In proposals of school reform, teachers who have traditionally been curriculum implementers are now seeing their role shift into one that requires the skills and knowledge necessary to become a curriculum designer. School reform has also associated competency in literacy to student success. However, literacy is an evolving field and current research has demonstrated that the underpinnings of learning and teaching literacy are poorly understood (Stanovich, 2000). For many adolescents who struggle, acquiring the ability to successfully manipulate alphabetic symbols so they are productive in establishing meaning for themselves and others has been a very complex challenge. Further, many of the available support resources are targeted at younger children so they are not interesting or applicable to an adolescent audience. The results of a five-year study that adopted principals of knowledge building will be presented based on the efforts of a high school classroom teacher and her students who were experiencing reading and writing difficulties. Incorporating an explicit feedback loop of analysis, design, development, implementation and evaluation, they searched for solutions to improve their confidence and competence. Theory bridged classroom practice and over time, the understanding of what it meant to be literate was transformed. Distinctions were made into the significance of Bereiters (2002) statement: Learning is what goes on at the level of the knower the individual or group that undergoes a certain kind of change. Knowledge building is what goes on at the level of productive work; it is the creation or modification of an artifact (p. 367).