Reading and Writing Strategies for the Secondary English Classroom in a PLC at Work®. Daniel M. Argentar

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 and become your school’s literacy leader. 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 dedicated 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 et al., 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 consistently 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 refer to ELA teams who are collaborating in focused ways to address literacy concerns for student learning in their classrooms. We also recognize that you might be a “team of one”—a singleton instructor who teaches an elective or is the only person teaching a grade-level course. In such cases, we encourage you to be creative in finding ways to collaborate with peers in your school, in your district, or even online and discuss how to make use of literacy strategies more effectively. There is great value in discussing how to use a strategy and ways to make it more effective.

       Chapter Contents

      In chapter 1, we lay out fundamental aspects of collaborative work to address teaching literacy in the ELA classroom. In chapter 2, we 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 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 discuss the strategy’s purpose, application, and literacy focus. There are also adaptations for each strategy, which may include modifications for students who qualify for special education or ELs and differentiation for mastery. Even though we gear these adaptations toward these subgroups, they apply to any student who would benefit from a variation of a strategy. Chapter 6 offers guidance for the scaffolded and strategic teaching of writing in the ELA classroom. 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 9). We intend for these to help you reflect on current practices, challenges, and opportunities for growth in working with literacy in the ELA classroom. 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 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 natural collaborative opportunities between literacy leaders and ELA teachers to build literacy capacity in your building (or buildings). As an ELA teacher, your content provides an opportunity for students to engage with texts on a regular and consistent basis, making it possible for students to further develop their literacy skills, whether they are at a foundational level of proficiency or they are moving toward being critically literate.

      thinking BREAK

      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 ELA 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, our interpretation of data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP, n.d.) tells us that more than half of U.S. twelfth graders graduate high school without preparation for advanced critical thinking. Given this, 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 disciplinary literacy skills is an important step toward building literacy proficiency.

      Collaborative Considerations for Teams

       What are some of the unique features of texts used in ELA classrooms?

       What are things that experts in your discipline look for when they read?

       What deficiencies do you notice in your students that might obstruct their understanding of your content?

       How might your team provide experiences and vocabulary to help students feel more confident in reading texts used in an ELA classroom?

      CHAPTER 1

      Collaboration, Learning, and Results

      On the surface, it may seem like a relatively easy task to get your English department colleagues on board with the idea of supporting students’ literacy growth, but remember that while some literature teachers may have natural abilities in teaching literacy skills, we find this is not something that teacher-prep programs extensively cover. Just like any other content-area team, a collaborative ELA team needs to ask difficult questions about its curriculum and teaching practices, even ones that question the practices that the