study of literature and related subject matter, few ELA teacher-preparatory programs offer more than a class or two, if that, to prepare educators to teach and support the scaffolds of reading as a skill.
Because ELA teachers are already committed to literacy by the very nature of their work, we have organized this book around three different methodologies that support literacy education: (1) we focus on recognized literacy strategies that educators should promote across all content areas to ensure all students approach literacy-based tasks with confidence and skill; (2) we encourage the consistent and regular use of literacy strategies in the ELA classroom that support all students, whether struggling or proficient; and (3) we provide many different reminders that all students need strategies to support their personal growth. To support your work in enacting these methodologies, we also present questions we hope ELA teams will use as conversation starters; you can find these questions in the Collaborative Considerations for Teams box that concludes each chapter.
We recognize that many schools do not have dedicated literacy experts (specialists and coaches) available to collaborate with ELA teachers around the challenges of building stronger readers and writers. To that end, we encourage you to use this book as a thought partner with your team or as your own personal literacy expert that can help you generate changes to support student learning. Use it to guide your practice and reflection in a sequence that makes sense for you and your team and not necessarily as a one-time, cover-to-cover read.
With or without dedicated literacy specialists or coaches, we mean for this book to be a helpful companion as you deepen conversations and navigate choices that will positively affect student growth and development, and we structured the text to demonstrate how to not only develop collaborative practices but also support both individual readers and teams in becoming reflective practitioners. This book provides, describes, and gives examples of many literacy-based strategies that you can integrate into the ELA classroom. You can use many of the strategies immediately; others require more preparation. In either case, we urge you to get started. Integrating focused literacy strategies initiates and promotes significant gains in learning, deep comprehension, and the capacity to think critically.
In addition, each strategy in this book lists specific adaptations, accommodations, or modifications for students learning English, for students in special education, and for students showing high proficiency. As you review this content, it’s critical to remember that, while the first two of these groups often benefit from similar adaptations, language barriers for English learners (ELs) are not the same as the cognitive barriers many students in special education face. When applying adaptations for a strategy, be mindful of how you approach these differences and adjust your instruction accordingly.
There are many reasons why ELA teachers in grades 6–12 need to renew and strengthen their focus on core literacy skills. Reading, writing, and thinking require strong habits of mind. Regardless of the discipline, all reading and writing tasks demand the following.
▶ A close attention to detail
▶ An understanding of how details interconnect to build concepts
▶ The ability to interpret data
Literacy strategies create an infrastructure of supports that allow students to learn independently and confidently. ELA teachers who focus on building stronger literacy strategies in their classrooms provide the necessary skills that support students’ abilities to develop their own thoughts and opinions.
The Need for Literacy Instruction
Picture a reader who is just beginning to learn how to read. What behaviors do you see as this student engages with text? What is he or she learning to do first? How is he or she grappling with the challenge of learning how to read? Chances are, you visualize this reader at the beginning stages, working to crack the alphabetic code—breaking apart and sounding out words, one syllable at a time, and likely dealing with simple language and colorful text. The words the student is trying to read are already ones that he or she likely employs in conversation. This student is engaging in growing basic literacy skills—decoding, fluency, and automaticity. During this early phase of learning how to read, comprehension and meaning making almost take a back seat to decoding. The reader is working on the mechanical process of learning to read.
As readers advance beyond the beginning stages of reading and advance in their abilities to read, they become more fluent and able to comprehend a text. At this point, the advanced reader possesses the ability to make meaning from what he or she reads—the process of reading is no longer dedicated to the mechanical process of encoding and decoding a text. Instead, the process of reading is dedicated to learning and thinking. More advanced readers can infer from and analyze what they read in a book, as well as what they read in the world, even when they have limited experience with a topic. Such readers possess the critical literacy skills they will need for college and success in the workplace. These critically literate students are ready to take on complex tasks and dive into ELA-specific literacy tasks, such as engaging in text analysis and writing extension activities that demonstrate a thorough understanding of a task and text.
But what about the reader who is somewhere between these two phases—the reader who is not a beginning reader and is not an advanced reader? What about the student who can break the code—he or she can encode and decode—but struggles to apply this information to make new understandings? The reality that we all know and experience in our classrooms is that there are many students who fall into this place along the continuum, and there are many students who leave our high schools without the essential life skill of being critically literate. In fact, National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results detailed in The Condition of Education 2018 report (McFarland et al., 2018) suggest that only 36 percent of eighth-grade students and 37 percent of twelfth-grade students possess literacy skills at or above the level of proficiency and over 60 percent have not met this readiness benchmark. This means that a majority of students are moving through middle school and high school without developing the literacy skills necessary to be successful in ELA classrooms. This is the group of students with which we are most concerned in this book. We know that this large group of students requires greater attention and a greater concentration on skill development. Moreover, a specific portion of these students will continue to need support in even basic literacy skill development. It is this portion of our student population that seems to be the conundrum—often, these are the students who teachers struggle to support.
Unfortunately, the struggle among many of this group of students is not always transparent, even though they make up the majority of students in classrooms. The graph in figure I.1 (page 6) represents the increasing gap in literacy as students grow up within schools, boldly demonstrating the challenges we must work to solve as educators in schools. These students are desperately in need of instruction to cultivate their intermediate literacy skills that serve as a common foundation for disciplinary literacy. These skills include building academic vocabulary, self-monitoring comprehension, applying fix-it strategies to understand a text, and applying knowledge to a prompted task (Buehl, 2017). As ELA teachers, we need to collaborate with our PLC teams to collectively shoulder the responsibility of student literacy and address these alarming statistics.
Research confirms there is a real need for disciplinary literacy instruction in the ELA classroom. Timothy and Cynthia Shanahan (2008) note the following.
▶ Adolescents in the first quarter of the 21st century read no better—and perhaps worse—than the generations before them.
Source: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, National Assessment
