#6 Seminar Four on October 13, 2010

Time: 12:00-1:00 pm Wednesday October 13, 2010

Place: Warf-Pickle 403

Presenter 1: Dr. Virginia Foley (ELPA) 

Topic: Teacher Leadership Academy from Conception to Reality

Presenter 2:
Dr. Rosalind Gann (CUAI)
Topic: Beyond Alphabetic Literacy: Lessons from the Chinese

Powerpoint: Gann's PPT; Foley's PPT

Virginia Foley’s Topic Teacher Leadership Academy from Conception to Reality

Summary: As the role of school leadership changes, more emphasis is placed on teacher leadership.  See and hear how a central office administrator, a university professor, and a local business partner created and delivered a Leadership Academy for teachers in Kingsport City Schools.  Emergent design was the model for delivering this professional development to teacher leaders in this district.   Participant Outcomes Participants will Learn about the application and selection processes to participate in the academy Learn about what designers see as the basics for a leadership academy Learn how sessions were designed in response to participant feedback Lean how evaluation of sessions and of the academy is directing the form of the next academy Lean how business can provide support in ways other than dollars Learn how professional practice has changed for academy alumni

Rosalind Gann's Topic Beyond Alphabetic Literacy: Lessons from the Chinese

Summary: In this presentation, I discuss what American reading educators might learn from a 2006 field study of Chinese reading instruction, conducted while I was in residence at the University of Shandong at Weihai. The notion of cuing systems in reading serves as a theoretical frame for this inquiry into Chinese reading pedagogy. Eighteen school teachers in Nanjing and Weihai were questioned about the way reading is taught in China. Informal observations of Chinese classrooms were also conducted. Collaborators were a renowned American language and literacy educator, Dr. Martha Collins and Liu Wei, a Chinese academic specializing in English. Unlike English, the Chinese writing system is not alphabetic; rather it is ideographic. A variety of methods is employed to teach characters: visual discrimination, morphemic analysis; syntactic and textual context; pragmatic use, kinesthesia in writing. Some of these techniques are relevant to American reading practice, if allowances for language differences are made.