SCHOOL BASED INITIATIVES

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.

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

The following workshop modules comprise five key components for improving literacy instruction taking a schoolwide approach.  Each can stand alone as a focussed school based initiative, and all are integral and interdependent one with the other within the big picture of school leadership and improvement.

All workshops within the individual modules can be transferred and intermingled.  All can be adapted, specialized and extended to meet specific training requirements within a school-based setting.

Literacy Learning (NZ) Ltd consultants collaborate with school leadership teams to plan a course of action. Consultants act as critical professional partners, facilitating training that is on going, on-site, responsive and focussed on helping principals and teachers ‘work smarter not harder.’

Module 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: -

•          Reflection and discussion about current practices – baseline information

•          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

Module 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: -  

•          Reflection and discussion about current practices – baseline information

•          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

•          Building systems for consistency across the school                     

Module 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 effective research based instructional strategies.

Dialogue includes: -

•          Reflections and discussion about current practices – baseline information

•          Research - Developing effective readers and writers

•          Research - Differences between spoken and written language

•          Research - Oral language development

•          The reading & 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

•          Reading & writing connections

•          Assessment – record keeping procedures

•          Building consistency across the school

Module 4: Management & Organization – Schoolwide and 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, publishing and displays, furniture, author’s toolboxes, centralized book room,

•          Selecting and unpacking texts and planning lessons

•          Building and monitoring schoolwide consistency

Module 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: -

•          Reflections and discussion about current practices

•          Assessment & 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

 Each module is in itself a major schoolwide initiative.

For further enquiries please contact Leanna Traill

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