Advanced Adolescent Reading Initiative
(2010 - 2016)
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The Challenge… Adolescent Literacy
The Challenge… Adolescent Literacy
Studies show that many secondary students fail to comprehend grade-level text and that even students with average reading skills are increasingly unprepared for the literacy demands of the workplace and post-secondary education. To date, little attention has been devoted to helping secondary teachers develop the skills they need to promote reading comprehension, ensure content learning through reading, and deal with the differences in reading skills that their students display. The Advancing Adolescent Reading Initiative (AARI) was a four-year research and capacity building initiative funded by Alberta Education to support the goals of the High School Completion Strategic Framework.
AARI Needs Assessment Survey - Between January - March, 2011, 289 secondary teachers from across Alberta responded to an online Adolescent Reading Needs Assessment survey conducted by the J.P. Das Centre. 98% of respondents identified struggling readers as an issue in their classrooms. Respondents identified demands of the curriculum (85%), timetabling (34.5%), lack of expertise (48%) and time (63%) as the major challenges in trying to help their struggling readers. The survey revealed that there is high interest and need for a flexible capacity building professional development program to support teachers in addressing reading issues in their content-specific classrooms.
“It is estimated that 70 per cent of youth who drop out of school have poor literacy skills.”
(Kamil, 2003; Kleinbard, 2009)
“It is estimated that 70 per cent of youth who drop out of school have poor literacy skills.”
(Kamil, 2003; Kleinbard, 2009)
The Advancing Adolescent Reading Initiative (AARI) was a comprehensive training program that was developed for Alberta educators teaching in grades 7-12.
AARI provided teachers across subject areas with advanced knowledge on how to:
teach reading skills as part of content area instruction,
identify students who need additional reading instruction, and
implement evidence-based reading instruction and interventions across the curriculum.
AARI drew upon local, national and international adolescent literacy specialists to provide instructional leadership to the program. AARI professional development was spread across two years of study and included:
Eight Online Learning Modules- a series of sequenced, online, interactive learning modules aimed at developing the deep foundational knowledge necessary to understand how students learn to read—and why some of them struggle. The first four focus on language, reading, data-informed assessment and instruction. The second four modules focus on content area reading skills, differentiated reading instruction across content areas and instructional coaching.
Weekends With the Experts - Internationally recognized experts will be brought in to share their insights and expertise with the cohort and invited guests. These weekends will allow access to the latest in research and practice. The WWE presentations were held at the U of A and were available online.
Summer Institutes -These 3 to 5 day institutes at the University of Alberta included modeling, teacher practice, and group work. The first took place late August 2011 and the second in July of 2012.
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