshop modules comprise key components for improving literacy instruction with an emphasis of the benefits of taking a schoolwide approach.  Each can stand alone as a professional development focus, but all are integral and interdependent one with the other within the big picture of school leadership and improvement.

Our goal is to help principals and teachers pool their strengths, vision and expertise to establish self-sustaining and self-managed school-wide systems that support effective instructional delivery to all children.

All workshops within the individual modules can be intermingled.  All can be adapted, specialized and extended to meet specific training requirements within a district or school-based setting. All workshops are designed to support instruction in classrooms for English and E.L.L learners. Strategies apply in bilingual education settings.

Getting started: Contact Leanna Traill to discuss your goals and develop a clear focus and agreement on aims and objectives for professional development.

Having established the focus and selected a module, the training is in-depth and on going; i.e. consultants work on-site with principals and staff, three times per year, for a negotiated number of days per visit.

If we can help you achieve your goals, please contact leanna@literacy.co.nz

In-depth workshop modules

1. Building Schoolwide Vision

Specific Objective: To give literacy for every child a high profile; to motivate principals and teachers to think critically about current and potential instructional programs, and to plan strategically for change.

Focus: Establishing a cohesive and balanced schoolwide approach towards literacy instruction – laying the foundations for change.

Dialogue includes: -

• Research on change and school improvement

• Philosophy and vision for change

• Barriers to teaching and learning

• Theory of language and learning

• Managing and monitoring change

• Deciding on a focus 

• Surveying current practices

• Action plan – time line for year one

• Evaluation

2.      The Integrated Curriculum – Contextualized instruction

Specific Objective: To establish an effective long-term curriculum plan with full curriculum coverage which is vertically as well as horizontally integrated, and which includes district and state benchmarks and standards.

Focus: To collaborate, and co-operate, in the preparation of a strategic schoolwide plan and in the preparation of topic-unit plans, including strategies for ensuring the school’s curriculum plan is implemented effectively at all grade levels.

Dialogue includes: -  

• The modes of language – oral, written, visual

• Inquiry based learning – research processes

• Interactive teaching models

• Curriculum Planning: - Long term – year long overview, Medium term – units of work based on the long term plan, Short term – in-class teaching plans that translate the long and medium plans into weekly and daily schedules

• The genre based curriculum cycle

• Structures, forms and features of text genres

• Reading to write and writing to read – specific strategies

• Monitoring planning, implementation and student achievement

3. Reading & Writing Connections – Key teaching approaches

Specific objective: To enhance teacher knowledge and teaching skills and develop consistency and efficacy of teaching approaches/strategies and learning activities classrooms schoolwide.

Focus: To reflect on, examine and ‘unpack’ current teaching practices, to build a common knowledge base and to plan and apply research based effective instructional strategies.

Dialogue includes: -

• Research - developing effective readers and writers

• Research - differences between spoken and written language

• Research - oral language development

• The reading and writing processes

• Defining key teaching approaches – shared, guided, independent

• Narrative and expository texts - structures, features, purposes

• Selecting and unpacking texts to plan instruction comprehension - questioning strategies

• Comprehension – graphic organizers

• Assessment

4. Management & Organization – Schoolwide and/or classroom

Specific objective: To organize teaching and learning resources to ensure flexibility and differentiation of instruction, and to support the philosophy of child centered environments - the emotional, social, intellectual and physical contexts of learning – and make these evident, consistent and expected, schoolwide.

Focus: To examine classroom management strategies that work and explore ideas for building consistent organizational management practices across a school, both from the classroom teachers’ and instructional leaders’ perspectives.

Dialogue includes: -

• Emotional environment – creating tone and relationships

• Social environment – creating systems of order, collaboration, co-operation, peer-coaching, inter-class and home communications

• Intellectual environment – curriculum planning, instructional planning and implementation, monitoring and assessments

• Physical environment – materials, resources, centers, displays – centralized in the building – classroom ideas

• Selecting and unpacking texts and planning lessons

• Monitoring schoolwide consistency

5. Assessment and Evaluation

Specific objective: To develop a schoolwide policy and approach to assessment and evaluation: this includes setting clear expectations for forms, frequency and analysis of records, use of information in shaping instructional decisions, identifying and analyzing barriers to learning and developing strategies to overcome them.

Focus: To examine the elements of a schoolwide policy on assessment and evaluation and to 'upskill' teachers in observing, recording and analyzing learning behaviors and developing assessments that are responsive to identified learning outcomes.

Dialogue includes: -

• Assessment and evaluation – beliefs and purposes

• The evaluation process

• Record keeping procedures – consistent procedures for all

• Scheduling assessments – formal grade level and schoolwide

• Forms of informal assessments – what, when, why?

• Self assessments

• Keeping student profiles

• Reporting to families

• Building schoolwide rubrics and transferring information

SPECIALIZED SKILLS WORKSHOPS 

Grade level, inter-grade level, school based initiatives, district cadres. Single or multiple day duration – as requested. Available by arrangement during Fall, Winter and Spring.

Topics are organized under main heading. Each bulleted topic can be targeted individually. 

Integrated Curriculum – Contextualized instruction

• Oral, written, visual language – differences between, purposes for, implications for intentional instruction

• Inquiry learning – research process

• Unpacking narrative and expository texts and planning for instruction

• Graphic organizers – comprehension ideas

Key Teaching Approaches – Learning to… and Learning from…

• The reading and writing processes – reading writing connections

• Shared reading and shared writing across the curriculum

• Guided reading and guided writing across the curriculum

• Selecting and unpacking texts for instruction

• Book/text introductions – implications for E.L.L.

• Questioning strategies for comprehension – literal, inferential, evaluative

Classroom Management and Organization

• Setting up an engaging reading and writing classroom environment

• What to do with the others – learning centers, engaging activities

• Responses to texts – graphic organizers, publishing ideas

• Curriculum planning – long term, mid term, short term

• Flexible grouping and differentiated instruction

• Planning an effective literacy block

Assessment & Evaluation

• Learning running records – for beginners

• Using running records – analyzing and using the information effectively

• Analysis of writing and spelling

• Monitoring writing and spelling development

• Self assessments

• Assessments of learning outcomes from content area units of work

Schoolwide Workshops: - Workshops to support schoolwide goals for building consistency of philosophy, understandings, expectations, instructional practices, materials and resources and assessments.

• Curriculum planning – long, medium and short term.

• Building consistent writing and spelling systems

• Building consistent understandings about text selection, text analysis, text deconstruction, reading writing connections

• Building consistent reading systems

• Developing centralized resource and materials rooms

• Developing an oral language development scheme of work

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