Pathways for Advancing Adolescent Literacy

NCTE's Pathways for Advancing Adolescent Literacy helps teachers, schools, and districts address the unique needs of adolescent learners. Designed around research on the key areas of 21st century learning, motivation, content-area reading and writing, issues surrounding the achievement gap, and testing and accountability, Pathways is s yearlong professional development program that focuses on building teacher knowledge to raise student achievement

The structure and content of the Adolescent Literacy Pathway are based on the NCTE Principles of Effective Professional Development and the NCTE Principles of Adolescent Literacy Reform and is organized around five key questions that middle and high school teachers from across the country are grappling with. Individuals or teams of teachers use a variety of data sources to determine which question(s) to focus on initially and then engage with a variety of resources designed to help build, extend, and assess their knowledge.

Pathways helps teachers who are asking questions such as:

• How can I support my students as readers and writers while at the same time teaching content?
• We're concerned about the achievement gap. We've identified particular segments of our population that are not achieving at the same levels. What do we do next?
• We hear so much talk about students not being motivated. Is there really anything we can do about this?
• With the current emphasis on testing, how do we support our students without compromising what we know constitutes good teaching?
• What does it mean to be literate in the 21st century and what are the implications for our teaching and professional development?

 More on the research, resources, and hands-on activities. . .