Literacy Professional Learning

Customized professional development for teachers, coaches, and/or administrators in your district with a focus on literacy and literacy instruction.

Classroom-Embedded Professional Learning

Literacy Professional Learning Courses 

Custom-Designed Learning Experiences


Learning Labs: Classroom-Embedded Professional Learning

Professional learning woven into the fabric of your school day.

Learning Labs are a design for classroom-embedded professional learning that brings together educator collaboration and the day-to-day work of teaching.  We partner with you to foster collaborative communities in which educators learn from one another, develop a shared vision of high-quality literacy teaching and practices that work toward this vision, and take this learning into classrooms with students.

What to Expect

  • Learning experiences tailored to the learning goals, histories, and existing structures and routines of your school
  • Long-term, ongoing relationship of at least one school year
  • Support for instructional leadership to sustain the work between sessions and beyond our collaboration

Learn More About Learning Labs


Elementary Literacy Professional Learning Courses

Engage a group of teachers, coaches, and/or administrators in your school or district in a professional learning experience. Each course can be adapted for in-person or online settings. Sample structures are provided for each course, but these can be tailored to meet your particular needs. Clock hours are available.

Unit Planning with Gholdy Muhammad's Cultivating Genius Framework

Gholdy Muhammad recently published a book entitled, “Cultivating Genuis.”  In this book, she articulates four key areas of development teachers should be focused on when designing classroom instruction:  Identity, Skill, Intellect, and Criticality.  In this course participants will explore these ideas, known as the Historically Responsive Literacy framework.  Participants will learn the origins of the framework and the various ways it can be applied to the work of elementary teaching.  To immediately put the ideas into practice, participants will also work collaboratively to adapt and plan an upcoming reading or writing unit using their district’s curricular resources, but keeping the framework at the heart of the unit. Through exploring the framework, working collaboratively, and unit planning, teachers will themselves develop across all four areas.   

Through participating in this course, teachers will:

  • Learn this framework for approaching the work of teaching
  • Experience an approach to unit planning that could be replicated for future planning
  • Further their experience with and ability to collaborate with colleagues
  • Develop a unit plan that can be implemented in their classroom


Details

  • Timing of this course is flexible and can be modified to suit your school or district’s needs
  • Clock hours, commensurate with amount of time of the course, available 
  • Up to 25 participants 
  • Interactive and engaging learning activities
  • Can be done in person or online
Teaching Phonics with an Equity Lens

In this course, teachers will be provided a refresher of the phonetic patterns most common in English.  Teachers will also explore a variety of ways to teach phonics to early readers and writers and will reflect on how these various strategies align with principles of anti-racist teaching.   Teachers will leave the course with concrete ideas about how to implement phonics lessons that support learners while honoring the various cultures and languages of their students.  

Through participating in this course, teachers will:

  • (Re) learn the phonetic patterns that support beginning readers to develop proficiency
  • Explore a variety of approaches to teaching phonics, in order to develop one that is appropriate for their context (students, grade level, curriculum, etc.)
  • Reflect on how their phonics instruction aligns with and embeds anti-racist teaching principles
  • Design phonics lessons that will meet the needs of their learners and support an overall atmosphere of equity and anti-racism


Details

  • Timing of this course is flexible and can be modified to suit your school or district’s needs
  • Clock hours, commensurate with amount of time of the course, available 
  • Up to 25 participants 
  • Interactive and engaging learning activities
  • Can be done in person or online
     
Content-Focused Comprehension Lessons

In this course, teachers will explore an approach to teaching small group reading lessons called content focused comprehension lessons.  These lessons are similar to what has been called "Guided Reading" but provide students rich opportunities to read and discuss texts in ways that not only support reading comprehension development, but also teach students to be critical thinkers who engage in discourse.  The course will explore the ways in which this teaching method aligns with other methods utilized in teachers’ classroom and district.  Teachers will learn about this approach, try it on with colleagues, and leave the course with draft lesson plans that could be implemented with their students.  


Through participating in this course, teachers will:

  • Learn an approach to teaching reading that engages elementary school students in deeply comprehending, discussing, and analyzing text
  • Develop lesson plans for their context that are designed to engage students in reading, thinking, and talking about texts that would be meaningful to them
  • Examine their current teaching practices around reading instruction to determine the ways in which these practices encourage comprehension, discussion, and analysis of text 
  • Collaborate with other teachers around ways to support comprehension instruction  

Details

  • Timing of this course is flexible and can be modified to suit your school or district’s needs
  • Clock hours, commensurate with amount of time of the course, available 
  • Up to 25 participants 
  • Interactive and engaging learning activities
  • Can be done in person or online
     

Custom-Designed Learning Experiences

Interested in developing your team's content knowledge in a particular domain? Want to gain expertise in leading instructional routines? Have another mathematics learning need? Tell us more about your interests.


Ready to get started?

Request Support