In this book, we offer suggestions focused on developing intermediate literacy skills that include building academic vocabulary, self-monitoring comprehension, and knowing how to apply fix-it strategies in order to navigate a text with understanding and the ability to apply this knowledge to a prompted task (Buehl, 2017). 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 science classroom, in this book, we regularly refer to the NGSS (Next Generation Science Standards) and the CCSS ELA (Common Core State Standards for English language arts) that help to articulate the priorities teachers should support in their classrooms. In doing so, we strive to point out the interdependent relationship between literacy skills and the ability to think critically like a scientist.
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. Who better to lead the way with disciplinary thinking than the experts—our science teachers?
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 science teachers who see the value of integrating literacy strategies into their classrooms.
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What would happen if your team were to gather teachers from every discipline in your 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 your team observe among these varied disciplines? |
Because teachers have unique expertise related to their academic field of interest, there are often noticeable differences in ways they might approach literacy-based tasks. Those differences stem from the diverse sets of expertise, interests, and background knowledge professionals each bring to teaching and learning. For each discipline in a grades 6–12 middle school or high school, teachers often attend to literacy tasks differently based on that expertise. After all, when ELA 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 the author’s purpose, to name a few. Those literacy goals are different in science.
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, unlike an English insider, a science insider 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 (page 10), 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 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).
Source: © 2019 Katherine Gillies. Adapted with permission.
Figure I.2: Reading-comprehension process checklist.
Visit go.SolutionTree.com/literacy for a free reproducible version of this figure.
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, often a strategy or a focus 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 science teachers’ literacy concerns and better equip them with ways to support their work in science classrooms. We aim to connect that work with literacy strategies to develop students’ understanding and skills as they read and write about science and learn to think like scientists.
Scope
This book is designed to help literacy leaders collaborate and build literacy capacities in the middle school and high school environment. 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 science teachers, we want reading and writing tasks to promote students’ abilities not only to learn about science but to actually do science.
As we work to approach these challenges, it is very important that readers of this book 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