It is helpful to detail your team’s understanding and the department’s approach to teaching the standard as well as the evidence of student learning you will be able to collect to demonstrate that students have achieved these skills. Use figure 1.1 to discuss with your team the content standards you are prioritizing and the evidence of student learning that you expect students to demonstrate. These are the first two critical questions teams should determine.
Figure 1.1: Content standard–analysis tool.
Visit go.SolutionTree.com/literacy for a free reproducible version of this figure.
We urge you not to overlook the steps in the content standard–analysis tool. While it is true that content standards may shift, it is also critical that we continue to evolve curriculum alongside changing standards. Also, although it is very tempting to jump to identifying power standards, make sure that you don’t skip the unpacking of these standards first. Curriculum teams that have gone in this direction often fall into the trap of simply overstating core curriculum components—essentially saying, “We do all of this already.” This is a misstep, as it will not lead toward additional growth or foster a team mentality that is focused on problem solving.
Another way to think of content standards is to frame them as desired student outcomes—the concepts that you want your students to have mastered at various checkpoints throughout the year. Conversely, process standards will help your students get to this point—they are essentially the vehicle that helps students get to these learning outcomes. These should be composed of a variety of focused tasks that teachers support via carefully sequenced literacy strategies used during instruction.
Identification of Students’ Literacy Skills
In order to dive into disciplinary literacy, your team needs to have insight into your students’ literacy-skill strengths and weaknesses. Literacy-based inventories or assessments that might show up on a standardized test like the ACT or on a reading passage from the SAT will help you identify where students are in terms of literacy skills so that you can later determine the necessary strategies to navigate challenging text tasks.
Many schools using the response to intervention (RTI; Buffum, Mattos, & Malone, 2018) or multitiered system of supports (MTSS; National Center on Intensive Intervention, n.d.) frameworks already have literacy-benchmark assessments in place, although the data are not always shared among all departments in the school. These assessments typically hold a wealth of information pertaining to student strengths and weaknesses for teachers of all content areas. If your school has a reading specialist on staff, he or she would be a great colleague to approach to learn what data your school has already collected and what other resources might be available.
While working with a reading specialist, your team might want to design your own literacy-based inventories, employing the content area’s authentic texts and assessing the literacy skills most pertinent to the specific field of study. Studying these initial student data will be a key component to your team time and will help you identify which strategies scaffold student success and help you further develop and utilize a variety of assessment types, including formative and summative tools.
A great deal of confidentiality and professionalism is a necessity for a productive collaborative model. Getting to know your students better means looking at and sharing their data with your team. If you want data to help move students forward, then you must handle them with great care, and you must confront the literacy data you collect.
During team meetings, it is critical that no one makes sweeping statements or generalizations regarding teaching practices based on raw data. When viewing group data in a team discussion on progress, remove names or class cohort information. Start the data discussion by noting this information may reveal things the team has already considered. For example, rarely does a nationally normed assessment show that a star student is one of the most struggling readers. Begin the data conversation with the idea that the data will often confirm what you already know about your students, but these data may also shed more light on why students are struggling.
As your colleagues become more comfortable with data reviews, fears in sharing data among the team that might exist will gradually drop away, and the team will become more open to collaboration that is focused on student learning. If you are a leader on the team, start with yourself; don’t be afraid to show your own student data. Students have entire academic histories before meeting their current roster of teachers. There is no way that one week in Mr. Williams’s class dictates all aspects of a nationally normed score.
Although it is critical that teams view data in a supportive manner, make sure that your team’s analysis doesn’t look like a list of excuses. It is very easy to fall into the pit of “things we can’t control” when looking at less-than-optimistic numbers. Instead, look at what you can change; the discussion should focus on how you move students toward a goal, target, or outcome—and ultimately toward graduation, higher education or training, and a career.
Identification of the Content-Literacy Connections
ELA teachers frequently struggle with the reality that, despite the plethora of text in this content area, many students simply are not reading. They are not engaging with the text teachers assign and, consequently, are not at all prepared for the engaging discussions and extension activities planned for class time.
As a reminder of something we wrote in the preface to this book, it is critical to remember that when we say literacy, we mean the act of engaging, knowing, and ultimately being able to navigate new understandings of known and unknown nuances associated with defined content. With this said, we encourage you to bring your texts into the classroom. Rather than leave all reading as an out-of-class assigned task, build active reading into your class time as standard practice. This can and should be done with both short and long texts. We find that incorporating more short texts paired with in-class close reading of these texts helps students more fully develop their literacy skills and flex their comprehension muscle because they will be able to engage with all parts of a complete text as opposed to the reality of only some doing so with portions of a larger piece.
Yes, this sounds complex! But really, teaching literacy is often about breaking down an idea, only to build it back up again by scaffolding and modeling a process—just like teaching a child how to tie a shoe. Words are literally everywhere, and many literacy texts are multimodal. Formulating an inference from a reading is similar to formulating an inference from what someone might say, from a film, or from a dramatic performance. The literacy strategies we use to understand or to infer are often similar no matter what the modality might be.
After your team has established a solid common baseline knowledge of the concept of literacy, focus on your power standards to identify which literacy tasks are the most innate to your area of study. Here is where you will be able to identify your process standards and consequently outline the scaffolds that will support students’ literacy-skill development. Familiarizing yourself with the strategies that come later in this book will help you work through the process of finding your content-area literacy connections. Additionally, you will need to take a close look at your texts (solo, or as a team for common texts) to determine if they are appropriate for your readers and tasks. Gather all texts, and assess your collection as a whole, using the tool in figure 1.2 as a guide.
Wrapping Up
If a fully supported and committed team sounds like a far-fetched dream,