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).
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, a strategy or a focus often 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 ELA teachers’ literacy concerns and better equip them with methods that enhance what they are already doing in their ELA classrooms. We aim to strengthen ELA teams’ use of literacy strategies to help all their students develop skills as readers and writers. Collaboration around these strategies will create new insights into heightening students’ abilities to approach more complex texts with confidence and advancing their abilities to think more critically.
Source: © 2019 Katherine Gillies. Adapted with permission.
Figure I.2: Reading-comprehension process poster.
Visit go.SolutionTree.com/literacy for a free reproducible version of this figure.
Scope
We designed this book to help literacy leaders collaborate and build literacy capacities in the middle school and high school environment. We talk more specifically about what makes a literacy leader in the next section, but what’s important to know here is that anyone in your building taking on the mantle for driving literacy advancement in the classroom is a literacy leader. 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 ELA teachers, we want reading and writing tasks to promote students’ abilities to not only learn from reading but also think critically about the reading and writing they do.
As we work to approach these challenges, readers of this book must 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. The skills that students need to apply remain the same and, with consistent application, become ingrained habits of the mind. As ELA teams collaborate on their work, staying committed to literacy-based strategies will help all students advance.
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 and become your school’s literacy leader. 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 dedicated 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 et al., 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 consistently 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 refer to ELA teams who are collaborating in focused ways to address literacy concerns for student learning in their classrooms. We also recognize that you might be a “team of one”—a singleton instructor who teaches an elective or is the only person teaching a grade-level course. In such cases, we encourage you to be creative in finding ways to collaborate with peers in your school, in your district, or even online and discuss how to make use of literacy strategies more effectively. There is great value in discussing how to use a strategy and ways to make it more effective.
Chapter Contents
In chapter 1, we lay out fundamental aspects of collaborative work to address teaching literacy in the ELA classroom. In chapter 2, we begin with more in-depth discussions about foundational literacy and many immediate interventions for literacy difficulties that require a fast solution. We call this literacy triage. From there, we focus on disciplinary literacy collaboration for prereading, during reading, and postreading in chapters 3 through 5, respectively. Within these chapters of the book, we slow down intentionally to support a deeper, focused approach. We offer classroom strategies that are the result of collaborative explorations by literacy leaders and content-area teachers—providing clarity around how varying perspectives inform instruction.
