The 4th Annual Institute on Literacy Coaching and Whole School Reform
Tuesday, February 9 - Saturday, February 13, 2010
The Teachers College Reading and Writing Project is pleased to offer the fourth annual Institute on Literacy Coaching and Whole-School Reform. This intimate and intensive institute will enable educators to learn the Project's newest and most powerful methods of staff development. The institute will equip you—whether you are a literacy coach, a principal, a lead teacher, or a literacy leader in some other role—with the tools, techniques, mentors, and intellectual community you need so that you can provide state-of-the-art data-based literacy leadership. Together, we will study how to lead staff development work that is school-wide so that you are better able to rally educators across entire schools to join together in professional learning communities. We’ll also learn to be sure that staff development is differentiated, supporting teachers across a wide-spectrum, and helping all teachers to differentiate based on solid evidence of what their learners can do, and can almost but not yet do.
We expect that many graduates of our Literacy Coaching Institute will one day join the Hall of Fame, along with others who have apprenticed in this guild. You will recognize the names of many literacy leaders who apprenticed at the Project, scores of whom have gone on to lead the nation's work in literacy. Our alumni include Carl Anderson, Janet Angelillo, Sharon Taberski, Carmen Farina, Ralph Fletcher, Katie Ray, Joanne Hindley, Randy and Katherine Bomer, Georgia Heard, Donna Santman, Kate Montgomery, and Kathy Collins, to name just a few.
This year we have scheduled our institute so that it will immediately precede our February Institute on Content Area Literacy, making it easier for participants to attend both institutes. The February institute will invite participants into some of the Project’s newest thinking, this time on ways in which educators can incorporate literacy skills and workshop methods into literacy-rich strong science and social study classrooms. Coaching participants who stay on for the February Institute on Content Area Literacy will be given time to work together before and after each day of the February institute so as to discuss ways in which to bring that content to your home sites. You'll also be invited behind the curtain to reflect with the staff at that institute on their methods for leading institutes.
Please submit your application along with a short letter demonstrating your prior knowledge of reading and writing workshops, and describing your position in your building and school.
The fee for the Coaching Institute is $650. This price is higher than that of other TCRWP institutes because the section sizes are considerably smaller, the institute, more intimate.
First Year Participants (Participants may—and probably will—have attended other TCRWP events, but this will be the first year in the coaching institute.) Participants will work in small groups led by one of the Project's senior staff developers. Your small-group will work side-by-side in classrooms, observing, trying on, and receiving coaching in methods of staff development in writing. Although your governing gaze will be on one area of the literacy curriculum—writing—you’ll learn a vast repertoire of methods of staff development that are applicable to all subjects and especially applicable to supporting reading as well as writing. You'll become more adept at demonstration teaching, collaborative coaching, classroom-based lab-sites, using formative assessment to inform curriculum and teaching, and methods for supporting whole-school reform. Participants may elect to focus on K-2, 3-5, K-5, or 5-8 grade-spans, although some sections will fill more quickly than others.
Advanced Participants (This section is reserved for participants who have attended a previous Coaching Institute with the TCRWP.) This section is reserved for coaches, principals and other literacy leaders who attended a previous Literacy Coaching Institute with the TCRWP, and for NYC coaches who have studied in a yearlong study group at the Project. Participants will choose a grade level focus, specializing in grades 3-5 (this section will be led by Kathleen Tolan, the Senior Deputy Director at the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project), or grades K-2 (led by Amanda Hartman, Lead Coach at the Project). Returning participants will study and practice assessment-based staff development in writing and reading workshops and will again work both inside and outside of classrooms, developing a variety of teaching strategies with teachers. These sections will look at ways of assessing our teachers’ practice, our buildings’ growth, and will think about how to develop larger goals and visions to move and propel our buildings further.
*The fee includes the cost of the book and DVD, A Principal's Guide to Leadership in the Teaching of Writing, by Lucy Calkins and Laurie Pessah. Returning participants will receive a different book on school reform.