Summer Literacy Institutes

Teaching reading and writing within prescribed curricula can sometimes feel like a treadmill—high expectations, pacing guides, and standardized goals can overshadow the joy of learning.  

This graduate course invites teachers to reconnect with the passion that drew them to the classroom. Through opportunities to revisit what we know about children and learning, reflect on what’s working and what isn’t, and remix required assignments into engaging, student-centered experiences, participants will explore strategies to reimagine instruction, recharge their creative energy, and reenergize their classrooms.  

By the end of the course, teachers will have practical tools to balance curriculum demands with authentic, joyful reading and writing experiences for every learner. 

Are your students full of ideas but struggling to get them onto the page? 
This hands-on, one-week graduate course is designed for teachers who want practical, research-based tools to help struggling writers succeed—without adding more to their plates. Using evidence-based practices and methods, participants will learn how to make writing visible, explicit, and teachable for all students, especially those who struggle with writing, organization, sentence construction, and academic language. This course shows teachers how to help students understand how language works to create meaning across different types of writing, in ELA, but also in Science, Social Studies, Humanities, ELL, etc. 

Teachers will explore real classroom texts and student writing, learn how to break down complex writing tasks, and practice scaffolding instruction so students can confidently write narratives, explanations, and arguments. The strategies learned are immediately applicable and especially powerful for multilingual learners and reluctant writers. 

By the end of the week, participants will leave with ready-to-use lessons, language scaffolds, and a deeper understanding of how to support student writing growth. This course is ideal for teachers who want clear tools, practical strategies, and a fresh way to think about teaching writing in their classrooms. 

Come explore the notebook as a creative laboratory, a slow sacred space where observation, imagery, and poetic language thrives and grows;  a place to collect and capture the ordinary and the extraordinary as we develop voice, form, rhythm, and metaphor.   Poetry gives notebooking purpose and structure, helping the writer identify patterns, passions and emergent themes. 

Through a blend of seminar discussion, guided writing sessions, and close reading of contemporary poets, we will practice using the notebook to gather fragments, sensory details, sketches, and moments from lived experience. 

The course emphasizes low-stakes, high-frequency writing as a method for cultivating poetic inquiry, as well as strategies and classroom practices for poetic notebooking with students. 

For hundreds of years writers have combined genres in a single work of literature: think of modern literature for children and young adults. Think, too, of classic literature like Moby Dick, John Dos Passos’ trilogy USA, and the poetry and copper etchings of William Blake. Blending genres is nothing new. Doing so in academic settings, however, is rare, though not as rare as it was before multigenre writing burst into classrooms in the late 1980s. Since then, some teachers at just about every level of education across the land are leading students into writing multigenre research papers. Participants in this course  will explore how to weave multigenre into their curricula, how to support students in their multigenre projects, and how to assess students’ growth and accomplishment. For the culminating project, participants will create their own multigenre research papers about personally important topics. Topics and activities include: 

• Daily writing workshop 
• Conferences with instructor 
• Peer response to writing 
• Study and practice of various genres/subgenres 
• Evaluation of multigenre papers 
• Examination of how multigenre meets CCSS 
• Speculation about how multigenre fits into the K-12 curriculum 
• Strategies to communicate the impact of MGP to school leadership

Instructors:

Tom Romano is retired from Miami University. He gardens, reads, and writes what comes along. His most recent book is A Boyhood at Red’s: Growing up in His Dad’s Neighborhood Bar. He and his wife live in Oxford, Ohio, where he spends considerable time walking Rocco, their two-year-old mafioso Cavachon. He can be reached at romanots@miamioh.edu

Angela Gomez is an 8th-grade English Language Arts teacher at Seth Low Middle School in Brooklyn, NY. She earned her MST from the University of New Hampshire in the summer of 2020. Over the past nine years, Angela has been an advocate for cultivating an organic joy for reading and writing in her classroom. She helps lead curriculum teams focused on integrating Social-Emotional practices for both students and teachers, as well as developing curriculum that supports a Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS) for the diverse learners in her school community. Angela previously co-taught a course at UNH, The Mindful Teacher, and is excited to join Tom Romano to share the benefits that Multi-Genre Projects have to offer.

This three-day workshop will bring together teachers and cultural leaders who will share best practices on incorporating archival materials in teaching language arts, social studies, and humanities. The course is also a wonderful experience for librarians and coaches. We’ll go on a walking tour of the Black Heritage Trail of New Hampshire and visit the historical site of the African-American novelist, Harriet E. Wilson, in New Hampshire. With historian and digital archive specialist, Kabria Baumgartner, we will learn how to integrate these powerful first-hand accounts and stories, along with other primary source materials, in our classrooms. Recommended for teachers, coaches, and librarians in Grades 3-12, 

This workshop, which can be taken for graduate credit, explores storytelling, primary sources, digital archives – bringing together language arts, research, humanities, and social studies-- to illustrate how teachers, coaches, and librarians can successfully bring these resources and stories into their curriculum and classrooms.  We ask three central questions: 

We can arrange transportation to sites if needed.