PREFACE
To begin this book, and to immediately demonstrate the value of professional learning communities (PLCs) to support positive, thoughtful collaboration, we want to share a real-life experience we had with a group of fellow teachers in our school. We believe this serves as an example of the familiar struggle occurring in many schools when teachers from various content areas struggle to approach literacy instruction.
“I don’t have time for literacy” and “I don’t know how to teach literacy” are two challenges we often hear when we work with teachers on how to integrate literacy strategies into their classrooms in ways that support learning. In the fall of 2013, we, the authors of this book serving together as a group of literacy coaches, were asked to present a workshop about science literacy to a group of science teachers working to adopt the new Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS; NGSS Lead States, 2013). Our purpose was to introduce how the NGSS were designed to focus teaching and learning practices on argumentation and literacy within science curricula. Our goals were not only to be a resource for our science teachers as they began to align their curriculum to the NGSS for grades 6–12, but also to help them better understand how a focus on literacy supports their efforts to teach students to think like scientists. At that time, many of those science teachers recognized the need to elevate student literacy skills, but many of them felt underprepared in this area. We couldn’t blame them. After all, few were trained to teach literacy, and almost all of them felt stressed about the amount of science content they had to cover to prepare their students for the future. On top of everything else, trying to find time to integrate literacy strategies into teaching and learning seemed overwhelming to them.
As literacy coaches, we spent three days that fall collaborating with teams of science teachers, setting goals that focused on results, and generating innovative approaches to student learning. As we patiently offered ideas and listened as these teachers developed their plans, we learned about the challenges they faced in teaching science, the essential skills they planned to focus on, and the ways they discussed student learning in science. As we began to build collaborative relationships with our science teachers, we began to seed our discussions with ideas about literacy, and we worked with them to consider how a focus on literacy could connect with their focus on important science standards and the skills needed to develop as a scientist.
However, as they revised their curriculum, their focus on the content skills constantly outweighed their focus on the literacy skills necessary for students to become strong science learners. Concerns about cutting into content learning time and about the lack of ability to teach literacy came up again and again. Some teachers simply said, “I don’t have time for literacy.” Some said, “I need to focus more on the science.” We soon concluded that a three-day workshop was not enough to truly integrate the changes we were hoping to make.
We knew we had more work to do, and we knew we would need to rethink how we could support teachers—not just through a short workshop. As we rethought our approach, we continued to return to our values and the commitments we had made to our PLC. In so doing, we considered ways to design our literacy work by establishing a focus committee dedicated to building literacy-based strategies and developing ongoing literacy coaching for our teachers who wanted to think differently about teaching and learning. By taking these steps, and with the support of our administrators and school district, we worked to make use of our PLC culture to impact change.
Although it was a struggle for the whole group to digest at one time, our initial introduction to literacy and the NGSS ended up resonating with some of the teachers. This planted literacy seeds that we were able to pursue with a smaller group of science teachers. The story of Cami (a pseudonym we use to ensure privacy) highlights our successful process of engaging these teachers and inspiring them to volunteer to join us (the literacy coaches) and to join our schoolwide literacy committee.
Early in the year, after our initial presentations on science and literacy, we had an encounter with a science teacher and colleague named Cami. We knew that, as a veteran teacher, Cami was a strong voice in her department, and we wanted to convince her to join our literacy committee so we could support her work and help her students progress in her science classroom. We talked with her about the cool things teachers could accomplish by using literacy and science content to work on targets aligned with the NGSS. We thought she was hooked—but when we formally asked her to join the committee, she told us that she knew reading was valuable, but she couldn’t find the time in her lessons and schedule to integrate literacy skills alongside the science content skills. She told us, “There is just so much curriculum to get through. I don’t think I have time to try and teach literacy alongside teaching the science.”
Later in the year, we renewed our efforts to gain access to Cami’s science classroom. We set up another meeting with her to try to convince her about the value of focusing on literacy in the science classroom, but this time, we brought her data about her students that demonstrated the range of reading abilities in her classroom. As we went through these data, she began to notice patterns that supported her concerns for certain students who seemed to struggle in her science classroom. Throughout the meeting, we reminded her of some of the great ideas we had chatted about earlier in the year, and we spoke about the need to better prepare our students for college and career readiness. Again, Cami was happy to talk, but when push came to shove, she reminded us she had “no time to teach literacy.”
Then, one day later that spring, Cami reached her breaking point. Faced with students’ consistent struggles to perform well on assessment questions that were reading dependent, students’ continued reliance on her lectures and explanations and their lack of comprehension of the text, and students’ apparent refusal to do most textbook reading, Cami came to us and asked, frustrated, “Okay, I give up. How do I get them to read?”
She knew something needed to change, and we were eager to help. During that short meeting, we focused Cami on our purpose in working with teachers in different academic disciplines. We replied, “You need to show your students how you think—how a scientist thinks—and why it’s important for a scientist to consume and use information from texts.” That exchange was the start of a now-longstanding collaborative relationship about literacy, science, and student learning.
Cami’s frustration with trying to hold students accountable for reading and writing turned into a collaborative experience combining content and literacy learning in a science classroom. Together, we planned a sequence of lessons that did not center on lecturing but instead would use strong literacy strategies to help students think about what information is important for scientists, comprehend the text they read, and synthesize information in ways that would increase their ability to master higher-order science standards. We collaborated to generate many different ways to approach literacy in the science classroom that continuously supported Cami’s focus on the skills of the science curriculum. She began to see how literacy skills and higher-order-thinking skills interconnect, and we worked together to help integrate literacy skills that supported how to learn science. Through this work, we built a collaborative partnership that continues to be more and more innovative.
Through our collaboration, Cami learned how to model ways a scientist would approach reading, how to use think-aloud strategies, how to guide students through the reading process, and how to support students in assessing their reading performance. Applying these strategies led her students to use the information from the text actively in class instead of passively listening to a lecture. She was thrilled with her students’ engagement and improving performance. At the end of the school year, when we sent out our invitation for teachers to join our literacy committee, Cami committed, and so did many other teachers who were seeking to make positive changes in their science classrooms. The next fall, not only did we continue our collaborative work with Cami, but we also continued to innovate new ways of working with an expanding group of teachers dedicated to our literacy committee and one-on-one literacy coaching in the science classroom.
As is our practice, the first thing we do with any new teacher to our literacy committee is sit down to have a conversation. The conversation can be formal or informal, but the purpose is to get to know the teacher, to become familiar with the types of students the teacher generally teaches, to explore any initial literacy concerns