AdLit PD & Consulting Summer Institute

Monday, July 21 - Friday July 25, 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:

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.