Literacy Initiatives for Urban Middle Schools

1
Literacy Initiatives for Urban Middle Schools

• SERP Research Team
• Catherine Snow, Chair

2
SERP-BPS Field Site History

• Bruce Alberts initiative at the National
  Academies
• 2003 NRC Report
• Key players
• Suzanne Donovan, executive director
• Tom Payzant, then superintendent in Boston
• Uri Treisman, Laura Cooper, other Committee
  members
• Boston Higher Education Partnership research
  collaborative
• Funding from Spencer, Hewlett, Carnegie
  Corporation of NY
• Additional field sites now being established in
  SF and MSAN districts

3
SERP Principles

• Emergence of questions from practice
  Practice-embedded research
• Working at three levels simultaneously (student
  learning, teacher learning, organizational
  learning)
• Recruiting multiple forms of expertise
• Creating local solutions designed to travel
• Engineering tools to help schools and districts
  work better
• Developing procedures to accumulate knowledge
  across sites
• Bottom-up as well as top-down sources of wisdom

4
The BPS/SERP Field Site

• Initiation by the Boston Higher Education
  Partnership, to include several universities
• Central role of the cross-university Doctoral
  Research Practicum
• Core team, Design team, Research team
• Focus on middle-school literacy
• Four domains of work
• tools for diagnostic assessment
• developing interventions to improve reading
  comprehension
• developing assessments of and interventions for
  school coherence
• helping BPS evaluate its own initiatives (Read
  180, Americas Choice)

5
Key questions addressed in this symposium

• What are the needs of struggling middle grade
  readers?
• How can we address those needs?
• What does the implementation of that intervention
  look like?
• How do non-school activities relate to students
  growth in literacy?

6
This Symposium and the SERP Principles

• Focused on tools
• For understanding struggling readers
• For intervening in their learning
• For intervening with teachers and schools as well
  as students
• Based on close collaboration with four schools
  Mystic, Reilley, Westfield, and Patrick
• Reflects participation of practitioners in
  developing and implementing the research

7
The presenters

• Michael Kieffer, Gina Biancarosa Joanna
  Christodoulou (HGSE)
• Jeannette Mancilla-Martinez Kathleen Spencer
  (HGSE)
• Claire White (SERP Institute)
• Sarah Meacham (HGSE and SERP)
• Joshua Lawrence (Boston University)

8
Building Knowledge and Constructing Solutions
Surveying the Landscape Kieffer, Biancarosa,
Christodoulou, Mancilla-Martinez on
Heterogeneity in Struggling Comprehenders Zooming
in Mancilla-Martinez Spencer on Listening
Comprehension Drafting the Architecture for an
Intervention White on the word generation
intervention Describing the Engineering for Word
Learning Meacham on classroom interactions Lookin
g outside the Building Lawrence on out-of-school
literacy learning