learn) and not just pronounce the little typed characters on the page. Likewise, they worried about covering the lists of Common Core State Standards for English language arts (CCSS ELA) they were expected to get through by the end of the school year.
Consequently, our ELA teams—small collaborative groups in our PLC that were focused on various courses in the department—returned to concepts and pedagogy that we knew but did not always think about or implement: prereading strategies, during-reading strategies, and postreading strategies. Why did we return to these strategies? Because in the end, we realized from our own experiences as readers that these are the steps that successfully literate people engage in when reading. Together, we began to explore how best to set our students up for successful reading experiences—based on thinking through our own habits as literacy experts.
During our collaborative work with ELA teachers, we also brainstormed a list of reasons our team felt students struggled in our classes.
▶ Students might have weak historical knowledge, cultural knowledge, or both.
▶ Students might have poor knowledge of reading strategies, poor usage of reading strategies, or both.
▶ Students might have difficulty remembering and focusing on important details.
▶ Students might have difficulty making logical inferences.
▶ Students might function as pseudoreaders (Buehl, 2017) who fake their way through reading or avoid it altogether.
▶ Students might struggle with their core writing skills with a need to improve focus, increase their use of evidence, and provide clearer justification.
For our team, the goals became clear. We needed to equip our students with improved reading skills to address the CCSS ELA. We needed to better prepare them for the reading skills they would encounter at the collegiate level, and we needed to teach them how to become lifelong readers for purpose and enjoyment. Furthermore, we knew that schools that invest in PLC at Work® culture work in ways that are more unified and cohesive, prioritizing shared concerns and working together to innovate (DuFour, DuFour, Eaker, Many, & Mattos, 2016). Our team vowed to return to the core commitments of PLCs to help it commit to the collaborative process, focus on student learning, and better understand how results can help us reflect on and plan for student growth. Together, we began the process to bring teaching reading back into our classrooms—with the disciplinary reading lens of literacy experts.
Why a disciplinary lens? Because we know that it is important for students to adjust their thinking and reading strategies in each discipline to think more like an expert on that subject (Buehl, 2017). In mathematics, students should read and think like a mathematician; in science, students should read and think like a scientist; and in ELA, students should read and think like literary experts.
In this book, we are excited to share ways a PLC culture can effect change when thoughtful educators dedicate themselves to supporting the literacy development of all students. ELA teachers have a special opportunity to lead in this work due to the clear relationship between ELA content standards and literacy processes—an opportunity that we will explore from collaboration and classroom perspectives.
We hope that these ideas can help develop your collaborative partnerships at your school, or that this book can serve as a strong resource for your teaching if you don’t have other literacy experts to collaborate with to enhance your teaching and learning.
In working within our collaborative teams, the ELA teachers in our school soon realized that the extra time it takes to teach reading skills has great benefits for student learning and student performance. Our teachers saw increased basic comprehension, increased engagement, and better thinking throughout the reading. Taking the time to teach students to read to learn helped teachers develop the more difficult skills demanded by the standards they had listed in their curricula.
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 grades 6–12 schooling
▶ Provide commonly shared approaches to literacy that can help students develop stronger, more skillful habits of learning
▶ Demonstrate how teachers can and should adapt literacy skills to support specific subject areas
▶ Model how a commitment to a PLC culture can promote the innovative collaboration necessary to support the literacy growth and success of every student
▶ Focus on creating literacy-based strategies in ways that promote the development of students’ critical-thinking skills in each academic area
As an ELA teacher, you may immediately recognize how this approach differs from many traditional school practices and formats, where educators view literacy development as the job of ELA teachers, reading teachers, or teachers of English learners. It is an accepted practice that these teachers bear the responsibility of teaching skills like vocabulary development, comprehension skills, inferential skills, and writing skills. In stand-alone ways, it may feel that you shoulder the charge to single-handedly support the literacy growth of students. While these traditional education approaches may be effective to a degree, we recognize the need for our schools to support changes that make teaching literacy a responsibility for all teachers. In this book, which focuses on the ELA classroom, we propose that schools adopt the collective commitment that every teacher is a literacy teacher. This commitment means we must support collaboration between ELA teachers and experts in literacy using processes we detailed in this book’s preface (page xv).
As we begin to aggressively address literacy issues in our classrooms, PLCs need to recognize the value of supporting literacy skills within every classroom—and every content area. Science teachers need to be literacy teachers. Mathematics teachers need to be literacy teachers. Social studies teachers need to be literacy teachers. World language and fine arts teachers need to be literacy teachers. Every teacher needs to be a literacy teacher, because the work cannot rest solely on the shoulders of the ELA department. By making literacy a core commitment in the work of every academic discipline, schools can begin to develop students’ abilities to read and write with a variety of more focused literacy strategies that support the critical-thinking skills necessary for science, social studies, mathematics, language acquisition, and the fine arts as well as ELA studies.
In this book, we emphasize how building collaboration among ELA teachers and literacy experts will be one of our greatest catalysts for supporting student growth in every area of school curriculum, and we stress a strong commitment toward building instructional improvements that can support the growth of every learner. As we’ve seen in many PLC cultures, collaboration generally begins with teaming teachers within like disciplines. Science teachers team with other science teachers, social studies teachers team with other social studies teachers, and so on. When teams form according to discipline, they tend to focus only on their content and discipline-based skills. We intend for this book to encourage collaboration of a different sort—collaboration among literacy and ELA experts teaching middle school and high school. When discipline-based teachers and literacy experts team up, they can build stronger approaches to teaching and learning that connect literacy-based strategies with discipline-specific subject areas, even in the ELA classroom. Although ELA teachers
