Vision: The mission of the literacy leaders is to provide guidance, training, and collaborative support to all D-11 teachers and stakeholders as they develop the literacy curriculum and embed research-based literacy instruction to ensure the academic achievement and career success of our students and graduates.

Guiding Principles
Recognizing that reading and writing are transactional communications, that is, that reading and writing serve as dialogue between people, the literacy vision in Colorado Springs School District 11 is guided by the following principles:

• All students are capable of growing as readers and writers.
• All students benefit from research-based literacy practices embedded in all content areas.
• An effective Writing Across the Curriculum vision has as its guiding principles:
  • Writing develops through meaningful practice.
  • Writing is a situated and recursive process.
  • Writing and reading are interrelated.
  • Different writing situations impose different demands.
• Similarly, effective reading instruction
  • Meets the specific needs of individual students as they work with increasingly complex texts;
  • Addresses the reading challenges of content-specific and professional texts; and
  • Fosters in students a joy of reading.
• Finally, we believe that a meaningful language arts curriculum provides students with a window into the experiences of other people and cultures and also serves as a mirror to one’s own experiences in world in which relationships with others and an understanding of the human condition is paramount.

In short, effective literacy instruction empowers students to communicate in a wide range of situations, environments, and with a variety of purposes in the world.

About Literacy in District 11
Literacy is more than a set of discrete reading and writing skills developed sequentially over time. Literacy is not a distinct content area of its own. Instead, literacy skills provide the way into, through, and beyond the academic disciplines and professional texts in one’s life. As District 11 teachers continue to embed research-based instructional practices into their classroom teaching, we enable students to become consumers and producers of a wide variety of texts.