Professional Development
Menu of NCFL Training Sessions
Comprehensive Family Literacy
Foundations in Family Literacy
Foundations in Family Literacy provides beginning family literacy practitioners with the framework needed to fully understand the comprehensive, four-component family literacy model. Foundations is designed to provide a basic overview of the principles and practices of family literacy and the research that supports those practices. This training can be delivered in a two-day or three-day format.
Starting a Family Literacy Program
Are you considering creating a family literacy program in your community? This one-day overview will take you through the basic steps of getting started. Topics covered include needs assessment, collaborative partners, program design, recruitment, assessment and evaluation.
Program Administration — Even Start
This training focuses on the development and management of Even Start family literacy programs that provide high-quality, research-based services to eligible families. Participants will learn how to apply the principles of Even Start legislative, regulatory, and guidance documents, with specific emphasis given to the 15 essential elements.
Collaborating for Component Integration
Collaborating for Component Integration guides participants toward integrating all four components of a family literacy program through the creation of core messages, assessment of levels of services and development of curricular connections based on the goals, needs and interests of families.
Evaluating Your Family Literacy Program
This informative and interactive training is designed to provide family literacy practitioners and administrators with the tools and skills necessary for evaluating a four-component family literacy program. Topics include data collection and management, reporting and use of an outside evaluator.
Recruitment and Retention in Family Literacy
This training is based on the research regarding adults’ motivation to attend educational programs, as well as on their persistence to stay in the program until they have met their needs. Through this highly interactive training, participants learn how to interpret the research and apply the findings to recruitment and retention efforts in their family literacy programs.
Children’s Literacy
Preschool Parent Workshops to Go
It’s 3 PM, you have a parent workshop scheduled for 7 — and there’s been no time to plan! Do you have a home visit tomorrow with no ideas? Based on the findings of the National Early Literacy Panel, this training provides participants with six workshops they can use with families as stand-alone presentations or in a continuing series. The topics cover the underlying building blocks of literacy development and emphasize ways parents can integrate language and literacy into their children’s daily lives through traditional family routines.
Elementary Parent Workshops to Go
Looking for ways to shift parent involvement to true parent engagement that improves student achievement? This training focuses on the skills and strategies important for educators of 5- to 10-year-old children. Specific focus is given to intentional and purposeful teaching strategies that parents can use to support their children’s reading acquisition. Participants leave this training with an understanding of research-based strategies to share with parents concerning students’ language and literacy skill development in the areas of creating a home learning environment, phonics and phonemic awareness, vocabulary development, fluency and comprehension.
Literacy Everywhere, All of the Time: An Introduction to National Early Literacy Panel Findings
What interventions impact preschoolers? What early literacy practices does research support? Learn what the National Early Literacy Panel (NELP) has to say about interventions and practices that build foundational early literacy skills and lead to successful reading outcomes. Early literacy is not a stand-alone topic, to be truly effective it needs to be embedded into environments, daily schedules, activities and interactions.
Children’s Literacy — Infants and Toddlers
This two-day training focuses on the research-based skills and strategies that promote language and literacy learning in infants and toddlers, delivered within the context of children’s everyday experiences, routines, environments and relationships.
Children’s Literacy — Preschool
This two-day training focuses on the research-based skills and strategies important for preparing preschool teachers to help get children ready to read. A specific focus on intentional and purposeful teaching through an assessment-to-instruction process is emphasized.
Read Together, Reach for the Stars: Dialogic Reading Workshops
This train-the-trainer session will help staff provide parents with the knowledge and skills needed in order to use dialogic reading techniques with their children. Dialogic reading is a research-based technique that can be used effectively with children ages 2 through 5. Participants will leave with materials to deliver eight one-hour parent workshops based on the findings of the National Early Literacy Panel (NELP), research supporting dialogic reading and the work of Dr. Grover “Russ” Whitehurst.
Adult Education
Research-Based Strategies for Adult Reading Instruction
This training introduces the components of reading that may contribute to a reading problem: alphabetic skills, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. It suggests research-based instructional strategies for improving adults’ reading skills by addressing their needs in the reading-component areas.
Building Fluency and Comprehension for Adult Readers
This session offers a brief overview of the components of reading with a focus on research-based strategies and resources to improve reading fluency and comprehension. Participants will learn and practice a sampling of instructional activities in these two component areas that can be used in their programs to help adults improve their reading skills. This also can be offered as the second day of a two-day session with Research-Based Strategies for Adult Reading Instruction.
Parent Involvement
All Your Parents = AYP
Parent involvement is a strategy that can support student achievement and adequate yearly progress (AYP). When parents are actively involved in the support of children’s education, both children and schools make gains. The question remains — how do teachers and schools really get parents involved at this level? All Your Parents = AYP approaches the parent involvement dilemma from a systems-change approach. Learn how teachers, parent involvement coordinators, leadership teams and parents can work together to embed parent involvement into the everyday school environment — and keep the momentum going. Based on a review of the most current literature related to parent involvement and aligned with No Child Left Behind, All Your Parents = AYP provides schools and districts with a comprehensive framework to make changes in efforts to effectively engage parents.
Participants attending this training will receive a core set of materials to support the beginning stages of implementation in their schools or districts. The recommended audience for this training is teachers, parent involvement coordinators/liaisons, school leadership team members, principals, administrators and parents who are ready for leadership responsibilities. Since this framework focuses on a team approach, it may be helpful for school staff to attend in teams.
Parent-Mentor/Parents Building Readers
Bring this innovative training to your early childhood program and build a community of parent mentors who are engaged in supporting their children’s literacy. Parents can be trained directly, or staff can attend a train-the-trainer workshop. All materials are available in English and Spanish and can be customized for Head Start or non-Head Start audiences.
The training will help parents:
- Expand what they are already doing to support their children’s learning.
- Better understand their children’s learning experiences and extend those experiences beyond the classroom.
- Recognize new opportunities in everyday routines to support their children’s learning.
- Encourage other parents to take a more active role in promoting children’s school readiness.
Financial Opportunity: Family Progress
This financial literacy workshop offers a framework for teaching parents and children basic concepts about managing money. Participants will learn effective strategies for teaching parents about long- and short-term financial planning, practice ways to engage preschool children in basic financial activities at home using the Family Financial Pay Pack and explore interactive ideas for parent-child.
Home Visits That Open Doors
Research indicates that implementing a successful home visiting program begins with planning and staffing. The importance of parental support of children’s literacy development also has been proven through research. Will that support be incidental or intentional? In this training, discover parent-supported activities that, done with intentionality, can make early literacy development a reality.
Building Literacy into Your Parent Education Curriculum
The Parent Time component in family literacy is an ideal time to build parents’ skills as their children’s first teachers. This training will provide research-based strategies that parents can learn in Parent Time and practice in PACT Time® to impact their children’s literacy development.
English Language Learners
Parenting for Academic Success: A Curriculum for Families Learning English
This interactive training supports a curriculum product developed by the National Center for Family Literacy in collaboration with the Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL) and K. Lynn Savage, educational consultant. Teachers, administrators and family literacy practitioners will learn to use the curriculum and explore complete lesson plans and unique features as they plan for its implementation in a variety of program settings.
Talking About Wordless Picture Books: A Tutor Strategy Supporting English Language Learners
Discover a program that builds confidence for teachers, tutors, parents and children while taking English language learning beyond the classroom and across generations. This training explores research-based program tools to support the needs of families who are learning English. This session is appropriate for adult educators, ELL or ESL instructors, family literacy administrators and teachers, tutors and parents.