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. 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 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, DuFour, Eaker, Many, & Mattos, 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 on a consistent basis 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 will refer to science teams who are collaborating in focused ways to address literacy concerns for student learning in their science classrooms.
Chapter Contents
In chapter 1, we lay out fundamental aspects of collaborative work to address teaching literacy within the science content area. In chapter 2, we will 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 will 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 will discuss the strategy’s purpose, application, and literacy focus. There are also adaptations for each strategy, which include modifications for students who qualify for special education, English learners (ELs), and those who demonstrate high proficiency and can benefit from more demanding work. Note that although these first two subgroups have different needs and different reasons they might face increased challenges with learning material (such as language barriers versus developmental barriers), we group these adaptations together because we find they often serve the learning of both subgroups equally well (just for different reasons). Indeed, even though these adaptations are geared toward these subgroups, they are applicable to any students who would benefit from a variation of a strategy that serves to scaffold learning in the short term to build out long-term proficiency. Chapter 6 offers guidance for teaching writing in science. 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 8). We intend for these to help you reflect on current practices, challenges, and opportunities for growth in working with science literacy. 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 science 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 collaborative opportunities between literacy leaders and content-area instructors to build literacy capacity in your building (or buildings).
|
|
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 science 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, given the data that show more than half of U.S. twelfth graders graduate high school without preparation for advanced critical thinking, 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 science disciplinary literacy skills is an important step toward building literacy proficiency.
Collaborative Considerations for Teams
CHAPTER