Marcia Nye Boody, Director of the Maine Literacy Partnership from the University of Maine at Orono, visited on Wednesday. She toured the school and met teachers, students, and Steve. Marcia brings knowledge and skills about best practices with literacy learning. She shared with Steve that MLP is a partner with the University of Arkansas where Dr. Linda Dorn conducts research in lab schools and writes about the results and conclusions in many resources for teachers such as Teaching for Deeper Comprehension that describes the Reader's Workshop and other components of Balanced Literacy.
As students left at the end of the day, Marcia stopped to talk about authors and books. She asked if the students would like to have her share one of her favorite books and she told them the author was from Maine. Well, that prompted many curious questions and name dropping. Who knew these first graders knew so much about Maine authors. It was impressive.
A casual tour of the school resulted in many introductions to the friendly staff at Williams-Cone. Marcia did share that it was obvious to her that this was a school that cared about children because all classrooms were filled with focused and engaged students. I'm sure Marcia left thinking that this is a very fine school for teaching and learning! If you didn't get a chance to meet her today, I'm sure she'll be back. :-)