The Vermont Adolescent Literacy and Learning Initiative’s (VALLI) mission is to foster research-based teaching of critical literacy skills in middle and high schools to promote thinking and learning. Through individualized, school-specific professional development, VALLI seeks to nurture a schoolwide culture that values rigorous standards and high expectations for the learning of all students.

VALLI engages schools in a pre-project year to administer and analyze a schoolwide baseline literacy needs assessment. During this year we work with school administrators to ensure that VALLI is indeed a good fit and that the elements needed to engage in an intensive three-year literacy program are intact.

The goal of VALLI’s first formal year in a school is to engage a cross-disciplinary cohort of teachers in preparing to lead a faculty-wide immersion in the strategies of teaching listening, speaking, writing, and reading skills as the basic components of all thinking and learning. Specific actions include developing a literacy action plan with goals and action steps, offering school-wide professional development, and meeting with cohort members to set personal learning goals, advise, and/or observe.

In its second year with a school, VALLI supports a growing, cross-disciplinary cohort of teachers in a collegial sharing of the strategies of teaching critical literacy skills to promote thinking and learning school-wide. This is accomplished through careful analysis of the school's baseline literacy needs assessment, its literacy action plan, and an evaluation of VALLI's first year at the school. Specific actions include scheduling ongoing meetings with educators to set personal learning goals, advising and/or observing, offering differentiated professional development, and keeping a special focus on sustainability by fostering literacy leadership within the school

In its third year working with a school, VALLI asks literacy leaders to review the literacy action plan and the baseline literacy-needs assessment, as well as the evaluation of VALLI's second year at school. Specific actions include designing in-school professional development programs and creating the structures and processes for sustaining comprehensive literacy instruction as basic to the school’s culture.

Participating Schools:

• Barre City Middle School
• Barre Town Middle School
• Milton Junior/Senior High Schools
• Mount Anthony Union Middle School
• Mount Anthony Union High School
• Spaulding High School

View/Download/Print VALLI Invite, Description & Application

Copyright © Vermont Reads Institute at UVM. Site designed & hosted by Earthlogic.