we discuss the strategy’s purpose, application, and literacy focus. There are also adaptations for each strategy, which may include modifications for students who qualify for special education or ELs and differentiation for mastery. Even though we gear these adaptations toward these subgroups, they apply to any student who would benefit from a variation of a strategy. Chapter 6 offers guidance for the scaffolded and strategic teaching of writing in the ELA classroom. Finally, chapter 7 covers ideas for formative and summative assessment and feedback.
Throughout this text, there are opportunities for Thinking Breaks (the first of which appeared on page 9). We intend for these to help you reflect on current practices, challenges, and opportunities for growth in working with literacy in the ELA classroom. We know that you might do this naturally, but these are the points where we think it is important to slow down and consider ways to apply the strategies we are suggesting for your own students. In addition, there will be other opportunities for Collaborative Considerations for Teams. These are chances for teams to discuss, collaborate on, or implement disciplinary literacy ideas at the end of each chapter. You and your team can use these tasks to build literacy into your practices in more directed ways as you target your specific grade-level curriculum.
Ultimately, we hope this book is not only a resource for ideas you can implement immediately in the classroom but also a source of inspiration for natural collaborative opportunities between literacy leaders and ELA teachers to build literacy capacity in your building (or buildings). As an ELA teacher, your content provides an opportunity for students to engage with texts on a regular and consistent basis, making it possible for students to further develop their literacy skills, whether they are at a foundational level of proficiency or they are moving toward being critically literate.
thinking BREAK
As you are reading and using this book as a resource to support your teaching, what do you want to get out of the content?
Note these three considerations for your team: (1) use this book as a book study, (2) break the book down chapter by chapter and focus on specific changes, and (3) prioritize your concerns for student learning and how to best support the literacy development of your ELA students.
Wrapping Up
Building collaborative teams focused on literacy development can be challenging. We know you are extremely busy and have enormous amounts of content to cover, so you may be reluctant to add another layer to your already demanding workload. However, our interpretation of data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP, n.d.) tells us that more than half of U.S. twelfth graders graduate high school without preparation for advanced critical thinking. Given this, we must pause and consider what we are all doing as educators to better prepare students for the future. Providing students with important intermediate literacy and disciplinary literacy skills is an important step toward building literacy proficiency.
Collaborative Considerations for Teams
CHAPTER 1
Collaboration, Learning, and Results
On the surface, it may seem like a relatively easy task to get your English department colleagues on board with the idea of supporting students’ literacy growth, but remember that while some literature teachers may have natural abilities in teaching literacy skills, we find this is not something that teacher-prep programs extensively cover. Just like any other content-area team, a collaborative ELA team needs to ask difficult questions about its curriculum and teaching practices, even ones that question the practices that the team has believed are tried-and-true methods or curriculum components. ELA teachers are a busy bunch—the sheer amount of grading alone can be completely overwhelming when papers stack up! However, identifying common concerns as a department will almost always lead to an opportunity to determine a solution-focused literacy need, such as students not reading assigned texts, failing to complete homework, and declining writing trends. Here is your opportunity to begin the collaborative process.
Collaboration plays a crucial role in the success of any school dedicated to building effective teams in a PLC culture. When experts collaborate, innovative ideas emerge in ways that support student learning and generate positive results. When a team uses collaborative time wisely—when the action steps of a team are clearly designed, intentional, and focused—it is possible to make great progress in student learning. Across North America, schools are making a commitment to this core principle, they are tackling long-standing concerns in education by bringing together teacher teams to make stronger curricular and instructional choices, and they are getting better and better at making use of assessment practices that support the formative development of all students.
This chapter helps you identify how to initiate collaboration by applying PLC fundamentals and build teacher teams within your school to support meaningful collaboration that leads to student growth and reflective teaching practices. We offer guidance for leaders and examine how to approach meeting logistics before delving into the details of the work teams carry out in collaborative meetings, including analyzing standards and setting goals, identifying students’ existing literacy skills and needs, and finding connections between the ELA curriculum and imparted literacy skills.
Collaboration Within a PLC
PLCs are a pivotal force for progress in schools, as they are all focused on three big ideas: (1) a focus on learning, (2) a collaborative culture, and (3) a results orientation (DuFour et al., 2016). Within our literacy work with disciplinary teachers, we kept these three big ideas at the core of our work, and we directed our commitment to literacy in all disciplines by continuously addressing the four critical questions of a PLC (DuFour et al., 2016).
1. What do we want students to learn?
2. How will we know when they have learned it?
3. What do we do if they haven’t learned it yet?
4. How do we extend learning for those who are already proficient?
We recognize that teams are configured in varying ways depending on the school. For instance, you might have curriculum teams, grade-level teams, content-focused teams, or teams that are singletons (teams of one). No matter how your teams are currently structured, when working toward integrating literacy-based strategies, we hope your teams will begin collaborating with a literacy expert
