How it Works

The Collaboratory engages participating teachers at two levels. As members of interdisciplinary school teams, they learn together face-to-face. As members of content-area groups drawn from multiple schools, they also learn together online.

Participants

Each Collaboratory cohort consists of five to seven cross-curricular middle school and/or high school teams. 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. A Collaboratory cohort may include teams from different secondary schools across the United States and its territories, multiple schools within a state, various schools within a district, or several teams from one school. Most cohorts have about 30 participants.

Activities

Through a blend of online and face-to-face activities, team members collaborate with each other and with a literacy expert and content-area coaches to read about, discuss, and experiment with research-based strategies for literacy-rich instruction in the content areas. The process culminates in the creation of a series of lessons, which are observed by team colleagues and videotaped for online feedback and refinement.

Each year-long Collaboratory includes three components:

1. Orientation Institute: 5 days of intensive face-to-face work (July, August or September)
2. Online & Team Interaction: 30 weeks of online coaching and peer discussions integrated with on-site lesson observations and team meetings (September–May)
3. Reflection & Sustainability Planning: 1 full day of online or face-to-face activities with literacy expert, coaches, and Collaboratory manager (May or June)

Learning Materials

The Adolescent Literacy Collaboratory draws on resources for content-area literacy instruction in the Adolescent Literacy section of The Knowledge Loom (http://knowledgeloom.org/adlit), a professional development Web site maintained by The Education Alliance at Brown University. The Knowledge Loom's Web resources are supplemented by readings from recent research on adolescent literacy that are updated annually.

Customized Collaboratories

School-Wide, District-Wide, or Regional
If you are interested in a larger-scale literacy initiative, you can choose a one-year Collaboratory involving at least five teams from the same school, district, or region. The five-day Orientation Institute can be held at your site at a mutually convenient time, if travel/lodging expenses for the facilitators and catering expenses for the participants are covered.

Multi-Year
Schools and districts can choose to participate at any level and for any length of time between one year and three years. Three-year involvement is designed to build capacity within the school or district to conduct its own Adolescent Literacy Collaboratories.

The Three-Year Collaboratory is described below:

Year 1: Five to seven schools (grades 5–12) from no more than three districts will participate. Each school will designate a principal or assistant principal to join the Administrators' Adolescent Literacy Network (AALN) and a five-person interdisciplinary teaching team to join the Collaboratory. AALN members will participate in a 3-day face-to-face institute and a series of online activities during the three years to help them support their faculty's professional growth and to facilitate the development, implementation, and refinement of school literacy plans. Collaboratory team members will learn and use strategies for supporting their students' literacy development in each content area, and will provide outreach on these strategies to non-participating faculty.

Year 2: The AALN will continue with the same membership, and new Collaboratory teams from the same schools will participate. Year 1 members from each district will then be selected to participate in an apprentice coaching and facilitation program through the Collaboratory. The other members will support the work of the Year 2 Collaboratory team and help to lead outreach activities for colleagues outside of the team.

Year 3: Each district will run its own Collaboratory, using the private online environment customized by The Education Alliance, but replacing the Alliance coaches and facilitator with its own newly trained teacher leaders. AALN members will continue to receive support from the Alliance to ensure the smooth operation of their localized versions of the Collaboratory.

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