New literacy academies focus on crucial middle school years
Going beyond professional development, the Texas Adolescent Literacy Academies (TALA) aim to create a comprehensive educational experience across content areas - complete with expert training, research-based teaching and assessment tools, and follow-up monitoring of implementation in the classroom.
The TALA project, under Deborah Reed’s direction at the Vaughn Gross Center for Reading and Language Arts, will extend the work done under the recently completed Texas Adolescent Literacy Project, shaping the research and instructional materials into an academy format and conducting training across the state. TALA will follow a similar training model with middle school teachers that has been successful for elementary teachers with the K-4 Texas Teacher Reading Academies and the national K-2 Teacher Reading Academies, which have received wide acclaim and have been disseminated in all 50 U.S. states and territories.
TALA is funded for two years through HB 2237, approved by the 80th Texas Legislature, at $18 million each year statewide, of which the Center will receive approximately $850,000 annually.
“We’re very excited that adolescent literacy is being addressed and becoming a priority in the state,” Reed said, citing trends both in Texas and nationwide of progress in early reading outcomes losing steam in the middle school years. “It’s a critical area.”
Tailored for the unique structure of middle schools, TALA will include two separate academies - an English language arts (ELA) academy (for English language arts/reading teachers) and a content area academy (for mathematics, science, and social studies teachers). Also in the works is an overview created specifically for administrators.
The first year of the study will be geared toward teachers of sixth-grade students, with 300 trainers instructing 15,000 teachers in the summer of 2008, according to preliminary estimates. In the summer of 2009, the project will shift to an estimated 30,000 seventh- and eighth-grade teachers, with 400 trainers leading courses. The trainers will include Reed and Muffet Livaudais of the Texas Education Agency (TEA) serving as master trainers, personnel from all 20 Texas Education Service Centers (ESCs) serving as state trainers, and school district educators serving as regional trainers. Livaudais also will lead the day-to-day management with the ESCs.
Participation is mandatory for all campuses deemed “academically unacceptable,” a designation based on Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) scores. Though participation is voluntary for all other campuses, the entire slate of courses in the ELA academy are expected to be full, Reed said, and work continues to attract participants to the content area academy.
Both academies will include the Tier I portion of the project, which will begin with 1.5 days of face-to-face training delivered via presentations, videos, and resources the teachers can use in the classroom. Tier I will focus primarily on cross-curricular vocabulary and comprehension instruction. Connections to the TAKS, Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS), and literacy’s relevance to content area subjects will be included throughout the academy. At this point, participants will receive half of their stipend for participating. The other half of the stipend and Continuing Professional Education credits (CPEs) are earned only after teachers complete a half-day follow-up practicum that requires them to implement instructional practices in the classroom.
In addition to Tier I, the ELA academy will take participants through the Tier II/III element of the project, adding 1.5 days of training in intervention, diagnostic, and progress-monitoring concepts focusing on word recognition, fluency, and comprehension instruction for students who struggle with reading. Practice administering and interpreting the results of an assessment created by the Texas Institute for Measurement, Evaluation, and Statistics (TIMES) under a subcontract for this project will be included. The follow-up practicum for the ELA academy will be a full day.
“The response to the preliminary work has been positive,” Reed said. “People are really appreciative that middle school is being addressed and that all this information is packaged together.”