1. Washington County Adolescent Literacy Project
An Adolescent Literacy Project Partnership funded through the Northeast and Islands Regional Educational Laboratory at Brown University (LAB)
Project Director: Julie Meltzer, Ph.D., Center for Resource Management, Inc. (CRM)

2. Project Goal and Context
Project Goal: To strengthen and accelerate academic literacy development for struggling and unmotivated readers and writers in rural high schools.
Project Context:
Five small low-performing rural high schools
Geographically isolated, economically depressed
Currently in Year 2 of the intervention/applied research study

3. Key Intervention Strategies
Coaching school-based teams to put literacy action plans in place in each school
Providing quality teacher professional development in content area reading
Supporting teacher use of high impact research-based literacy strategies across the content areas
Working with regional, state, and university partners to provide project support

4. Adolescent Literacy Support Framework

5. Early Indicators of Project Impact
Teacher and administrator buy-in: literacy seen as central instead of marginal
Substantive widespread use of literacy support strategies in classroom teaching across the content areas
Improved student engagement and increased completion of reading and writing tasks
Higher/more common expectations for student work

6. Early Indicators of Project Impact
Positive changes in teacher interactions with students
Positive changes in teacher efforts to make a difference for those students with weaker literacy habits and skills
Changes in textbook purchasing patterns, teacher lesson planning, and student-choice books linked to project
“Literacy is not something extra on the plate, literacy IS the plate.”