High Progress Literacy

Changing Learning. Changing Outcomes. Changing Lives.

High Progress Literacy is about helping students build academic capacity.

Ensuring college and career readiness requires that we help every student to develop academic capacity in grades K-12 so they know how to learn by reading, writing, and speaking the language of every discipline. In High Progress Literacy, students learn how to engage productively with complex disciplinary texts in order to learn content in every subject area.

Why is this our focus? Because the ability to make sense of complex text is the #1 predictor of success in college and the workforce (2006 ACT Study). Making sense. Figuring things out. It’s what we do.

About High Progress Literacy

We offer a full range of services for educators working to help students build academic capacity.

Our onsite coaching and professional learning experiences help instructional leaders, coaches, and teachers transform classrooms into student-centered learning labs. 

Our website is a storehouse of free tools and resources for educators working to build high progress classrooms where students spend most of their time engaged in reading, writing, and researching in appropriately challenging text in order to learn important content…learning to read and write like scientists, historians, mathematicians, engineers, musicians, artists, poets…

As one HPL educator said, “HPL just works.” In classrooms where teachers consistently implement the New Norms for Learning to engage students in reading, writing, and researching to learn content, we see increased capacity for learning and improved results…including test scores. 

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New Norms for Learning across the Disciplines

The New Norms for Learning in HPL are the processes real people in the real world use to make sense of large amounts of information. We call these processes the New Norms because over time, they become “the new normal” for what we do to learn in academic settings.

We know that we learn how to do anything by doing it. And we learn to do things well by doing them a lot. Students learn how to learn in academic settings by using the New Norms to engage productively in reading, writing, and researching so they can make sense of complex disciplinary texts across the curriculum.

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TextDepot

Engaging with appropriately challenging texts across the disciplines requires easy access to texts that teach your content. 

TextDepot is our free, collaborative repository of texts aligned to science and social studies learning standards. We help you build text sets to engage students in reading and writing across the curriculum. Even better, you get to access text sets built by other teachers who teach what you teach. When folks collaborate, the collection grows!

Need help to build a text set you don’t see in our collection? Contact Rachel, our curator. She’s here to help you. 

The Big Books Project in TextDepot provides free, teacher-created big books aligned with science and social studies standards for grades K-2. Download big books for free. Project them onto your Promethean board. Print out multiple copies to add to your text sets. Want to write a big book for our collection? We’d love that. Find out how. 

Learn More about TextDepot

Managing Time with a Workshop Approach

We use a workshop approach across the curriculum to adjust our use of time and students’ use of time, minimizing whole group instruction and maximizing the time students spend engaged in learning by doing.

We help teachers to customize instruction based on observations of students engaged in working on the work. We help you to coach, set goals, and plan your way to better and better learning outcomes.

More about the Workshop Approach

Fostering a Growth Mindset

Mindset (Dweck) is our underlying belief in the nature of our own intelligence and abilities. A Growth Mindset is the belief that our intelligences and abilities can change and develop. People who believe they can change their abilities are more likely to tackle new challenges, persevere in the face of difficulty and work to develop their and outgrow their current capabilities. They view challenges to their current abilities as opportunities to learn and see mistakes as a natural part of the learning process. People with a growth mindset learn how to reflect, plan and strategize their ways to better outcomes.
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Professional Learning Experiences

High Progress Literacy Associates provides onsite coaching and professional learning experiences for K-12 educators. We work side-by-side with district leaders, principals, coaches, and teachers to help you transform your K-12 classrooms into high progress literacy classrooms.
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ACT Prep Courses & Seminars

We offer 3-day trainings with all of the materials needed (syllabus, practice tests, lesson plans) so high schools can offer semester-long ACT prep courses. (Soon, we will offer SAT as well.)

We also offer 1-day seminars for high school teachers on how to incorporate ACT-like test prep into your daily practice across the curriculum.

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SC Read to Succeed Courses

We include R2S courses as part of the professional development package for districts who contract with HPLA for onsite coaching and professional learning experiences.

Please note that we do not offer courses without onsite coaching support nor do we offer courses to individuals at this time.

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Join us!

Join the growing ranks of HPL learners and educators. Sign up for a free account to access everything we offer. Or sign in if you already have an account with us. We’re glad you’re here!
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High Progress Literacy is copyright (c) 2022 by High Progress Literacy Associates, LLC. The materials on this site are free for individual use and for educational purposes. Any commercial use is strictly forbidden. Materials may not be redistributed without the express written permission of High Progress Literacy Associates, LLC.