GLAD
Key Trainers: Mrs. Gaw, Mrs. Gingras
Corbett Elementary is a Guided Language Acquisition Design (GLAD) school. GLAD is an instructional model (United States Department of Education Project of Academic Excellence) that promotes English language acquisition, literacy, academic learning and achievement, and cross-cultural skills. As a research-based instructional model, GLAD promotes a classroom environment that values every student's personal, linguistic, and cultural experiences. It also provides authentic opportunities for use of academic language and maintains the highest standards and expectations for all students.
Through GLAD, Corbett teachers integrate the content areas and direct teaching of meta-cognitive strategies, which make learning more relevant, challenging, and meaningful, thus, insuring more efficient and effective student learning. GLAD strategies are best teaching practices, which foster oral language development through negotiations for meaning, dialogues, open discussions and personal interactions, reading and writing as a process, cross-cultural understanding, and test-taking skills. GLAD utilizes the scaffolding model: teaching whole class, small groups, and individual practice. It values standard-based instructional delivery, differentiated instruction, teacher collaboration, student motivation, direct teaching, comprehensible input and output, social skills development, flexible groupings, primary language, and diversity.
Most importantly, Corbett administrators and teachers are committed to creating a language functional environment that aims to produce effective, literate life-long learners of a global society.
CELL/ExLL
The Foundation for Comprehensive Early Literacy Learning (CELL) is a project that provides professional development designed to help teachers strengthen their teaching of reading and writing. Roger Corbett adopted the project several years ago. The project provides a framework in which to deliver instruction. CELL (PreKindergarten- grade 3) emphasizes that the instructional focus in primary grades is to teach reading and writing. ExLL (Extended Literacy Learning for grades 3-8) focuses on reading and writing in the content areas while recognizing that some children in the intermediate grades are still struggling readers.
The PreK framework is carefully designed to help the beginning reader develop the necessary skills to master alphabetic principle, phonemic awareness, and concepts about print in a literature-rich environment. The following is the CELL framework for classroom instruction.
| Oral Language | Phonological Skills |
| Read Aloud | Shared Reading |
| Guided Reading | Independent Reading |
| Interactive Writing and Editing | Independent Writing |
These are the elements that you will observe when visiting your child's classroom in grades K-3.
The ExLL framework is aligned with the CELL framework and is designed to help the wide range of readers in the intermediate grades extend their essential skills while reading and writing in the content areas. Again, these are the elements that you would observe while visiting your child's classroom in grades 3-6.
| Phonological Skills | Shared Reading |
| Independent reading | Read Aloud |
| Independent writing | Directed Reading |
| Oral Presentation | Directed Writing |