A Bit Like Bungee Jumping

Today's post was contributed by Lisa Weiss.

I am excited and terrified about this year! I have a literacy-focused professional development plan in place for all 6-12 teachers, which I am certain, explains the previous sentence. I’m anxious, in a good way, to see what results from everybody pulling in the same direction, but I am also biting my nails, anticipating what will be challenging for teachers! My blogging plan for the year is to document the good, the bad, and perhaps a few happy accidents, of our laser-like focus on the intentional use of literacy in the service of our contents. Love that phrase...thanks Doug Buehl!

First things first. For a variety of reasons, I wanted to move away from focusing our school improvement goals on reading. The assessment we use as a screening tool is not sensitive enough to measure the incremental growth we are looking for, and at times I think we oversimplify what it means to have a reading focus. In worst-case scenarios we hear things like, It’s not my job to teach them to read, or I assign reading, so I’ve done my part for the school improvement goal. If only it were that easy!

In moving toward a focus on writing, I can:

• set teachers up to elicit meaningful writing from students in their contents
• model how to model the writing we hope for in our content areas, using the gradual release of responsibility
• facilitate sessions where our purpose is to study student writing
• show teachers how to identify strengths in writing, and give feedback that continues to challenge our proficient writers
• demonstrate how to coach students through the areas of writing that are not yet meeting the standards, and
• show the connection between the reciprocal processes of reading and writing, and how we can assess reading through writing!

The original plan was to make sure that each 6-12 building had a minimum of one  literacy-focused professional development session each month, and that is how the plan worked out at the middle schools. The high schools are a different story; the principals had an even more ambitious vision for the frequency of literacy-focused learning sessions! There are  three literacy-focused professional development sessions each month, beginning in November. With dates identified, I was ready to move to the next step: sharing the thinking and the year-long plan (and how this professional development ties to the school improvement goals, and could tie to SLO’s), with the department heads.