The UC Davis School of Education and Twin Rivers Unified School District will host a Youth Poetry Slam assembly on Oct. 14 to celebrate a new literacy project, “Closing the Achievement Gap Write Now.”

The project will be financed with a nearly $1 million grant to the School of Education that will be presented during the afternoon program.

The assembly, to include performances from poet mentors and an open microphone for students who want to perform, will start at 1 p.m. at Martin Luther King Jr. Technology Academy, 3051 Fairfield St., Sacramento.

The three-year grant from the California Postsecondary Education Commission will finance a project to help middle and high school English teachers strengthen their teaching.

Vajra Watson, director of research and policy for equity at the School of Education and coordinator of the Sacramento Area Youth Speaks (SAYS) poetry program, will head the project with Chris Thaiss, director of the UC Davis University Writing Program. Karen Smith of the Area 3 Writing Project at UC Davis will also provide expertise in teacher professional development.

“I am excited about bringing SAYS and the Writing Project together to create an in-depth professional development experience for teachers,” said Watson. “We will work with teachers to incorporate strategies and tools into their teaching of writing that will be exciting and empowering for their students.”

The project will work specifically with English and English language development teachers at Martin Luther King Jr. Technology Academy and Grant Union High School, both in the Twin Rivers district.

The initiative is designed to increase teachers’ content knowledge, improve their writing instruction and ability to analyze writing. At the same time, it will seek to boost secondary students’ academic achievement in writing, as measured by standardized tests, the high school exit exam and district written assessments.

Earlier in the summer, the state commission awarded two other “Improving Teacher Quality” grants to the School of Education:

• $1 million to expand another teacher training program known as the Pacific Coast Teacher Innovation Network. Through the program, faculty from UC Davis and Humboldt State University work with teams of teachers at public, private and charter schools to improve teaching skills and mastery of the subjects they teach.

• $525,000 to education professor Rebecca Ambrose. With the four-year grant, Ambrose and a team of researchers and educators from UC Davis, the Sacramento County Office of Education and the Robla School District of north Sacramento will provide enhanced professional development for kindergarten through sixth-grade mathematics teachers.

All of the grants have been funded with money from the federal No Child Left Behind Act.