Four dynamic, knowledgeable speakers, all experts on early literacy education, will contribute their ideas, wisdom and inspiration to a special week-long Institute designed for new teachers with less than four years of experience. The Institute, a partnership of CLI and Arcadia University, was developed to provide new teachers with effective strategies for using literacy instruction as a means to successful classroom management and will be held in August, 2002. Please click on the link for more information: Institute for New Teachers.

• The keynote speaker will be Dorothy S. Strickland, the State of New Jersey Professor of Reading at Rutgers University. A former classroom teacher, she received her doctorate in Early Childhood and Elementary Education from New York University. Dr. Strickland is the author of a key work in the field of early literacy, Emerging Literacy: Young Children Learn to Read and Write, and has written extensively about literacy instruction and working with low-income and at-risk children. She is a past president of the International Reading Association and served on the National Research Council panel that produced the book Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children.
  
  
• Children's author, Jean Marzollo, creator of the "I Spy" series, will be the dinner speaker. For twenty years the editor of Scholastic's kindergarten magazine, she has written over a hundred children's books in the past thirty years. Ms. Marzollo has a particular interest in speaking to teachers' groups about how her books can be used to help children develop phonemic awareness through rhythm and rhyme, and about the use of children's literature to inspire student writing. She is a former teacher herself, who holds a Masters in Teaching from Harvard Graduate School of Education. Titles by Ms. Marzollo that are included in the CLI classroom collections include I'm a Seed; I am a Leaf; Mama, Mama; and the I Spy Little Book.
  
  
• Lilian G. Katz, Professor Emerita of Early Childhood Education at the University of Illinois (Champaign-Urbana), and Director of the ERIC Clearinghouse on Elementary and Early Childhood Education will deliver the endnote speech. Professor Katz is the author of more than one hundred publications, including journal articles, chapters, and books about early childhood education, teacher education, and parenting. Her books include Engaging Children's Minds: The Project Approach, Advances in Teacher Education and Talks with Teachers: A Collection. She received her doctorate in School Education and Psychological Studies from Stanford University. She has also taught abroad, including at institutions in Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, and India.
  
  
• Also featured will be CLI's Deputy Director for Program Development, Dr. Jack McGovern, who oversees CLI's training department. He will discuss ideas about working with challenging kids and using rituals and routines to build classroom communities. An experienced teacher himself, in 1981 Dr. McGovern received the Rose Lindenbaum Award for Most Distinguished Teacher for his work in inner-city Philadelphia public schools. Additionally, he has been a principal at a number of highly successful schools, and is an Adjunct Professor for the University of Pennsylvania Literacy Network and Arcadia University.

CLI's Institute for new teachers, named "Getting it Together: Classroom Management through Effective Literacy Instruction," will take place on the campus of Arcadia University (formerly Beaver College) in Glenside, PA (a suburb of Philadelphia), August 5-9, 2002. CEUs and graduate credits are available. For more information, click here to view the Institute for New Teachers.

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"Children's access to books is so fundamental that it is often overlooked. In recent years, school and classroom libraries have deteriorated." This sad statement was published in 2000 in a position paper by the International Reading Association. The IRA has declared that children have a right to access to a wide variety of books as one of 10 crucial principles of classroom practice that must be followed if all children are to learn to read and write.

Research confirms the benefits of access to books, reading, and stories. Providing young students with classroom book collections increases their reading and the likelihood that they will choose "literature activities" during their free time. When teachers read to children and discuss the stories, the children in turn show more interest in reading themselves. Furthermore, children who are read to regularly from a varied collection of books show impressive gains in vocabulary development and comprehension.

In short, young children need access to a wealth of literature and many opportunities to hear language and listen to stories read aloud. Children need to enjoy looking at books with an adult and being read to several times a day, almost every day, from before they're a year old through third grade at least.

CLI provides classroom collections of quality books to the teachers they train. In fact, since CLI was created in 1988, more than a million books have been shipped to classrooms ranging from preschool to third grade. A lot of thought, effort, and expertise on the part of CLI's program development staff goes into creating balanced and varied collections that contain only high-quality books. Here are some of the major criteria that are used when creating collections.

Quality classroom collection books:

• have interesting, varied vocabulary and rich uses of language that help the reader and listeners create mental images. Such books increase children's vocabulary and thus their reading comprehension skills;
  
  
• have well developed plots and characters that encourage children to use their imaginations and problem-solving abilities in thinking about the stories. Children enjoy hearing or reading such stories repeatedly, which helps to solidify their learning of new words and concepts;
  
  
• have outstanding illustrations that spark children's interest and add depth and detail to the written word.

A quality classroom collection:

• contains balance and variety in genre and type; with a mixture of fiction, folk tales, poetry, and non-fiction books, such as biographies and books about the natural world. Collections for very young children should include concept books that introduce children to colors, numbers, and shapes, while older children's collections should include some chapter books;
  
  
• contains balance and variety in the cultures that are depicted. Folk tales and legends are excellent ways to introduce students to the diversity of world cultures and traditions, as are many biographies and contemporary story books;
  
• contains balance and variety in illustration media and styles; with a mixture of photography, painting, drawing or cartooning, collage, and other art forms. Illustration styles that evoke other centuries and cultures (the Renaissance, ancient China) add more interest and sources of inspiration for classroom discussion.

To see suggestions of excellent read-aloud books made by CLI trainers and staff, go to Books for Reading Aloud.

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CLI is in the process of expanding its professional development activities with principals. They are currently working to develop an Institute that will provide principals with concepts and tools they need to enhance school-wide literacy efforts. Transforming literacy instruction throughout an entire school is a formidable task. In order to accomplish it, principals need to be knowledgeable about good literacy instruction and children's literature, and to be able to motivate teachers in the classroom, and coordinate school-wide efforts. Principals also have to consider what uses of time, space, and financial resources will best support literacy instruction. Furthermore, transforming instruction successfully necessarily involves transforming aspects of a school's culture.

In designing the Principals Institute, CLI is drawing from their work with principals over the years, including the Principals Study Group, and from CLI's Literacy Leadership Working Conference in October 2001, sponsored by the Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund and attended by over 20 literacy leaders, from nationally known authors to successful local principals. CLI's approach is also influenced by the school reform model put into practice by Superintendent Anthony Alvarado, first in District 2 in New York City, and currently in San Diego.

Based on the Literacy Leadership Conference, CLI has developed a Blueprint for Literacy Leadership, and a list of resources for principals that includes books, web sites, and organizations. To view, please click on: A Blueprint for Literacy Leadership.

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