Using Coaches to Improve Adolescent Literacy Instruction: Seminar Descriptions
Literacy Coaching Seminar One:
Progress Monitoring and Matching Students to Text
On April 4, 2008 a group of SEA Literacy Leaders met to learn more about and to discuss how to monitor the progress of secondary students and match them to texts.
In a series of three workshops, tools for differentiating instruction based on student assessments were presented by Dr. Andrea Kotula.
- In the first workshop, participants learned how to create, administer, score, and graph the results of two curriculum-based measures to monitor ongoing progress for adolescents: one for reading comprehension and one for content area knowledge.
- In the second, participants practiced creating, administering, and scoring tests of oral reading accuracy and silent reading comprehension with a specific piece of text.
- The third workshop then identified free or inexpensive tools for estimating the readability of trade-books, textbooks, and electronic text such as primary sources obtained from the Internet; participants practiced using qualitative judgments to fine-tune readability estimates so teachers can match students to appropriate text.
Literacy Coaching Seminar Two:
Improving Literacy Instruction in the Content Areas
Ongoing literacy instruction and development needs to be a key part of the broader effort of improving secondary schools. This seminar, held on May 22, 2008, aimed to assist educators with this by:
- Examining the literacy demands of specific content areas and discussing what literacy skills are unique to each;
- Looking at what teachers need to know about the content areas and what commonalities exist among them; and
- Sharing the research and best practices in secondary literacy coaching being implemented in other states.