Suggested Strategies and Resources
There must be a concerted coordinated effort to support literacy achievement. Connections to the overall educational program must be designed into the overall initiative from the beginning. Strategies to do this include: 1) use student performance indicators to ensure flexible placement and the matching of support resources most accurately with need, 2) develop the initiative so that many levels of student achievement can be simultaneously accommodated within the same classrooms, 3)
reevaluate specialized staffing and use personnel differently to target specific goals, 4) have content area literacy be focused upon at all levels and in all subject area classes, 5) bundle resources so students receive intensive intervention which also places them in authentic service roles vis-à-vis the general community (e.g., remedial reading and writing students tutor younger children in reading; ESL students write a parent newsletter), and 6) deliberately infuse arts-based literacy support at different points throughout a student's educational experience (see, for example, http://artslit.org).
However organized, adolescent literacy development must be ongoing and part of a standards-based curriculum. For some examples of
how this might look at the high school level, see http://mcsd.org/Report_files/secondary.pdf and http://madison.k12.wi.us/tnl/langarts/hsread.htm#commitment and http://cela.albany.edu/eie1/main.html.
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Questions to Think About
Before you can implement this Key Component, your stakeholders will need to consider some or all of these questions. The questions could be used in group discussions, needs sensing activities, and informal small-group conversations.
- Is this best practice already in place in your organization (see practice listed at the top of the page)? What would it take to put this into place?
- Are there other key support structures that you would see as essential to the success of an adolescent literacy initiative?
- What do you see as the most important goals of an adolescent literacy initiative in your school or district? What are the most
pressing literacy problems? How do you feel these would best be addressed within the context of your educational program?
- What kinds of professional development do you feel would be most helpful to teachers?
- How do you think an adolescent literacy initiative in the content areas could best be promoted in your district? How would you strategize to get teacher support? Parent support? Student support? Community support?
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