Story of the MIDWEST CLC project

Brief History

As literacy remains one of the core skills required for success in the 21st century, it is essential for our nation's youth that effective approaches to improving adolescent reading and writing skills be identified. REL Midwest one of 10 regional educational laboratories in the country funded through the Institute of Education Sciences at the U.S. Department of Education serves Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin, and has been charged with conducting a study of an intervention designed to increase high school students' literacy skills and content area knowledge. We are seeking schools and districts in which adolescent literacy is a growing problem to participate in a three year study of the development and evaluation of a school-wide literacy improvement initiative.

This literacy improvement initiative will require teachers and administrators to commit 45 to 50 hours in a 12 month year (i.e., equivalent to about 6 days of time across both the summer and school months and equivalent to a 3-credit hour graduate course) for participation in embedded and ongoing literacy-centered professional development delivered via a blend of face-to-face and online learning formats. However, additional time for individual as well as team planning, implementation, and evaluation, will be required to integrate and then manage the new literacy elements with existing school structures, systems, and practices as literacy practices are extended across the school during the three year time frame of the study.

Professional development will focus on helping teachers and administrators: (a) tie standards-based planning to content-centered literacy practices, (b) improve elements of literacy for all students, (c) align literacy practices with efforts to ensure students meet or exceed subject area standards, (d) build school structures and systems required to support high quality instruction, and (e) use staff and student learning data to evaluate progress and refine literacy practices. School personnel will be supported by an experienced professional development team comprised of teachers, administrators, and researchers who will provide a wide variety of print, video, and online resources (a more detailed description of site criteria are included in this informational packet).

Quick Facts:

  • The study is focused on adolescent literacy. The intervention will be phased into the 9th grade curriculum in Year 1 of the study, and expanded to higher grades in subsequent years to build a school-wide approach to improving literacy that reaches all students.
  • The program to be tested is the Content Literacy Continuum (CLC) developed by researchers at the University of Kansas Center for Research on Learning. The CLC initiative includes both teacher-focused and student-focused interventions that are delivered across the curriculum throughout the high school day. Two of the main developers of the CLC, Don Deshler and Keith Lenz, are key members of the implementation leadership team and will be actively involved in the project.
  • The project uses an experimental research design, meaning that entire schools (not students or teachers) will be randomly assigned to a treatment or control group and schools that participate will have an equal chance of being in either the treatment or control group. Schools that are assigned to the treatment group will learn and implement the CLC intervention while control schools will not. Data will be collected from both treatment and control schools, including student achievement data.

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