Clarke County Schools
Teacher Consultants:
Lois Alexander, Kristi Amatucci, John Bishop, Tonia Bowden-Paramour, Daphne Hall, Freida Hammett, Anne McCloud, Susan Nordstrom, Andrea Pintaone, Andy Plemmons, Kaycie Rogers, Donna Ware
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The beginning of the 2005-2006 school year marked a major shift in Clarke County's language arts curriculum. Committed to creating a standards-based learning environment, the district went above and beyond the Georgia Performance Standards by creating their own district-wide performance standards for language arts. To help the teachers in Clarke County implement this new curriculum, Teacher Consultants from the Red Clay Writing Project collaborated with Clarke County's Instructional Coaches to develop a series of 3-day workshops for teachers in grades k-1, 2-3, 4-5 and 6-8 offered during the summer. During the workshops teachers applied Clarke County's language arts standards to a writers workshop in their classrooms, participated in a book study group, developed mini-lessons for writing workshop to use in their classrooms, assessed student work using rubric, and discussed strategies to help all children become writers. |
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Apalachee High School, Barrow County Schools
Teacher Consultants:
Kristi Amatucci, Susan Nordstrom, Teri Holbrook, Melanie Hundley |
In 2005, a faculty study group at Apalachee High School in Barrow County Georgia wanted to increase the efficacy of their reading and writing instruction in all the content areas. They took this desire to their school leadership and the faculty and school leadership decided to meet this desire. Their grass roots effort led them to hire RCWP teacher consultants to help them with their goal.
Planning sessions with their needs as our focus, the RCWP teacher consultant team developed two 80 minute sessions that aimed to help them collaborate as a school of teacher leaders and opened up the notion of literacy and how it works in their individual classrooms. The last two sessions will be dedicated to helping the teachers to open the notion of literacy in their classroom through collaborative planning. Together, presenters and faculty, we continue to make meaning together on what literacy is and how it can work in all subject areas. |
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Madison County Schools
RCWP Teacher Consultants:
Andy Plemmons and Andrea Pintaone
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During the 2004-05 school year, a group of teachers from elementary schools throughout Madison County chose writing as their focus for professional learning. RCWP TCs Andy Plemmons and Andrea Pintaone looked at teacher self assessments to design a five session professional learning opportunity that took teachers from learning about a writing workshop to designing a writing workshop for their own classroom. The initial session focused on an overview of the components of writing workshop, while the following sessions broke writing workshop into its individual sections and focused on how to make each one successful. Writing Workshop: The Essential Guide by Ralph Fletcher and JoAnn Portalupi was used as a resource throughout the five sessions. Teachers participated in a writing workshop to learn first hand how students are involved during the writing process. Each teacher used the session content to create an action plan to take back into the classroom and use before the next scheduled meeting. Through learning about the writing workshop and reflecting with one another about teaching practices that were working in Madison County schools, the participating teachers began taking steps to fully implement writing workshop in their classrooms. |
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Whitehead Elementary School,
Clarke County
RCWP Teacher Consultants:
Daphne Hall and Donna Ware |
At the end of the 2004 school year, Whitehead Elementary teachers listed their major concerns and struggles with the teaching of writing, which RCWP TCs Donna Ware and Daphne Hall used to design a two-day summer inservice. To prepare for the inservice, participating teachers read Writing Workshop: The Essential Guide by Ralph Fletcher and JoAnn Portalupi. The first day of the workshop used demonstrations, videos, participatory activities and discussions to explore the teaching of writing to young students. On the second day, teachers shared goals, discussed conferencing with students about their writing, examined the role of writer's notebooks in the classroom, and explored other management ideas. In addition, teachers planned the first 10 days of a writing workshop. |
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Coile Middle School,
Clarke County
RCWP Teacher Consultants: Lois Alexander, Kristi Amatucci and Gwen Faulkner-Holley |
"Working Closely With Children" provided an opportunity for TCs Kristi Amatucci, Gwen Faulkner-Holley and Lois Alexander to work with the teachers of W.R. Coile M.S. in Clarke County. The in-sessions had four components: Working Closely with One Student, Writing in Substantive and Connected Ways, Connecting Reading and Writing, and Writing with a Purpose. A variety of activities fostered conversations about diversity, cultural issues and developing close relationships with students. Teachers were given websites to use in developing strategies to reach struggling readers and writers; writing across the curriculum and multi-genre writing were also discussed. In order to enrich the writing skills of struggling readers and writers, the participating teachers were assigned students with whom to work in an after-school program. A database was created to help teachers develop a reading and writing library. Participants received a 35 dollar stipend to enhance these libraries. |
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Jefferson Elementary School,
Jackson County
RCWP Consultant: JoBeth Allen |
In monthly workshops, teachers met by grade level to discuss the use of literature circles. The school provided 5 books about LCs, identified by JoBeth and by teachers. Each grade selected which chapters across the texts they wanted to focus on each time and what they would try out in their classrooms; then at the monthly meetings they discussed both their readings and their classroom teaching and learning actions and assessments, often bringing examples of student work such as reading logs, self assessment, comprehension techniques, and other teacher and student designed innovations. |
