About

Literacy is a critical factor that affects the ability of middle school and high school students to grasp concepts in math, science, social studies and English/language arts and to articulate their understanding of those concepts. The Adolescent Literacy Collaboratory is a year-long professional development initiative that helps interdisciplinary teams of teachers to support their students' literacy development while improving their content area learning. Through a combination of online and face-to-face collaborative activities, teachers analyze their students' reading assessment data, explore literacy research and resources, experiment with new teaching strategies, and ultimately create a series of literacy-rich lessons in their content area. They also act as "literacy ambassadors" to the rest of the school, sharing the strategies they find most effective and supporting their colleagues in the use of these strategies.

Philosophy

The Collaboratory is not a traditional course. Instead, it is an opportunity for professional learning using a collaborative inquiry process that draws knowledge, experience, and insights from an adolescent literacy expert, online content-area coaches, and Collaboratory participants. It requires adopting what might be a new way of thinking about professional learning—an ongoing commitment among a cohort of colleagues to create knowledge together as they experiment with and reflect on new instructional strategies over a full school year. The structure and content of the Collaboratory draw on established research about effective professional development.

Objectives

The Adolescent Literacy Collaboratory is a year-long, job-embedded professional learning initiative for teams of middle school and high school teachers and literacy or instructional leaders. Each team contains five members: a math, science, social studies, and English/language arts teacher and a team leader. The team leader can be a literacy coach, a professional development coordinator, a curriculum supervisor, an assistant principal for instruction, a library/media specialist, or a department head with a literacy background.

The primary objective for team leaders is to support their team's work throughout the year. The objectives for teachers are to:

• become familiar with recent research on adolescent literacy and with the adolescent literacy resources (teaching strategies, stories, research summaries, and online tools) on The Knowledge Loom web site (http://knowledgeloom.org/adlit)
• learn how to identify their students' specific literacy needs and gauge their progress using local reading assessment data
• develop content-area lessons that incorporate strategies for addressing student literacy needs and improving student engagement
• become reflective practitioners, evaluating the effectiveness of their literacy-focused instruction and considering alternative approaches when necessary
• act as literacy resources for their team members and for others in their schools, both during and after the Collaboratory year

Staff

All online discussions are led by an adolescent literacy expert with extensive teaching experience—and by four coaches. Coaches are experienced classroom teachers from each content area (math, science, social studies, and English/language arts) who have successfully integrated The Knowledge Loom's adolescent literacy principles into their own teaching. Most have completed a course at the University of Maine based on these principles or are former Collaboratory participants. They have many practical ideas to share.

The Collaboratory co-developers and managers, Mary Anne Mather and Allison Brettschneider, are both former K–12 teachers with extensive experience designing professional learning opportunities. Mather, a Program Planning Specialist at The Education Alliance, is also the project manager for The Knowledge Loom and the author of its companion guidebook for professional development facilitators. Brettschneider, Senior Research Associate at the Alliance, is content manager for The Knowledge Loom and also conducts professional development research.

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