When Thinking about the Soup of Secondary Instruction, Consider Literacy the Broth.
Designing an instructional vision for a middle school or high school without addressing literacy instruction is like leaving out the broth in chicken noodle soup. Reading, writing, speaking, and language use are not only life-long skills that humans need, but also skills that support content learning in every classroom, and yet, too often in secondary schools, everything literacy falls to the English Language Arts team. ELA teachers often shoulder the burden of improving reading test scores, developing student writing, and inspiring students to fall in love with books. Placing the responsibility for comprehensive literacy development in a singular content area, led by only a small number of practitioners, does not lead to coherent and sustainable literacy growth. And when everyone is engaged in literacy instruction, we have the whole team playing rather than a few players. Instead, consider literacy the core of your instructional vision and practice; it is the broth in which all the other ingredients combine.
Design an Instructional Vision with Instructional Look-Fors Rooted in Literacy
Start with your instructional vision. Is literacy included in that vision? In what ways is it included? How is literacy expected to be integrated and explicitly taught in all classes? Be sure that your instructional look-fors, based on your instructional vision, include specific literacy routines and practices that should be a part of every unit and lesson component across the school.
Audit your instructional vision and instructional look-fors for cross-content literacy instructional expectations. Make sure the literacy expectations include concrete routines and practices that are part of every school-wide unit and lesson.
Design a school-based lesson planning tool that specifically addresses literacy routines and practices, and the parts of the lesson in which they can and should be used.
Utilize High Quality Literacy Materials To Support All Teachers
Districts and schools often spend a lot of money on curricular materials for English Language Arts classrooms, and those materials come with tools and resources that can support literacy instruction beyond the ELA classroom. Often, the tools and resources are content-agnostic and teach literacy strategies and skills that reflect the metacognition we want students to use to access different types of knowledge. Harnessing your ELA HQIM materials and resources for schoolwide use is an opportunity to get more out of your spending and to benefit all teachers and students by creating school-wide coherence in literacy instruction.
Invite your instructional coaches and teachers to review ELA curricular materials for tools and resources that can and should be used across content areas to develop targeted literacy skills and strategies.
Utilize professional learning time to engage teachers in meaning-making of literacy instruction within their content area using the selected curricular materials and resources. This is a great opportunity to let your ELA teachers shine by demonstrating their expertise in modeling how to use literacy tools and resources with content area peers.
Model Literacy-Based Routines and Practices In Professional Learning
All teachers need to practice literacy-based instruction in professional learning so they can turnkey the same practices with their students. This kind of professional learning cannot be “sit and get,” as teachers need to make meaning and apply literacy-based routines and practices within the context of their content area.
Select 1-2 literacy-based routines and practices to model and practice during every professional learning session. Make sure educators practice and plan for the implementation of the target literacy-based routines and practices with materials from their content area.
Include time for practitioners to reflect on the routines or practices so they can not only reflect on their own learning, but also plan for how they will apply the literacy work in their instruction.
Embed Opportunities for Classroom Coaching Focused on Literacy Instruction
Transfer to practice happens in the classroom, and that is where coaching needs to happen. If your district or school is fortunate enough to have instructional coaches, then they can support content teachers with the implementation of literacy instruction in their specific disciplines. If instructional coaches are not an option, school leaders and teacher colleagues can step in and provide classroom-based coaching.
Provide structures with allotted time for instructional coaches to work directly with content area teachers on literacy routines and practices. Utilize professional development time, common planning time, and individual coaching.
Integrate opportunities for collegial peer-to-peer support. Establish peer coaching relationships in which teachers can support each other. Consider pairing ELA teachers with other content teachers or having similar content teachers coach each other. Receiving in-the-moment feedback on instruction through individualized coaching is the most effective way to ensure cross-content literacy instruction can develop and sustain as time progresses.
Design Common Literacy-Based Assessments and Rubrics To Use Across Content Areas
Many schools struggle to address the disparity in literacy-based assessments and rubrics across content areas. There should not be an argument writing rubric in Social Studies that is different than the argument writing rubric used in ELA. Yes, the content will be different, but the actual text structure, craft, and skills for developing an argument are the same across disciplines. Students build different knowledge in each content area, but the reading, writing, and discussion skills to access that content are the same. Think about it like this: During training camp, NFL players learn plays and strategies they use all season long. But, how they use those plays is influenced by the team they are playing, the timing and weather of the game, etc, so the skills they use are the same, but the context changes. The same applies to literacy skills in different content areas.
Use the same grade-level reading, writing, and discussion standards to support the development of assessments and rubrics across a grade level. For example, if you use state standards that mimic the ELA Common Core State Standards, then you can use those same reading, writing, speaking, and language standards across content areas. (The Grades 6-12 Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects mimics the ELA standards.) The content areas can then integrate and combine their content standards with the targeted ELA standards and skills to create assessments and rubrics.
Audit all content assessments to discover opportunities to cohere around literacy-based demonstrations of learning and encourage collaboration across content areas.
Can Literature Make Our Nation Less Insular?
“I believe the appeal and engagement with these texts was not my instruction. Instead, it was the content, or more importantly, the humanity in these texts. Beyond our differences, we all desire family and community, we all seek love and acceptance, we all make mistakes because of our flaws, and we all struggle with decisions. In these universal truths, shared in text, my students simply saw human beings, and they related to them. That connection is powerful. My students came away with a consciousness about “others” without even leaving their own neighborhoods. Through reading, discussing, and writing, students engaged with text that forced them to walk in the shoes of people they have never before come into contact.”
I’m Not Sure How to Talk about Social Justice in My Classroom: How to Provide Opportunities for Students to Do the Talking!
“Questions about implementation may surface, including: Are my students mature enough to handle a discussion about social justice? Can my students relate to or understand the lives of marginalized or disenfranchised others? Will the discussion promote anger and frustration, negating its intent? Will my students even talk during a discussion? With all these questions, the tendency may be to shy away from social justice topics, even though the need for an enlightened youth is of the utmost importance currently. Thus, we, as educators, need methods that can support our facilitation of discussions so that the most important conversations that need to take place can.”
Why Are the First Several Years of Teaching So Difficult? How Schools Can Stop Failing Novice Teachers
“Consider that new teachers have to learn how to hold their bladders while simultaneously ignoring thirst and hunger to make it through four classes in a row, often while pushing a cart from classroom to classroom or racing students up and down stairs. They have to figure out how to interact with a diverse range of human beings, from the youngsters in their care to the adults in the building—most of whom hold power over them, from the secretary who holds the key to the supply closet, to the principal who has the authority to exercise the capital punishment of the workplace: non-renewal—to the parents and guardians who may see them as another kid, a potential ally, or an adversary.”