AdLit PD & Consulting Summer Institute

Monday, August 4 - Friday August 8, 2014

8:30am - 4:30pm daily

Starting in Summer 2014, AdlitPD and Consulting and HILL for Literacy are partnering to present week-long institutes for middle and high school content-area teachers who want to adopt and adapt strategies for helping teens develop the disciplinary literacy skills emphasized in the Common Core State Standards.

Webinars are available to continue learning after the institute ends so teacher leaders from each school can participate in follow-up professional development to support the extension of this work in their schools. The webinars also provide an opportunity for participants to stay connected and share successes.

Our summer institutes are led by expert instructional coaches who have taught across a range of content areasand who all share a commitment to improving content instruction by paying particular attention to students' literacy needs.Institutes typically focus on the six major elements we have found essential to improving secondary students' literacy and content-area achievement:

• Disciplinary literacy
• Vocabulary
• Discussion
• Multiple texts / text complexity
• Motivation / digital literacy / out-of-school literacies
• Writing-to-learn vs. writing-to-demonstrate knowledge

Particular attention is paid to Common Core connections and structures for continuing the work during the year inprofessional learning communities. Note: Institutes can be taken for professional development or graduate credits.

• Day 1: Identifying Goals & Challenges
• Day 2: Vocabulary
• Day 3: Motivating & Supporting Students
• Day 4: Complex & Multiple Texts
• Day 5: Writing Across the Curriculum & Action Plans

AdLit Summer Institute Faculty:

Jacy Ippolito is an assistant professor in the Adolescent Education and Leadership Department in the School of Education at Salem State University, Salem MA. His research and teaching focus on the intersection of adolescent literacy, literacy coaching, teacher leadership, and school reform. Jacy is specifically interested in the roles that teacher leaders, principals, and literacy coaches play in helping institute and maintain instructional change at middle and high school levels. After completing his doctorate in education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE), Jacy has taught courses on adolescent literacy, school reform, teacher leadership, and literacy coaching at Salem State and at HGSE. Jacy’s writing has appeared most recently in the books Adolescent Literacy (2012),Best Practices of Literacy Leaders (2012) and Essential Questions in Adolescent Literacy (2009), as well as in journals and online publications such as The Elementary School Journal (2010), Texas A&M Corpus Christi’s CEDER Yearbook (2010), the Literacy Coaching Clearinghouse (2009), the Massachusetts Reading Association’s Primer (2009; 2005), the Harvard Educational Review‘s Special Issue on Adolescent Literacy (2008), and the International Reading Association’s Standards for Middle and High School Literacy Coaches (2006). Jacy continues to consult in Boston-area K-12 schools as a licensed reading specialist and literacy coach. Jacy taught in the Cambridge Public Schools for over seven years after earning his master’s degree in education from HGSE and his bachelor’s degree in English and Psychology from the University of Delaware’s Honors Program.

Joshua Lawrence is an assistant professor of language, literacy and technology in the Department of Education, University of California, Irvine. His research focuses on: (1) creating and testing interventions and teaching methods to improve adolescent literacy outcomes and, (2) understanding L1 and L2 language and literacy development. Josh’s experience as a Boston Public School teacher has motivated his interest in children’s language and literacy development. After completing his doctorate at Boston University, Josh completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Harvard Graduate School of Education under the advisement of Catherine Snow. During that time he worked on a quasi-experimental study of the Word Generation program in Boston Schools. The first paper from this study demonstrated that language-minority learners benefited more from program participation than English monolinguals did (published in the Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness). A follow-up study suggested differential impacts for proficient and limited-proficiency language-minority students, and that improvement from program participation were sustained a year after the end of the program (in press at Bilingualism: Language and Cognition).  More recently, Josh has been working on a randomized trial of the Word Generation program funded by the Institute of Educational Sciences (Catherine Snow, PI). Josh is a research associate with the Strategic Educational Research Partnership and committed to leveraging the results of research to build literacy knowledge and improve instruction for struggling students.

Chris Buttimer is currently a doctoral student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE).  His research interests include adolescent literacy, critical pedagogy, instructional coaching, and school reform.  Chris recently completed a master’s degree in Language and Literacy at HGSE, obtaining a K-12 reading specialist license in the process.  Prior to coming to HGSE, Chris earned his master’s degree in teacher education from UMass Boston and taught 7th and 8th grade ELA in the Cambridge (MA) public schools for six years.  In addition to his coursework, Chris has worked with HGSE and the Boston Public Schools (BPS) in a variety of roles, including as an advisor who supported teacher candidates during their teaching practicums.  Chris has also worked as a middle school curriculum developer for BPS through SERP, a non-profit organization linking educators and researchers together to create cross-disciplinary curriculum and improve teaching and learning.

Christina Dobbs is an advanced doctoral student in Human Development and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Her research interests include academic language development, the argumentative writing of students, and writing instruction. She has served as an adjunct instructor at Lesley University, Hunter College, Simmons College, and Salem State University and as a consultant for the Cambridge Public Schools, Boston Public Schools, and Concord School District in New Hampshire. She served as the Manuscripts Editor for the Harvard Educational Review, and she edited a volume titled Humanizing Education: Critical Alternatives to Reform. She is a former high school teacher, literacy coach, and reading specialist.

Jenny Jacobs is currently a doctoral student at Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE). Jenny has focused much of her research and coursework at HGSE on teacher reflection and group inquiry, and facilitating discussions among teachers. Her professional development experiences includes one year working as Academic Director of a K-9 bilingual school in Honduras, where she coached relatively inexperienced teachers, including modeling lessons, facilitating group planning and professional development, and observing lessons and giving feedback. Jenny also spent one year in San Salvador, El Salvador where she designed and implemented the first year of a professional development program from K-6th grade teachers which included the first-ever coaching program in the country. Jenny prepared 30 national-level coaches, and they worked with local universities to introduce the program in 300 schools nationally. Jenny is currently working with Wheelock College to supervise undergraduates doing school-based pre-practicum work with K-2 students as part of their training to teach early reading.