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Professional Learning and Coaching
High-quality professional development (PD) is critical to ensure that all teachers and school leaders have what they need to be successful in their classrooms and schools. Effective PD can change mindsets and build new knowledge and skills necessary to provide students with effective instruction that positively impacts their literacy achievement.
Just like high-quality student learning, adult learning and PD should be intentional and designed to meet the individual needs of educators. PD opportunities should be ongoing, connected, and part of a long-term learning and improvement plan.
Coaching is one of the highest forms of evidenced-based professional development. Job-embedded coaching supports educators as they translate new knowledge and skills into new and/or improved classroom practice. Educators need support as they take new ideas, translate learning into actual practice, and change their own teaching behaviors and practices.
Grades 4-12 Professional Development
Teachers of adolescent students must understand the content they teach, and they must also understand how to support their students regardless of the literacy level the students bring to their classrooms. In other words, teachers must be prepared to support the struggling readers, average readers, and more advanced readers in their classrooms.
Because the challenges and demands of reading increase dramatically in the secondary grades, teachers should understand the developmental nature of reading and should also know how to prepare students appropriately to meet the literacy demands of their age group and grade-level content.
Schools should create a professional learning plan for induction and for continued professional growth. The plan should be created based on student assessment data, as well as based on the individual needs of teachers to build greater capacity to serve the varied needs of the range of readers in their classes.
Leadership at the school level is critical for adolescent reading development. Leaders serving grades 4-12 should be involved in developing all aspects of the program in order to create a system for improving students’ literacy outcomes. School leaders are the lead learners, so they must attend all professional learning sessions that the staff members attend. Building-level leaders should develop their own knowledge of adolescent literacy research in order to build a school culture of literacy where teachers know evidence-based, effective literacy instructional practices and use data to inform improvement.
The National Association of Secondary School Principals (2005) recommends that professional learning should begin with analyzing student data from varied assessment tools, as well as teacher data gathered from tools such as teacher surveys, teacher observations, professional preparation information, and other potential tools. Professional learning needs should be identified by comparing student and teacher needs. The professional learning plan should be consistently evaluated so that it can be revised if student learning doesn’t improve.
The authors of Time to Act: An Agenda for Advancing Adolescent Literacy for College and Career Success define the bare-minimum working knowledge that all middle and high school teachers should possess:
- How literacy demands change with age and grade. Teachers need to understand the developmental nature of reading and know how to prepare students appropriately to meet the literacy demands of their age group and grade-level content.
- How students vary in literacy strengths and needs. Teachers must be equipped to provide differentiated instruction. The variety of students’ skill profiles in adolescence is much greater than in the primary grades, leading to an even greater need for middle and high school teachers who are adept in identifying and addressing the needs of subgroups of students with varying profiles. This increased variety of skill profiles results from the students’ diverse histories as readers and learners, and also from the increasingly diverse demands of the content areas. In addition, teachers also must be sophisticated about language in general so that they can communicate effectively with, assess, and promote in their students the academic and literate language skills they will need throughout life.
- How texts in a given content area raise specific literacy challenges. At a bare minimum, content area teachers should become adept at teaching language, reading, and writing skills and reading comprehension strategies specific to their own content areas. They also need to be able to provide explicit instruction using the release of responsibility model.
- How to recognize and address literacy difficulties. Teachers should know how to recognize when intervention is required and how to provide interventions and accommodations for students with particular reading difficulties. Furthermore, given the specialized knowledge required to meet the needs of some students, it is the responsibility of schools and districts to create mechanisms (e.g., teaching teams, consulting teachers) to support less experienced or less knowledgeable teachers in this process.
- How to adapt and develop teaching skills over time. Much recent research supports the view that the knowledge base requisite for effective adolescent literacy teaching cannot be gained through a single course or series of in-service workshops; rather, a systemic approach to building teacher knowledge and expertise is necessary.
Professional learning will provide opportunities for teachers to move from a novice effective teacher to a highly-effective and strategic teacher. Further, providing effective professional development increases teacher retention. When schools provide the ongoing support that teachers need, then teachers are more likely to stay at the school, which supports consistency in creating a school culture focused on literacy.
Resources
Doing What Works: Adolescent Literacy Professional Development Module
https://wested.ent.box.com/s/i7l3576xyam2ahni4rhc
AdLit101
https://www.adlit.org/adlit-101-overview
IRIS Center: Secondary Reading Instruction Part 1
https://iris.peabody.vanderbilt.edu/module/sec-rdng
IRIS Center: Secondary Reading Instruction Part 2