• Identify strategies that address specific needs of students;
• Set high expectations for all students to be challenged and supported to reach high levels of achievement, application, and reasoning; and
• Provide strategies that accelerate and increase understanding in all areas.

Each Practicum session will focus on specific Essential Academic Learning Requirements as follows:
SESSION ONE

• Reading Standard 1 – The student understands and uses different skills and strategies to read.
• Writing Standard 1 – The student writes clearly and effectively.

SESSION TWO

• Reading Standard 2 – The student understands the meaning of what is read.
• Writing Standard 2 – The student writes in a variety of forms for different audiences and purposes.

SESSION THREE

• Communication Standard 2 – The student communicates clearly and effectively.

OBJECTIVES

• To explore the core of mastery in literacy: the interconnectedness of understanding, language and culture;
• To integrate strategies for mediating literacy within the context of the Seattle Essential Components of a Reading and Writing Program as well as across all disciplines;
• To provide a forum for reflective discussion about the purpose of specific strategies that intensify and accelerate reading and writing processes;
• To create bridges between the cultural experience of the student and the skills and content to be learned and mastered;
• To assist teachers in identifying and achieving measurable goals for their students in reading and writing; and
• To correlate skills from the EALR’s;

EXPECTATIONS
Participants will:

• Set specific objectives for ALL their students to achieve by the end of the school year and will, in particular, substantially raise their expectations for their low performing students.
• Assess the progress of the students identified as in particular need of intensified instructional support. This progress will be discussed during the Practicum sessions.
• Be given assignments to complete in their own classrooms and will be expected to keep a Reflection Journal to record how the strategies effect students’ learning. They will be expected to bring these notes to each session and share their work and reflections with others.
• Bring examples of their own classroom applications of the strategies. These can include student work, videos, audio, scrapbook entries, and photos.
• Be expected to articulate how each strategy they learn is related to the Reading, Writing and Communication Arts standards focused on during each session.

THROUGH-LINES
The following features of the Practicum are identified as "throughlines" because they are given repeated emphasis from one Academy session to the next. This repetition will serve to emphasize the importance of these features and to help participants become more competent and confident in their learning and application of these features.

Mastery
Teaching for mastery refers to instruction that always aims for a higher level of functioning (precept: transformation) while exciting students' critical thinking and inquiry. When teaching for mastery, teachers provide strategies and support that enable students to attain the highest level of achievement in reading and design opportunities for demonstrating this mastery.

Mediation
Mediation reverses the focus from teaching and learning to learning and teaching, with all considerations revolving around the student as a learner. It is a process through which the teacher provides learning experiences that are intentionally selected to assist students in reaching identified learning goals. Teachers guide student thinking by identifying understandings and cognitive skills within the content unit. The process is designed to integrate assessment of understanding with stimulating instruction that provides students with thinking skills and strategies that enhance learning capacity in relation to the curriculum and life experiences.

Motivation and Relevance
In order to develop the necessary cognitive skills for learning and literacy development, the brain circuits for attention, memory, and meaning must be activated. This activation occurs when the learner is motivated to learn. Motivation happens when students:

• Perceive an experience to be personally or culturally relevant,
• Perceive patterns or relationships that are related to previous learning, and
• Perceive a personal connection or experiences an emotion that makes the new information especially memorable.

Partnership-Building
Peer support is an important component to create systemic change within a school. Participants will work in partner teams most of the day to develop, and encourage working partnerships back at the school sites.

Active Participant Involvement and Reflection
Strategies presented will be limited to those that are the most generative and effective. Participants will be guided through the learning and application of the strategies to ensure competence and confidence in their use. They will practice these strategies during the workshop sessions, and will apply them in their own classrooms between sessions, sharing their successes with their teammates in various ways as they refine and extend their new skills. Participants will discuss and write during the day to reflect on the activities that they are participating in and the strategies they are learning through demonstrations. These activities will help them analyze, interpret and articulate what they are learning. This will serve as a model of the kind of discussion and writing they can ask their own students to engage in to enhance learning.

Intensified and Accelerated Instructional Approaches
Participants will learn how to intensify their efforts with students in specific, classroom-tested ways so that they can accelerate progress for students, especially students for whom traditional methods have failed.

Five Critical Experiences
As strategies are presented and practiced, participants will focus on how the strategies are related to the Five Critical Experiences.

SESSION ONE

• Reading Standard 1 – The student understands and uses different skills and strategies to read.
• Writing Standard 1 – The student writes clearly and effectively.

GOALS FOR PARTICIPANTS
ß Create community building opportunities
ß Analyze print rich environments
ß Learn and practice strategies that lead to mastery of word analysis skills
ß Learn strategies for developing vocabulary and concepts
ß Apply Thinking Maps for organizing ideas for writing

GRADES K-2
The focus of the K-2 Practicum is to help teachers provide students with strong skills in vocabulary and decoding, enabling them to read fluently with expression by the end of second grade. This will prepare them to handle the more difficult comprehension demands of textbooks and other reading materials in the upper grades. While focusing on vocabulary and decoding, teachers will also explore some of the same comprehension strategies that teachers experience in the Practicum sessions at the other grade levels. The K-2 sessions devote more time to word analysis and vocabulary skills because of the particular importance of these elements in the reading program at these grade levels and because of the need to accelerate student’s learning of these skills at these grade levels.

In each session, participants will learn to work with colleagues in NUA teams, will express their questions and concerns, will engage in substantive reflection on their work, and will commit to using what they experience regularly and consistently in their own classrooms. The approach in each workshop will be to introduce strategies by means of demonstrations that engage the participants in active, brain-based learning of the sort that is most effective in producing high-performance learning.


STRATEGIES: Word Analysis (Highly Recurring Phonic Elements)
Key Words for Word Analysis Practice (Street Phonics )
Concept Development
Analogies
Silent Flow
Flash Newsletters

GRADES 3-5
STRATEGIES: Word Analysis (Chunking and Word Walls)
Bookshares
Imitation Writing
List-Group- Label
Concept DevelopmentDescription with Bubble Maps
Categorizing with Tree Maps

GRADES 6-8
STRATEGIES: Group Norms
Teacher Journals
Word Walls and Scavenger Hunt
Concept Development
Categorizing For Main Idea with Tree Maps
Compare and Contrast with Double Bubble Maps
Cause and Effect with Multiflow Maps

GRADES 9-12
STRATEGIES: Vocabulary Taxonomy
Key Word Strategy
Reflective Metacognition
Concept Development
List-Group-Label
Categorizing For Main Idea with Tree Maps
Cause and Effect with Multiflow Maps

SESSION TWO
ÿ Reading Standard 2 – The student understands the meaning of what is read.
ÿ Writing Standard 2 – The student writes in a variety of forms for different audiences and purposes.

GOALS FOR PARTICIPANTS
ß Apply Reading/Thinking Process Model
ß Learn strategies for constructing meaning and reading fluency
ß Create purposes for writing
ß Apply Thinking Maps for text analysis

GRADES K-2
STRATEGIES: Categorization and Concept Development
Dancing Definitions
Panel Books
Questioning Strategies
Sequencing with Flow Maps
Cause and Effect with Multiflow Maps

GRADES 3-5
STRATEGIES: List, Group, Label
Read- Talk- Write
Read- Draw-Write
Induced Imagery
Analogies
Analytical Reasoning with Brace Maps
Sequence with Flow Maps
Description with Bubble Maps

GRADES 6-8
STARTEGIES: 4 Word Note Taking
Rapid Retrieval of Information
Read to Discover

GRADES 9-12
STRATEGIES Read-Talk-Write
Application Disciplines
Drawing to Understand
Description with Bubble Maps
Compare and Contrast with Double Bubble Maps
Analogies

SESSION 3
ÿ Communication Standard 2 – The student communicates clearly and effectively.

GOALS FOR PARTICIPANTS
ß Create opportunities for language use
ß Analyzing structures of effective communication of ideas
ß Recognize patterns in oral and written language
ß Correlate Thinking Maps to objectives

GRADES K-2
STRATEGIES: Guided Fluency and Punctuation
Idea Books for Observation, Reflection, and Research
Compositional Forms for Directions
Sentence Transformation and Imitation Writing

GRADES 3-5
STRATEGIES: Learning Logs
One-sentence Summaries
Draw- A- Face
Say Something/Write Something
Thinking Maps For Presentation

GRADES 6-8
STRATEGIES: Choral Reading
Directed Listening Thinking Activity
Read-Talk-Draw-Write
Thinking Maps For Presentation

GRADES 9-12
STRATEGIES: Learning Logs
Read-Talk-Draw-Write
Imitation Writing
Thinking Maps For Presentation