▶ Fears of teaching reading among teachers because they did not have training as literacy teachers
▶ Concerns about teachers’ losing time to teach content while also teaching literacy
▶ Struggles among students to see a clear purpose for reading and to synthesize information after they finish a reading assignment
▶ A need for focused reading strategies to help students be successful
▶ A need to support students using information and applying or connecting reading to scientific problems
▶ Struggles among students with analyzing visual information, such as graphics and data tables
▶ A need for students to improve the way they write lab conclusions, including a need to improve focus, increase the use of evidence, and provide clearer justification
▶ A need for students to broaden and increase their knowledge of science with choice reading opportunities within and outside the current unit of instruction
▶ Concerns that some students were faking their way through reading or avoiding it altogether (pseudo-reading; Buehl, 2017)
For all of us, from literacy coaches to science teachers, the initial goal was clear—we needed to equip our teachers with the ability to help improve their students’ reading skills to address the expectations of the NGSS and to better prepare them for the reading skills they would require for college and career readiness.
Our work began with developing an understanding of how scientists consume and use information—the disciplinary literacy of science—and Cami’s commitment has since led to several years of creative collaboration aimed at teaching students to think like scientists and to use literacy within the NGSS.
We share this story from the start because it exemplifies three important commitments that are core to our work and the work of a strong PLC: (1) we believe in supporting collaboration between experts seeking to solve an educational concern; (2) we believe in integrating change that is focused on every student’s learning—where teams systematically consider, implement, evaluate, and revise all changes; and (3) we believe that we must focus on the results students produce.
This book is dedicated to the literacy issues we think are important to pay attention to when connecting literacy to science. We hope these ideas can help develop collaborative partnerships at your school, and we hope this book can serve as a strong resource for your teaching if a literacy expert isn’t an immediate resource for your work in teaching and learning. Use this book as a thought partner, and make literacy a priority. Every teacher is a teacher of literacy.
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 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
You may immediately recognize how this approach differs from many traditional school practices and formats, where educators view literacy development as the job of English language arts (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, they shoulder the charge to single-handedly support the literacy growth of students. While these teachers and 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 science classroom, we propose that schools adopt the collective commitment that every teacher is a literacy teacher. This commitment means we must support collaboration between expert science teachers and experts in literacy using processes similar to in the story of Cami that we detailed in this book’s preface (page xvi).
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. 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.
In this book, we emphasize how building collaboration among science 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 science 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. When these two forces come together to collaborate, we begin to see positive results.
As we constructed this book, we recognized that many schools do not have literacy experts (English teachers, reading teachers, reading specialists, and so on) available to collaborate with science teachers around the challenges of building stronger scientific 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. In either case, 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.
As you will see, this book provides, describes, and details many literacy-based strategies that you can integrate into the science classroom. You can use many of the strategies immediately; others require preparation. In either case, we highly encourage getting started. Integrating focused literacy strategies into the science classroom initiates and promotes significant gains in learning, deep comprehension, and the capacity to think critically.
There are many reasons why science teachers in grades 6–12 need to be literacy teachers. Reading about science, writing about science, and thinking like a scientist require