TCRWP Professional Development Brochure for 2020-2021
The Project is eager to work with all different types of schools—public, charter, and private—in both New York City, its surrounding suburbs, districts across the US, and distant corners of the world. Requests exceed our capacity but we regularly forge relationships with new schools. Priority usually goes to schools that are interested in sustainable reform.
The Project is especially known for providing a sequence of staff development days, spaced across the year, with most of those days including time when we bring half a dozen teachers into a classroom and we do demonstration teaching followed by coaching. Sometimes we demonstrate the flow of an entire workshop, highlighting ways to pace instruction, to lean on and adapt Units of Study, to teach efficiently and responsively. Other times our demonstration teaching spotlights particular methods of teaching—perhaps showing participating teachers ways to use learning progressions to give concrete clear feedback, or showing ways to lead small groups in which kids are the ones doing the most work. Either way, demonstration teaching gives way to guided practice as we channel the participating teachers—usually half a dozen—to try whatever we have demonstrated while we coach into that work.
Other times, however, districts convene large groups of teachers or of literacy coaches and ask us to lead workshops to those teachers. For example, we might work with all the first grade teachers from a district, or all the social studies secondary teachers. There are staff developers at the Project with expertise on almost any literacy-related topic.
Senior Project leaders regularly work with leaders from a district. We are most apt to do this with districts that have adopted the TCRWP’s Units of Study in Opinion, Information or Narrative Writing and/or Units of Study in Reading, or who are considering such an adoption. In those instances, we help principals and other district leaders learn from how other districts have supported implementation. Our time together includes discussion on supervision of teachers, data-based planning, leading literacy cabinets and cross-grade-level planning, helping teachers assess student work, and supporting diverse learners.
We also lead week-long “homegrown institutes’ that take the best of TCRWP’s NYC institutes and bring these to sites throughout the world.
We also offer an array of conference days and institutes at the College, and you can learn about these on this web-site. These includes
- four summer Institutes; two in the teaching of reading and two in the teaching of writing;
- two coaching institutes each year spotlighting state-of-the-art staff development and data-based literacy leadership;
- a content area institute that highlights the TCRWP’s latest thinking about content area literacy and instruction.
- An array of other institutes on topics such as lifting the level of nonfiction writing, toolkits for supporting primary readers, supporting kids with IEPs, etc.
For more information about receiving professional development services from the Project, please email us at services@readingandwritingproject.com.
