Each Collaboratory cohort consists of five to seven cross-curricular middle school and/or high school teams. Each team contains five members: a math, science, social studies, and English/language arts teacher and a team leader. The team leader can be a literacy coach, a professional development coordinator, a curriculum supervisor, an assistant principal for instruction, a library/media specialist, or a department head with a literacy background. A Collaboratory cohort may include teams from different secondary schools across the United States and its territories, multiple schools within a state, various schools within a district, or several teams from one school. Most cohorts have about 30 participants.

Through a blend of online and face-to-face activities, team members collaborate with each other and with a literacy expert and content-area coaches to read about, discuss, and experiment with research-based strategies for literacy-rich instruction in the content areas. The process culminates in the creation of a series of lessons, which are observed by team colleagues and videotaped for online feedback and refinement.

Each year-long Collaboratory includes three components:

1. Orientation Institute: 5 days of intensive face-to-face work (July, August or September)
2. Online & Team Interaction: 30 weeks of online coaching and peer discussions integrated with on-site lesson observations and team meetings (September–May)
3. Reflection & Sustainability Planning: 1 full day of online or face-to-face activities with literacy expert, coaches, and Collaboratory manager (May or June)

The Adolescent Literacy Collaboratory draws on resources for content-area literacy instruction in the Adolescent Literacy section of The Knowledge Loom (http://knowledgeloom.org/adlit), a professional development Web site maintained by The Education Alliance at Brown University. The Knowledge Loom's Web resources are supplemented by readings from recent research on adolescent literacy that are updated annually.

School-Wide, District-Wide, or Regional
If you are interested in a larger-scale literacy initiative, you can choose a one-year Collaboratory involving at least five teams from the same school, district, or region. The five-day Orientation Institute can be held at your site at a mutually convenient time, if travel/lodging expenses for the facilitators and catering expenses for the participants are covered.

Multi-Year
Schools and districts can choose to participate at any level and for any length of time between one year and three years. Three-year involvement is designed to build capacity within the school or district to conduct its own Adolescent Literacy Collaboratories.