we formally asked her to join the committee, she told us that she knew reading was valuable, but she couldn’t find the time in her lessons and schedule to integrate literacy skills alongside the science content skills. She told us, “There is just so much curriculum to get through. I don’t think I have time to try and teach literacy alongside teaching the science.”
Later in the year, we renewed our efforts to gain access to Cami’s science classroom. We set up another meeting with her to try to convince her about the value of focusing on literacy in the science classroom, but this time, we brought her data about her students that demonstrated the range of reading abilities in her classroom. As we went through these data, she began to notice patterns that supported her concerns for certain students who seemed to struggle in her science classroom. Throughout the meeting, we reminded her of some of the great ideas we had chatted about earlier in the year, and we spoke about the need to better prepare our students for college and career readiness. Again, Cami was happy to talk, but when push came to shove, she reminded us she had “no time to teach literacy.”
Then, one day later that spring, Cami reached her breaking point. Faced with students’ consistent struggles to perform well on assessment questions that were reading dependent, students’ continued reliance on her lectures and explanations and their lack of comprehension of the text, and students’ apparent refusal to do most textbook reading, Cami came to us and asked, frustrated, “Okay, I give up. How do I get them to read?”
She knew something needed to change, and we were eager to help. During that short meeting, we focused Cami on our purpose in working with teachers in different academic disciplines. We replied, “You need to show your students how you think—how a scientist thinks—and why it’s important for a scientist to consume and use information from texts.” That exchange was the start of a now-longstanding collaborative relationship about literacy, science, and student learning.
Cami’s frustration with trying to hold students accountable for reading and writing turned into a collaborative experience combining content and literacy learning in a science classroom. Together, we planned a sequence of lessons that did not center on lecturing but instead would use strong literacy strategies to help students think about what information is important for scientists, comprehend the text they read, and synthesize information in ways that would increase their ability to master higher-order science standards. We collaborated to generate many different ways to approach literacy in the science classroom that continuously supported Cami’s focus on the skills of the science curriculum. She began to see how literacy skills and higher-order-thinking skills interconnect, and we worked together to help integrate literacy skills that supported how to learn science. Through this work, we built a collaborative partnership that continues to be more and more innovative.
Through our collaboration, Cami learned how to model ways a scientist would approach reading, how to use think-aloud strategies, how to guide students through the reading process, and how to support students in assessing their reading performance. Applying these strategies led her students to use the information from the text actively in class instead of passively listening to a lecture. She was thrilled with her students’ engagement and improving performance. At the end of the school year, when we sent out our invitation for teachers to join our literacy committee, Cami committed, and so did many other teachers who were seeking to make positive changes in their science classrooms. The next fall, not only did we continue our collaborative work with Cami, but we also continued to innovate new ways of working with an expanding group of teachers dedicated to our literacy committee and one-on-one literacy coaching in the science classroom.
As is our practice, the first thing we do with any new teacher to our literacy committee is sit down to have a conversation. The conversation can be formal or informal, but the purpose is to get to know the teacher, to become familiar with the types of students the teacher generally teaches, to explore any initial literacy concerns the teacher might already have coming into our work, and to set some collaborative goals to focus our work. Obviously, by then we knew Cami pretty well, but the issues she identified at that initial meeting with her resonated with many of the science teachers we worked with. During the collaborative work between literacy coaches and science teachers, the following issues surfaced regularly throughout our conversations.
▶ Fears of teaching reading among teachers because they did not have training as literacy teachers
▶ Concerns about teachers’ losing time to teach content while also teaching literacy
▶ Struggles among students to see a clear purpose for reading and to synthesize information after they finish a reading assignment
▶ A need for focused reading strategies to help students be successful
▶ A need to support students using information and applying or connecting reading to scientific problems
▶ Struggles among students with analyzing visual information, such as graphics and data tables
▶ A need for students to improve the way they write lab conclusions, including a need to improve focus, increase the use of evidence, and provide clearer justification
▶ A need for students to broaden and increase their knowledge of science with choice reading opportunities within and outside the current unit of instruction
▶ Concerns that some students were faking their way through reading or avoiding it altogether (pseudo-reading; Buehl, 2017)
For all of us, from literacy coaches to science teachers, the initial goal was clear—we needed to equip our teachers with the ability to help improve their students’ reading skills to address the expectations of the NGSS and to better prepare them for the reading skills they would require for college and career readiness.
Our work began with developing an understanding of how scientists consume and use information—the disciplinary literacy of science—and Cami’s commitment has since led to several years of creative collaboration aimed at teaching students to think like scientists and to use literacy within the NGSS.
We share this story from the start because it exemplifies three important commitments that are core to our work and the work of a strong PLC: (1) we believe in supporting collaboration between experts seeking to solve an educational concern; (2) we believe in integrating change that is focused on every student’s learning—where teams systematically consider, implement, evaluate, and revise all changes; and (3) we believe that we must focus on the results students produce.
This book is dedicated to the literacy issues we think are important to pay attention to when connecting literacy to science. We hope these ideas can help develop collaborative partnerships at your school, and we hope this book can serve as a strong resource for your teaching if a literacy expert isn’t an immediate resource for your work in teaching and learning. Use this book as a thought partner, and make literacy a priority. Every teacher is a teacher of literacy.
INTRODUCTION
Every Teacher Is a Literacy Teacher
In this series of books, called Every Teacher Is a Literacy Teacher, we focus on how each subject area in the grades 6–12 experience has a need to approach literacy in varying and innovative ways. To address this need, we designed each book in the series to:
▶ Recognize the role every teacher must play in supporting the literacy development of students in all subject areas throughout their schooling
▶ Provide commonly shared approaches to literacy that can help students develop stronger,
