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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 are clear content experts in the 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 of Educational Progress, n.d.

Figure I. 1: Percentage distribution of fourth-, eighth-, and twelfth-grade students across NAEP reading achievement levels.

▶ For many students, the rate of growth toward college readiness actually decreases as students move from eighth to twelfth grade.

▶ American fifteen-year-olds perform worse than their peers from fourteen other countries.

▶ Disciplinary literacy is an essential component of economic and social participation.

▶ Middle and high school students need ongoing literacy instruction because early childhood and elementary instruction does not correlate to later success.

Among the many concerns within collaborative discussions about teaching and learning, literacy continually ranks as one of the most worrisome. In many of our discussions with teachers throughout North America, teachers across academic disciplines express three running concerns: (1) many students struggle with basic literacy skills, (2) many students read and write below grade level, and (3) many students do not know how to complete reading or writing assignments.

Gaps in literacy skills are staggering, and these gaps affect all areas of many students’ education. As students are marched through their schooling, the statistics demonstrate that gaps in literacy increase over the course of many students’ elementary, middle, and high school years. Columbia University Teachers College (2005) reports many students find themselves reading three to six grade levels below their peers, many students struggle mightily to comprehend informational texts, and many students graduate from high school unprepared to enter a college-level experience. Columbia University Teachers College (2005) and Michael A. Rebell (2008) further highlight the following statistics, which present significant and long-standing concerns.

▶ By age three, children of professionals have vocabularies that are nearly 50 percent greater than those of working-class children, and twice as large as those of children whose families are on welfare.

▶ By the end of fourth grade, African American, Hispanic, and poor students of all races are two years behind their wealthier, predominantly white peers in reading and mathematics. By eighth grade, they have slipped three years behind, and by twelfth grade, four years behind.

▶ Only one in fifty Hispanic and African American seventeen-year-olds can read and gain information from a specialized text, such as a science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)-focused journal, compared to about one in twelve white students.

▶ By the end of high school, African American and Hispanic students’ reading and mathematics skills are roughly the same as those of white students in the eighth grade.

▶ Among eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds, about 90 percent of whites have either completed high school or earned a GED. Among African Americans, the rate is 81 percent; among Hispanics, 63 percent.

▶ African American students are only about 50 percent as likely (and Hispanics about 33 percent as likely) as white students to earn a bachelor’s degree by age twenty-nine.

Statistical results like these are a stark reminder that we need to focus our attention on the literacy development of students in every corner of our schools. For the grades 6–12 ELA teacher, developing students’ abilities to comprehend informational texts should stand out as an important goal, as these abilities are central to state and national standards for ELA, skill development, and curriculum content expectations. As we will note throughout this book, reading and writing strategies in an ELA classroom often require different instructional approaches that ELA teachers must collaborate on. These approaches must be tailored to meet the needs of every student and demand innovative thinking.

In this book, we offer suggestions focused on teaching students intermediate literacy skills. These are important skills to attain because students with strong intermediate literacy skills have essentially developed an awareness of their own active comprehension, and they know what to do when comprehension begins to feel shaky. It is vital that, within our disciplines, we don’t jump ahead of intermediate literacy but instead continually model this phase for our students and provide opportunities for them to practice these skills in a constructive and guided manner.

Due to its focus on literacy in the ELA classroom, this book regularly refers to the CCSS ELA that help articulate the priorities teachers should support in their classrooms. In doing so, we strive to emphasize the importance of all students having the literacy expertise necessary to be college and career ready after graduation.

Disciplinary Literacy

As you gain confidence that students have a good grasp of basic, foundational literacy skills, and as you begin to see them develop more intermediate and advanced literacy skills, you can move forward with tailoring their literacy instruction with an eye toward disciplinary literacy. Even though students will need you to continue modeling the use of academic vocabulary and monitoring their comprehension, they will also be ready to attack complex texts with a disciplinary lens even as they practice building their skills.

For our purposes, a discipline is a unique expertise, which schools often split into subject-matter divisions such as mathematics, science, ELA, physical education, world languages, fine arts, and so on. Disciplinary literacy focuses on the literacy strategies tailored to a particular academic subject area. This book, as previously noted, focuses on the expertise of ELA teachers who see the value of integrating specific literacy-building strategies into their classrooms to support readers and writers working at various skill entry points as they work toward mastering course-content goals. Who better to lead the way with disciplinary thinking connected to ELA topics than the experts—our ELA teachers? After all, when English 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 an author’s purpose, to name a few.

thinking BREAK

What would happen if you were to gather teachers from every discipline in a school and track the way they each address a reading, writing, and speaking task? Predict how different content-area teachers would approach and work through literacy tasks. What similarities and differences would you observe among these varied content areas?

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, where an English insider might focus on themes and symbolism, a science insider, for example, 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, 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 on 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).

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. For each example, 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

What are some of the unique features of texts used in ELA classrooms?

What are things that experts in your discipline look for when they read?

What deficiencies do you notice in your students that might obstruct their understanding of your content?

How might your team provide experiences and vocabulary to help students feel more confident in reading texts used in an ELA classroom?