Deeper Learning 2023

Walk into any of the 20 advisory classrooms at ARISE High School on any given Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday and you will be met by a group of 15 to 20 students silently reading a book of their choice. Notice the schoolwide “word of the week” projected on the daily advisory slides. Transition to academic classes and you are likely to find teachers of all subjects (not only English classes) engaging students in pre-reading strategies, academic discourse, text annotations, claim-evidence-analysis writing, or some other component of our Literacy Order of Operations framework. On Wednesdays while students are participating in their Enrichment classes facilitated by community partners, teachers focus on professional development grounded in our Literacy Priority Plan for the year. At ARISE High School, our goal is to create a literacy ecosystem in which students are spending a significant amount of their days reading and writing the word and the world. This is one way we work to achieve our aspirational mission “to empower ourselves with the knowledge, skills, and agency to become highly educated, humanizing, critically conscious, intellectual, and reflective leaders in our community.” The purpose of this workshop is to share our whole school literacy framework and engage participants in a process of analyzing their school’s literacy practices in order to identify a few concrete components they can take back to grow their own literacy ecosystems in their own classrooms, schools and districts. Participants will learn about and receive tools and resources including ARISE’s: Daily Independent Reading Time model Literacy Priority Planning tool for professional development Literacy Order of Operations framework Whole school writing rubric Culturally responsive text canon