Washington County Adolescent Literacy Project

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Washington County Adolescent Literacy Project
An Adolescent Literacy Project Partnership funded
through the Northeast and Islands Regional
Educational Laboratory at Brown University
(LAB) Project Director Julie Meltzer, Ph.D.,
Center for Resource Management, Inc. (CRM)
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Project Goal and Context

• Project Goal To strengthen and accelerate
  academic literacy development for struggling and
  unmotivated readers and writers in rural high
  schools.

• Project Context
• Five small low-performing rural high schools
• Geographically isolated, economically depressed
• Currently in Year 2 of the intervention/applied
  research study

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Key Intervention Strategies

• Coaching school-based teams to put literacy
  action plans in place in each school
• Providing quality teacher professional
  development in content area reading
• Supporting teacher use of high impact
  research-based literacy strategies across the
  content areas
• Working with regional, state, and university
  partners to provide project support

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Adolescent Literacy Support Framework
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Early Indicators of Project Impact

• Teacher and administrator buy-in literacy seen
  as central instead of marginal
• Substantive widespread use of literacy support
  strategies in classroom teaching across the
  content areas
• Improved student engagement and increased
  completion of reading and writing tasks
• Higher/more common expectations for student work

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Early Indicators of Project Impact

• Positive changes in teacher interactions with
  students
• Positive changes in teacher efforts to make a
  difference for those students with weaker
  literacy habits and skills
• Changes in textbook purchasing patterns, teacher
  lesson planning, and student-choice books linked
  to project

Literacy is not something extra on the plate,
literacy IS the plate.