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Fenway High School's Literacy Program
Boston, MA
School Type: Public
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School Setting: Urban
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Level: High
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School Design: Small School
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Content Presented By:
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Jobs for the Future
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Fenway High School
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Replication Details
Replication Tips
Larry Myatt, the former director of Fenway High School in Boston, offers the following tip to schools seeking to implement an effective literacy program:
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If a school wants to have a culture of literacy, the administrators and faculty need to work together to determine what it might look like in practice. In developing this vision, it is important that the adults model what they hope students will be doing in classrooms, e.g., writing their vision of a culture of literacy, discussing their visions together, rewriting their visions.
Robin Hennessy, literacy coordinator at Fenway High School, offers these additional tips:
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Teachers must model the desired literate behavior for their students. For example, during DEAR ("Drop Everything and Read") time, teachers should not be sitting at their desks grading papers but should sit with the students and engage in their own reading.
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Teachers should also always model for students how to read a particular text within a particular content area. Reading in each content area requires a specific skill set. Teachers need to make this skill set explicit through modeling.
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There needs to be a wide range of books available to students. I encourage schools to ask students to create a list of books they would
like to see in their classroom libraries.
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Independent reading time must be built into the schedule.
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For teachers of language arts, I recommend any of the Readers'/Writers'
Workshop texts: In the Middle, Nancy Atwell; Time for Meaning, Randy Bomer;
Seeking Diversity, Linda Reif; Reading and Writing Together, Nancy
Steineke; and anything by Lucy McCormick Calkins.
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For teachers in all content areas, I recommend Strategic Learning in the
Content Areas, available from the Wisconsin Department of Education. This
is a good text for an entire teaching staff.
Costs and Funding
The literacy program at Fenway High School requires one full time equivalent (FTE) position for a literacy coordinator and some funding for extra books and resources for the Foundations of Literacy course.
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