Lesson Planning Aligned to Standards, Assessments, and Research - Literacy Strategies Consulting

Structured, Systematic, and Engaging Lesson Planning: Creating Lessons Key to Student Success

Jennifer Serravallo's team of literacy specialists at Literacy Strategies Consulting can guide you and your colleagues in planning a custom curriculum, creating unit plans and lessons from scratch, or adapting existing curricula to better align with your state standards and student assessment data.

Proven Curriculum Ensuring All Students Succeed in All Subjects, Grades K-12

Educators must plan for the most appropriate and sequential content, materials, and methods to ensure a comprehensive and engaging scope and sequence for learners across grade levels and subjects. Our team can support you and your colleagues in the journey of lesson planning by: 

• Ensuring alignment with state standards
• Evaluating student assessment data and crafting plans based on student needs
• Focusing on engagement and motivation and creating lessons that require active student participation
• Sequencing content logically and progressively ensures students within and across grade levels can build upon their knowledge and skills incrementally, without gaps or confusion
• Prepare for differentiation by considering necessary adaptations and modifications for those who need them
• Evaluating the effectiveness of lessons through progress monitoring and making adjustments to future plans based on student response
• Teaching coaches and administrators how to support professional growth throughout the process by using reflection and revision, leading educators toward more refined instructional techniques
• Increasing the focus on literacy skills and strategies within content area literacy
• Supporting small group instruction planning based on formative assessment
• Using universal design concepts to ensure access for all student learning profiles
• Adapting lessons to meet the needs of students with IEPs and multilingual learners
  

Creating Original Teaching Frameworks

Why create a curriculum from scratch?

Creating original lesson and unit plans provides educators with the opportunity to consider their unique school and district context, their students' needs, and their own areas of passion and expertise, resulting in engaging plans that they have ownership of and which students will find culturally relevant and sustaining, and engaging. We find that educators who engage in this work develop a deep understanding of the content they'll be teaching and the intentions behind the decisions they make when creating the curriculum. When we help educators create their own curriculum, we spotlight what matters most at every step of the process: student needs, research, and standards. 

How do we do it?

We start by unpacking your state standards, student performance data, and district goals. We then utilize existing standard alignment documents that highlight key points of synergy between the goals and skill progressions in Jennifer Serravallo's bestselling resources, The Reading Strategies Book 2.0 and The Writing Strategies Book. Next, we help you create a big-picture scope and sequence to ensure alignment across grades and from month to month within each grade for literacy (reading and writing) and the content areas. We then map out grade-specific learning objectives for each unit. Finally, we develop a bank of strategies aligned to each unit objective, knowledge and vocabulary goals, and help you make text selections to ensure students work with grade-level appropriate texts. We also help teachers flesh out detailed plans using the nine research-based lesson structures explored in Serravallo's newest title, Teaching Reading Across the Day.

Adapting Core Curriculum with Supplemental Lessons and Revised Instructional Blueprints

Why adapt plans from your core curriculum?

Your district may have invested in a core program filled with ready-to-go lessons and resources. But are they really ready? As tempting as it may be to teach straight from the box, the reality is that teachers still need to plan to ensure their lessons align with what their students need and include activities, procedures, and materials that will engage their students. Adaptation is critical: research into teacher quality and effectiveness has shown that teachers, more than materials, have the biggest impact on student growth and achievement. This is because expert teachers make adaptations. We can help.

How do we do it?

Alongside literacy leaders, we first review the expected outcomes, goals, objectives, and/or enduring understandings of the curriculum you're using. Then, we examine student data to understand which goals are most needed for all students and what small-group instruction might be warranted. We'll utilize Jennifer Serravallo's The Reading Strategies Book 2.0 and The Writing Strategies Book to find research-aligned strategies, as well as her book Teaching Reading Across the Day for lesson structures. Next, we teach teachers a streamlined process to adapt existing lessons to effective templates for explicit instruction that help teachers highlight literacy skills, knowledge development, and vocabulary growth in an efficient and effective manner.

We've already studied and have created correlations for these five commonly used core programs and worked with several districts that use them, but we can work with districts using any core program to teach our process for lesson adaptation:

• Expeditionary Learning (EL Education)
• Amplify CKLA
• Wonders
• Wit and Wisdom
• HMH Into Reading
  

We can also support coaches and administrators in evaluating lesson effectiveness and providing meaningful, constructive feedback to educators on their plans and implementation, which will impact their future planning.