The Webster Central School District is dedicated to a student-centered, innovative, rigorous literacy program where:

STUDENTS

• Are engaged in and value literacy as a life skill;
• Are known, challenged, and believed in as learners in a safe environment that values literacy;
• Identify, articulate, and demonstrate the strategies of good readers and writers;
• Help guide their own personal literacy achievement pathways through personal goal setting;
• Interact with text at their independent levels the great majority of each school day;
• Are challenged at their literacy instructional levels a portion of each school day;
• Access engaging materials that they can read, understand and learn from on their own;
• Use literacy strategies in multiple contexts to learn and problem solve, both in school and outside of school.

TEACHERS

• Demonstrate and articulate a common understanding of a comprehensive, balanced literacy program focused on student goals and outcomes;
• Build on their own teaching strengths while capitalizing on student capabilities and student learning strengths;
• Incorporate innovative, powerful, differentiated, literacy practices in daily work with students;
• Create supportive and challenging classroom cultures that immerse students in literacy and promote student risk taking;
• Effectively use professional learning communities to drive 1) decisions about assessment; 2) the analysis of assessment data; and 3) implications for changes in instruction;
• Regularly participate in high quality, authentic, differentiated District and school-wide professional development and implement the content and skills into daily practice;
• Nurture new and deeper partnerships with parents and community leaders to promote literacy and create supportive literacy cultures at home.

SCHOOLS and SCHOOL LEADERS

• Support the sustained and accessible professional literacy learning through ongoing, job-embedded, collaborative implementation of powerful, innovative practices;
• Create and sustain structures to support frequent conversations about literacy using common District language;
• Demonstrate understanding of the essential literacy outcomes for each grade level and support the alignment of these consistent outcomes across the grade levels;
• Guarantee clear, consistent literacy outcomes for each grade level;
• Showcase literacy instruction that is differentiated based on readiness, learning profile, and/or interest.

PARENTS and COMMUNITY

• Support engagement in relevant and authentic literacy applications;
• Interact with children to support and sustain developmental literacy;
• Are invested in literacy partnerships among parents, schools, and the community to promote high levels of literacy.
• The approach anchors the teaching of reading and writing in the practice of the gradual release of responsibility, which allows students to progressively take ownership of their learning through the thoughtful instruction and guidance of the classroom teacher.