Literacy Learning Communities

Why just "sit and get" professional development when you can take charge of it? Schools nationwide are using professional learning communities to revitalize staff development, and "Literacy Learning Communities" shows you how to adapt this powerful framework to target the literacy strengths and needs of students in secondary schools. Whether you're an administrator, a staff developer, or a member of a teacher-study group, Literacy Learning Communities shows you how to make them happen, why they work, and how to get the most from them. In "Literacy Learning Communities "veteran staff developer ReLeah Cossett Lent shows how LLCs can energize the professional community of any middle or high school. She offers concrete steps toward success: a thorough review of the unambiguous research supporting both collaborative professional development models and the importance of authentic approaches to literacy learning and teaching specific steps for creating an initial literacy learning community to assess your school's reading and writing needs and to develop a three-year plan for authentic, sustained, and embedded staff development practical ideas for meeting your schools' challenges through professional development methods such as action research, peer coaching, and study groups. Throughout "Literacy Learning Communities "Lent provides smart suggestions for working with resistant faculty, overcoming a school-wide culture of isolation (a particular problem in secondary schools), and strengthening the professional relationships in your school to improve the efficacy of your LLCs. She even presents Questions for Reflection at the end of each chapter to stimulate your thinking and help you move toward relevant and "sustained "professional learning. Built on a combination of research and real-world experience, "Literacy Learning Communities "can help you build a culture of professional learning, peer support, and teacher engagement that will improve the performance of every learner - teachers and students alike.

ReLeah Cossett Lent was a middle and high school teacher before becoming a founding member of a statewide literacy project at the University of Central Florida. She is now an international consultant, writing and speaking about adolescent literacy, Common Core, and school leadership. Her latest book is Overcoming Textbook Fatigue: 21st Century Tools to Invigorate Learning (ASCD). ReLeah's work with Jimmy Santiago Baca, award-winning poet and writer, led to a book and CD for reaching at-risk adolescents, Adolescents on the Edge, Stories and Lessons to Transform Learning (Heinemann). She has also written Keep Them Reading: An Anti-Censorship Guide for Educators and Literacy for Real: Reading, Thinking and Learning in the Content Areas (Teachers College Press), Engaging Adolescent Learners and Literacy Learning Communities (Heinemann). ReLeah's first two books, co-authored with Gloria Pipkin and published by Heinemann won the American Library Association's Intellectual Freedom Award and the NCTE/Slate Intellectual Freedom Award. ReLeah was also the recipient of the PEN/Newman's Own First Amendment Award in 1999. You can find her at www.releahlent.com.