The National Literacy Project began as the Florida Literacy Project (FLP) in 2000 and sponsored its first state-wide literacy summer institute in Tallahassee, Florida. More than 100 educators attended the five-day institute. FLP continued offering services to schools and districts during the next two years. In 2002, FLP leaders formed the National Literacy Project (NLP) as a non-profit organization. Since then, NLP has maintained long term relationships with many schools and districts in Florida and throughout the country. 

NLP (along with other colleagues) developed has designed a five stage process for developing, implementing, monitoring, and sustaining an effective literacy action plan. This process is based on the Taking Action Literacy Leadership Model shown below and has been field tested in numerous schools and districts across the country. It is fully described in Taking the Lead on Adolescent Literacy co-published by Corwin Press and the International Reading Association in 2010.

If you are a school or district literacy leader, one of your tasks is to support teachers and administrators as they help students develop literacy skills necessary for success in college, in the workplace, and as citizens. The National Literacy Project (NLP) offers you innovative consulting services, products, and tools along with a systemic team-building process to support your efforts to improve the literacy success in your school and/or district.

The NLP Team has developed a five stage process for developing, implementing, and monitoring a literacy action plan for an upper elementary, middle, or high school. The five stages are: Get Ready, Assess, Plan, Implement, and Sustain. Schools assess themselves using Literacy Action Rubrics, write goals, and develop an implementation map (or plan) for each goal. Our services include helping literacy teams and other school leaders use data to make decisions, build leadership capacity, support teachers to improve instruction, and allocate resources to improve literacy among students. For a report on the results of NLP projects from 2007-2011, see this report.