Academic Literacy Development Training Sessions

We offer a series of literacy-development training sessions that directly apply to client-specified program, course, and content needs. Each training is designed to equip teachers with practical knowledge and tools to lead their students in meeting the literacy practice demands inherent in their courses and includes hands on skill-building and knowledge-acquiring experiences resulting in participant-generated literacy-development models to help guide their students in developing effective literacy practices. Each training session is an independent literacy-development unit with a unique curricular framework made up of clear, specific and targeted learning objectives that cluster to form stages of learning marked by end-stage outcome criteria. The learning objectives and sets of staged outcome criteria are sequenced developmentally so what is learned and achieved at one step and stage informs to what is to be learned and achieved in the steps and stages that follow. While each training session is instructed and stands alone as a separate unit, combined they add up to a comprehensive institute for academic literacy development.

Please click on any of the training topics to the left to learn more about them.

Elements of Literacy: Building an Academic Language Foundation

Foundational understandings of the Elements of Literacy are essential to academic success. This session offers a comprehensive model to explicitly instruct the development of an academic language foundation necessary to fully access learning opportunities. The curricular framework specifies and clarifies concise knowledge of word parts, sentence structures, and grammar and punctuation and provides authentic and manageable tasks for learning to apply foundational language knowledge to conveying thought in written form. The learning objectives are specific, clear, organized in developmental sequence and taught in steps and stages through authentic and individualized learning tasks that focus teaching and learning efforts on manageable elements of learning. The implementation practices and task applications are designed to inspire engagement and ensure success in learning. A tool to identify, track, and address each student’s foundational language needs is incorporated into this literacy development framework. Participants walk away with practical knowledge and instructional tools to lead student in developing comprehensive understandings of the foundational elements of written academic language, including how word parts indicate meaning and can be used to decipher the roles words play in phrases and sentences, and how words, phrases and clauses work together and are punctuated to convey complete thoughts in academic writing. Participants learn how to lead students in developing skill in constructing written sentences authentic to each student’s knowledge and experience. Guided implementation planning is included in this session.

Single-Topic Paragraph: Learning to Articulate a Single Idea in Writing

Sentences combine to clearly articulate single, focused and developed thoughts. Developing knowledge and skill in single-topic paragraph writing is essential to developing high-level reading and writing skills and achieve academically, as these written single ideas combine to create larger text-based informational structures.

In this training, participants review the structure, parts, and purposes of single-topic paragraphs, experience an instructional model that effectively engages students in learning to fully articulate single ideas in academic writing, practice evaluating and developing responses to student-generated single-topic paragraphs, and plan for implementation.

Academic Writing Process: Expressing Complex Understanding in Academic Formats

An Academic Writing Process provides a path for writing that replicates the processing habits of skilled writers. Skilled writers are knowledgeable and experienced in managing the complex tasks involved in successful academic writing. They maintain focus on high-level writing goals as they acquire and consolidate new information while exploring, developing, expressing, and revising ideas for finished written products.

Each stage of this writing process model is framed by task-based outcome criteria general enough to apply to various types of academic writing but specific enough to provide clear targets to guide students’ efforts and against which to measure outcomes. Each set of criteria focuses students’ efforts on manageable goals that contribute to the structure, development, and organization of finalized papers and other text-based academic products authentic to each writer’s knowledge, understandings and experiences.

Participants walk away with practical knowledge of a flexible curricular writing-process framework and relevant language structure lessons, a personally generated essay model to help guide planning and implementation efforts, and generalized understandings of research theories foundational to these methods for teaching and learning.

Academic Reading Process: Reading for Understanding and Storing Information for Academic Purposes

Academic success is dependent on students’ abilities to correctly and fully interpret the inherent meanings of course-related texts. How can students who struggle to fully understand the texts they read learn be equipped with skills to fully engage in course readings and significantly improve comprehension? Illuminate a path to Reading for Understanding and teach students how to navigate that path.

In this process, the automatized cognitive processes exercised by skilled readers are contextualized in a series of developmentally sequenced, specific, and measureable knowledge and skill-based learning objectives designed to facilitate the formation of understanding while reading. This path to reading comprehension is navigated using accessible, manageable, and authentic learning tasks, and individually responsive and success-driven implementation practices.

Throughout this training, participants will experience and learn a series of text-interaction and note-taking skills designed to help students read course-specific texts for understanding and store text-based information for academic purposes. Participants will create course-specific models demonstrating these approaches to academic reading and plan to incorporate An Academic Reading Process into programs, courses, units, and lessons.