CTL Adolescent Literacy Model

Introduction

CTL’s Adolescent Literacy Model is a school-wide comprehensive professional development model for middle and high schools. It provides training, coaching, strategies, tools, and processes to address the global and specific literacy improvement needs in schools today. It has been developed over ten years, and has been tested through two external research projects, where it has been shown to have a positive impact on teacher practice, teacher and student self-efficacy, and student performance.

CTL’s Adolescent Literacy Model is designed for customized implementation. Specific components of the Model are combined to address the targeted needs of the school. The process of customization and ongoing formative assessment for program refinement is a co-constructed process, involving school stakeholders at all levels.
 

Components of the Model

The model includes specific sets of professional development, tools and strategies for:

• Classroom literacy integration across all disciplines;
• Coaching development and support; and
• Leadership development and support.

Classroom Literacy Integration Across All Disciplines

This model component focuses directly on improving the instructional practice of teachers, including:

• Multi-day professional development institutes
• Discipline-specific training sessions
• Needs-based customized training sessions
• Literacy technologies training sessions
• A core set of strategies and tools for vocabulary development, reading comprehension, writing-to-learn, academic dialogue, and writing for publication
• Integration of Web 2.0 literacy applications and classroom instructional hardware
• Teacher planning tools for literacy integration
• Self-assessment tools for teachers
• Evidence gathering and reflection protocols

Coaching Development and Support

This model component focuses directly providing coaching support to implementing teachers and/or to develop literacy coaches at the local level, including:

• On-site coaching for full faculties, departments, and individual teachers
• Distance coaching, applying various technologies
• Comprehensive coaching development training sessions, designed to certify literacy coaches (based on the IRA standards for Secondary Literacy Coaches)
• Content-specific coaching training
• Classroom observation tools
• School walk-through tools
• Coaching planning tools and resources

Leadership Development and Support

This model component focuses on developing a distributed leadership model in participating schools, including:

• The Adolescent Literacy School Performance Guide, to formatively assess and plan to meet ongoing school program needs
• Administrative Leadership professional development series
• Teacher Leadership Team professional development series
• Various administrative and teacher leadership planning and self-assessment tools

CTL Support

As schools implement the comprehensive ALM model, applying customized components, CTL provides specific support to meet individual school needs, including the following:

• Co-construction of customized school programs
• Training for full faculties
• Training for administrators and leadership teams
• Training and certifying local-level middle and high school literacy coaches
• Coaching teachers and local-level coaches, at a level that is consistent with ongoing school needs
• Providing project leadership for planning, evidence gathering, and trouble-shooting
• Gathering and providing formative and summative evidence of implementation
• Advising implementing schools concerning any required evidence of impact

Testing of Our Adolescent Literacy Model

CTL’s Adolescent Literacy Model is currently the subject of Gold-Standard research by the US Department of Education through one of eight Striving Readers grants nationwide. In addition, CTL’s Adolescent Literacy Model has been successfully implemented in 37 middle and high schools and six colleges in Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan and North Carolina to promote student learning and foster higher levels of achievement.

The ability to comprehend challenging concepts and vocabulary depends on a solid literacy foundation.  A strength of the model is that it gives students the literacy skills they need to master challenging content in virtually all subjects (mathematics, science, social studies, language arts and applied arts). Previously, under a federal grant from the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education, CTL was able to show: 

• Improved reading skills for students in grades 6 and 9.
• Improved grades in mathematics and science
• Significant improvement in teacher and student self efficacy.
• Significant gain in efficiencies in teacher practice, such as less need to re-teach and better classroom performance by students.

Many of the early research findings noted above have continued to be evident in Kentucky’s Striving Readers project, including:

• Increase in teacher use of literacy strategies to support content learning.
• Significant and ongoing growth in teacher self-efficacy.
• Noticeable gains in student reading performance.

(For a more detailed report on results to date, see CTL Adolescent Literacy Model Results: An Analysis of Three Studies, conducted for CTL by the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation, May 2010) 

Strengths of the Model

CTL’s Adolescent Literacy Model has a variety of unique strengths:

• It is compatible with a variety of targeted interventions used with struggling students.
• It is appropriate for use with English Language Learners (ELL).  Research into effective ELL programs demonstrates that cross-content literacy models recommended for use with struggling and proficient learners are equally effective with ELL students, particularly when teachers approach literacy instruction as an “accelerated language” experience.
• Literacy integration strategies are based on solid adolescent literacy research in the sub-domains (vocabulary development, reading comprehension, writing-to-learn, academic dialogue, and writing to use what we know).
• The model includes intensive professional development for teachers where they learn a process for explicit instruction, instructional modeling, and gradual release of strategies to student use
• Schools participate in ongoing job-embedded literacy coaching, on-site and via distance learning technologies.
• The model provides an additional learning strand for the development of local literacy coaches, housed in middle and high schools, effectively building school capacity for independent implementation.
• CTL provides training and coaching support for both administrative and distributed leadership structures in schools, ensuring commitment on the part of leaders and staff.

For More Information, contact
Amy Awbrey
v: 502.895.9500 x318