Leadership Team Minutes – September 26, 2009

I.        Attendance:  John Hagaman, Mollie Wade, Laura Houchens, Christie Wiles, Pat Puckett, Denise Henry, Linda Martin, Sara Jennings, Anne Padilla, Danielle Wolf, Jamie Carnes, Patrice McCreary, Sherry St. Claire

II.      Announcements

a.  New brochure is ready.  Thanks to Laura Houchens and her husband for their work on the brochure.

b.   State funding down from $65,000 to $51,000, and after University cut down to $47,300.  Bluegrass WP is now inactive.

c.  Summer Institute 2010 participants will get a reduction in stipend next year due to cuts.  The stipend will be $500 this year, down from $800.  Maybe we can get schools to make up the difference.

d.  Denise Henry went to Summer Writing Retreat at Cavanaugh Life Institute.  Great experience for adult writers and would like to develop a retreat for our site based on her experience this summer.

e.  2-day Institute at Lake Cumberland-modeled after the academies-held in late July

f.  Annual state Writing Project network conference will be held in Morehead State University on September 11, 2010. 

g.  In place of Summer Academies 2010, the WP network proposes a Program Effectiveness Pilot Review with schools-the network will form a team, one Fellow from each site, to work with schools in their area to help schools create their Literacy Plan using the PERKS document.  This pilot group would be available in summer and fall 2010 to work with other schools in the process of doing a review and creating a literacy plan.

h. Report about the summer 2009 academies from Pat Puckett, who co-facilitated one of the academies.

i.  New on-demand book written by Jennifer Bernhard and Donna Vincent available this fall and written for the network.    Laura Houchens suggested that we might get Donna and Jennifer to do an on-demand workshop.  (Denise Henry and Janet Martin have also written on on-demand and might lead a workshop us.)

i.  NWP/NCTE meeting in Philadelphia on November 19-22, 2009.

j.  KCTE/LA annual conference in Louisville at the Marriott on February 19-20, 2010. 

III.  Looking Ahead

  1. Sherry St. Claire – suggestions for the Outreach program – worked last year with KDE to develop online courses – she did 6-week professional development courses for teachers through her work with KDE – if we choose to have this type of course we need to have a leader to do follow-up and facilitate the discussions.  A Webinar is another option – not like an online course.  Most effective might be to have 3 weeks online and then have face to face meeting and then do the other 3 weeks online.  Need to think about audience and purpose.  Could do something for course credit through WKU – John said that it was quite expensive through WKU.  The state charges $25 to use Blackboard for each participant.  Suggested topics might include a Webinar on how to get writing in the curriculum now that the portfolio is less of a focus.  State  push on formative assessment—looking at homework and how to accurately assess it.  Some other suggestions:  “Schoolwide Literacy Planning” or “Content Area Literacy”  Sherry could design course, it could be launched from WKU’s site, and would need a trained facilitator.  Could cost up to $3000 to develop the course.  Terry Elliott suggested we do a Webinar for the November 7 Social Networking follow-up and the November 14th demonstrations.  Could we get an organization to partner with us to help defray costs?  Webinar may be the most cost-effective option for us.

 

III.    Reports 

a.    Content Area Literacy (Gaye Foster and Holly Ringo, co-directors) follow-up session on December 5, 2009. 

b.    Advanced Institute (Terry Elliott and Michelle Johnson)-Follow-up meeting on November 7, 2009 - discussed how to get 21st Technology resources into apprehensive districts. 

c.    Expanding Our Offerings(Gaye Foster, Anne Padilla, Angela Lay, Pat Puckett)-$5000 renewal grant just got renewed-we are now working with Tier 2 and Tier 3 participants to try to build literacy in the classrooms-goal is to convince participants that they are the experts in their content areas-this year’s grant has 7 new teachers-each new teacher will become a mentor for the next year for another group of participants-we are excited that the process is actually working to help get others to buy in to this idea of teaching reading across the curriculum.

d.      Outreach (Mollie Wade and Laura Houchens) – Report on Jan-Aug 2009

 February/March-Collaborative Center for Literacy Development-went to work with GED teachers-met 2 days in February and 2 days in March, April-Bookfest, July 14-15, Literacy Matters conference-presenters, Mollie Wade, Laura Houchens, Pat Puckett, Michele McLoughan, Sara Jennings, Bobbi Taylor, Larissa Haynes, Audrey Harper, Kim Thomason, and Terry Elliott,

Report on  September- December 2009

October and November have a variety of happenings, including Writing for College at Russellville High School, Mollie at Hardin County-literacy strategies for at risk youths, and a new teacher workshop on October 22, in conjunction with the WKU Teacher Ed department.  Also, on October 31, Belinda Stark and Renee Murray are presenting two workshops at Elizabethtown High School (see Project website) and on November 7, Angela Gunter and Patrice McCrary are presenting a National Board Certified Teacher workshop.

e.    John reported that the Teacher-Inquiry group is going strong with 10 Fellows as members.  They had a face to face meeting on August 31 and will have a live chat on October 17 at 9 am. 

f.    Discussion about funding-we are approved providers for Gear Up, NCLB, as well as a variety of other funding providers-if it deals with literacy we are an approved provider-need to send a letter or email to districts, and principals, reminding them that we are an approved provider and some of the services that we offer-Sara suggested we have a similar workshop for middle school students

g.      New teacher workshop on October 22-target audience is new teachers or teachers with less than 3 years experience-limited to 40 people.

IV.      Looking Ahead

a.    Jamie suggested that we need to look at offering more PD at the end of the school year when people are getting desperate to finish up their PD hours for the current school year.  Need to saturate emails about the offerings.  Might be the time to do a Webinar-might be more attractive to the person who needs it quick.

b.      Possible workshop for people interested in the NBCT process now planned for November 7 in Bowling Green.

c.    Continuity-Denise Henry, our new Continuity director, discussed a possible writing retreat for our project, based on her experience this past summer at the Cavanagh Life Center: start with a mid-day luncheon, immediate writing, silent writer response group-writer never says anything, three others talk about your piece and they cannot ask you questions-no defense of writing, do this with each person in group for 15 minutes, spend another hour in group discussion and then go into peer conferencing, sessions offered throughout the day-could use the piece you are working on at the time.  Purpose was for adult writing but could be adapted for all grade levels from kindergarten to 12th grade.  Participants stayed on site and were immersed in writing for 3 days.  Gallery walk was fabulous-took one piece and read other writing for an hour and a half.  Good way to network new project fellows with older project fellows.  Mollie asked Denise to come to Summer project to do a mini-lesson using her experience from the retreat.  John suggested having some book focus groups, perhaps based on the work of Billy Collins and Gurney Norman since poet Billy Collins is coming to WKU in April 2010 and Gurney Norman in March, 2010.  Mollie suggested that Denise talk to Sheila Thompson at GRREC.

d.    Next meeting:  January 23, 2010 9:00 am at Cherry Hall.

Respectfully submitted

Pat Puckett

Secreatary, pro temp