Honoring Local Context: Designing Collaborative Pre-K–12 School Literacy Action Plans

A literacy plan holds the potential to drive instruction and impact student learning, but too often once these plans are created, they sit on a shelf and are of no practical value to teachers doing the daily work of improving student literacy. This mixed-methods study investigated a statewide research–practice partnership with pre-K–12 teachers to design school literacy action plans that are inquiry based, culturally relevant, and responsive to local contexts. Our approach to literacy plan design supported educators through professional learning around co-constructed goals and initiated an iterative process of inquiry, revision, and growth. Initial needs/assets surveys, follow-up reflections and evaluations, and literacy plan documents provided evidence that a collaborative process in designing literacy plans is key and that teachers need to be supported as leaders in their schools to best build on their own literacy understandings and incorporate new evidence-based knowledge.