Content-Area Literacy Professional Learning

The Story of SCORE: The Mississippi Writing/Thinking Institute Takes on a Statewide Reading Initiative

Summary:

The SCORE monograph (Secondary Content Opening to Reading Excellence) from the Mississippi Writing/Thinking Institute offers an overview of programming for content area teachers as part of a statewide reading initiative. A useful resource for teacher leaders, the monograph includes a rich description of five days of workshops (p. 14-19) along with timelines (p. 24-25), and agendas (p.26-31) that structured and organized this work.

This monograph is a realistic look at how a well-established National Writing Project state network broadened its teacher-consultant leadership capacity while taking on a state initiative and turning it into an opportunity to forge strong alliances with educational policymakers. It describes a professional development program for secondary reading that began as a passing comment in a staff meeting and grew into a statewide model for secondary reading instruction. The story of this inservice model includes site directors who trusted teacher-consultants and let teacher-consultants from across the state work cooperatively to develop a new model for professional growth, SCORE: Secondary Content Opening to Reading Excellence, that would stand up to the challenges of preparing secondary teachers to teach reading as well as content-area material.