**The Maine Professional Development Collaborative** is a group of highly skilled middle and high school teachers working with Don Leu and his colleagues at the [New Literacies Research Lab at the University of Connecticut](http://www.newliteracies.uconn.edu/news.html) to develop and study a powerful professional development model for 1-to-1 laptop classrooms. In 2009 the project is working to integrate online learning skills into the English and Science classroom. The project is structured in a team approach, where each colleague has an important voice and insights to share as they build the professional development model together through action research. The team will collectively build a new model of professional development that will prepare teachers, around the world, for teaching in 1-to-1 laptop classrooms, preparing students for their future in an online world of learning and work. This project uses a collaborative approach to create a professional development model for supporting the acquisition of online literacy and learning skills within 1-to-1 laptop classrooms. The collaboration will include exemplary classroom teachers, university researchers, and school leaders, each bringing their special insights to answer the question, *“How do we build the most effective professional development model possible to help teachers integrate the new literacies of online reading comprehension and learning into the classroom?”* The project will develop a pilot professional development model, which will be used to seek federal research grant funding for the State of Maine to evaluate and improve digital learning on a wider basis. The content will focus on developing expertise with the use of Internet Reciprocal Teaching (IRT) (Leu, et al, 2008), a research-based model for teaching online reading comprehension skills in 1-to-1 laptop classrooms. We will evaluate three different types of job-embedded professional development approaches: 1. A literacy coaching approach, where literacy coaches work collaboratively with classroom teachers to improve implementation of the IRT model. 2. A peer coaching approach, where two teachers in the same school support one another with the implementation of the IRT model. 3. An online coaching approach, where teachers and outside experts support the implementation of the IRT model with bi-weekly, isight videoconferences and an ongoing email discussion group. The project began by selecting exemplary classroom teachers at the middle and high school levels. A two- day professional development session at the beginning of the second semester, will be followed by pilot implementation in classrooms during the remainder of the spring semester. Mid-semester there will be a one-day professional development session followed by additional implementation. Immediately after school is out for summer, a two-day debriefing session will be used to both evaluate and revise the initial model. Pre and post tests of online reading comprehension, Internet dispositions, and school success will be administered to both students and teachers to measure changes during the course of the project. These data, with names, schools, and classrooms removed, will be available to participants as we evaluate the model together and make revisions. Central to this collaborative venture will be the insights, experiences, and recommendations of the classroom-teaching participants. We believe that participating teachers possess the most important information for building this innovative, collaborative model for professional development. Initiatives Within MICDL image/jpeg 2009-03-20T13:29:02Z 10 Don_Leu.jpg 200 22 34110

_The Maine Professional Development Collaborative_ is a group of highly skilled middle and high school teachers working with **Don Leu** and his colleagues at the [New Literacies Research Lab at the University of Connecticut](http://www.newliteracies.uconn.edu/index.html) to develop and study a powerful professional development model for 1-to-1 laptop classrooms. In 2009 the project is working to integrate online learning skills into the English and Science classroom. The project is structured in a team approach, where each colleague has an important voice and insights to share as they build the professional development model together through action research.

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