differences in ways they might approach literacy-based tasks. Those differences stem from the diverse sets of expertise, interests, and background knowledge professionals each bring to teaching and learning. For each discipline in a grades 6–12 middle school or high school, teachers often attend to literacy tasks differently based on that expertise. After all, when ELA teachers read, write, and speak, they do so with certain goals and objectives in mind, such as determining universal themes, the meaning of symbols, and the author’s purpose, to name a few. Those literacy goals are different in science.
There are certain stylistic and conceptual norms professionals attend to in each discipline. A scientist, a historian, a businessperson, or any other professional is going to address literacy tasks with norms and behaviors befitting his or her expertise and profession. That makes total sense; after all, each expert or professional has unique insider knowledge. Insiders have more background knowledge, subject-related vocabulary knowledge, and subject-related purpose than others without such dispositions. On the other hand, disciplinary outsiders lack sufficient background knowledge and vocabulary to navigate a disciplinary text successfully. Literacy expert Doug Buehl (2017) suggests that our job as educators is to teach students how to think like we do—as disciplinary insiders. So, unlike an English insider, a science insider approaches reading tasks with specific goals and objectives, such as locating causes and effects, finding meaningful data, analyzing experimental conclusions, and drawing connections to scientific concepts.
Text comprehension in all disciplines generally follows a similar nine-step process, illustrated in figure I.2 (page 10), but the ins and outs of application, connection, and extension reside within the specific lens of the disciplinary expert and must be modeled accordingly. Years ago, when training our peer tutors how to help struggling readers navigate disciplinary texts, Katherine Gillies crafted this poster as a guide to moving toward text comprehension.
Given the difference between disciplinary insiders and outsiders, it makes little sense that they teach students to read and write with the same general strategies and moves. After all, if we know that each school content area has its own thinking style, it makes sense that we support students to consume and produce texts with the same unique thinking style required of each content. Even students who have a solid foundation of general strategies may struggle with the specific demands of disciplinary texts. Instead of using generic strategies in every class and across the school, providing students with a varied strategy toolbox to meet disciplinary demands will better equip them as disciplinary insiders to read like scientists, historians, and so on (Gabriel & Wenz, 2017).
Source: © 2019 Katherine Gillies. Adapted with permission.
Figure I.2: Reading-comprehension process checklist.
Visit go.SolutionTree.com/literacy for a free reproducible version of this figure.
Over time, we’ve made positive strides toward building disciplinary literacy strategies that support learning in more directed, focused, and attentive ways. We’ve learned that we should apply more specific strategies to different disciplines in ways that help support learning. When we speak of this shift to disciplinary literacy and training students to be insiders, what we intend to do is teach students to think differently in each classroom they encounter during their day. This is the goal of disciplinary literacy and why we often ask teachers who wonder how to teach a text, “How would you, as an expert, address the task?” As they think through their own processes, often a strategy or a focus emerges that is unique to their discipline, which allows us to help teachers recognize the value of thinking about their discipline in relation to literacy.
About This Book
Our goal for this book is to support collaborative partnerships in schools to address science teachers’ literacy concerns and better equip them with ways to support their work in science classrooms. We aim to connect that work with literacy strategies to develop students’ understanding and skills as they read and write about science and learn to think like scientists.
Scope
This book is designed to help literacy leaders collaborate and build literacy capacities in the middle school and high school environment. In elementary school, teachers work hard to teach students to read. In middle school and high school, the goal is to teach students to read to learn. There’s a big difference between the two approaches. Moreover, as science teachers, we want reading and writing tasks to promote students’ abilities not only to learn about science but to actually do science.
As we work to approach these challenges, it is very important that readers of this book recognize that each school is unique, and each student is unique—there is no one-size-fits-all pathway to literacy development. Within this book, there is a continuum of supports related to the varying needs of each school and each classroom. Sometimes we might require short-term, immediate literacy triage; sometimes long-term, sustained collaborative development; or sometimes both triage and sustained literacy-based professional development. We recognize that strong, consistently applied literacy strategies can and will help all readers develop their potential. We invite you to adapt the strategies we offer in this book to your unique needs. Many of the same literacy strategies for less complex literacy tasks still apply to more complex tasks—the only difference is the difficulty level.
Common Language
For the purposes of this book, we recognize that we need to have a common understanding of literacy and a common language around literacy development—let’s not get confused by education jargon. For instance, we use the word text to mean a reading, an article, a chart, a diagram, a cartoon, a source of media, and so on. There are many texts we ask students to read, and please know they can be in many formats. In addition, the term literacy leader can be applied to a variety of educational roles. Throughout the book, a literacy leader can be anyone in your building, such as an administrator, teacher leader, reading specialist, or literacy coach. A literacy leader is someone who has a knowledge base around literacy and wants to improve the overall literacy skills of a school environment or institution. If you don’t have a literacy leader at your school, don’t let that stop you. Remember, you can use this book as a thought partner. The overriding message of this book is to get started with the demanding challenges of literacy that need to be tackled now, with or without a literacy coach or a school literacy leader championing the work. Any teacher and team of teachers can initiate the changes that are necessary to support student learning; this book is meant to guide you and help you understand how to approach these changes in teaching practices.
In this book, you will also often use the term professional learning community. A PLC is “an ongoing process in which educators work collaboratively in recurring cycles of collective inquiry and action research to achieve better results for the students they serve” (DuFour, DuFour, Eaker, Many, & Mattos, 2016, p. 10). A PLC consists of a whole-building or whole-district culture of collaboration. We believe that a commitment to collaboration can help to support and innovate literacy in every classroom, and we believe that PLC cultures promote changes that will effectively support all students.
Within a PLC culture, collaborative teams meet on a consistent basis to build innovative practices concentrated on student growth and learning. We will use the term team throughout the book with the understanding that all PLC teams are interdependent and are professionally committed to continuous improvement. We know that teams may look different from building to building, and we know that schools need to configure them differently based on building resources. In this book, we will refer to science teams who are collaborating in focused ways to address literacy concerns for student learning in their science classrooms.
