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A LEADER’S GUIDE TO READING AND WRITING I N A P L C AT W O R K , S E C O N D A R Y
demonstrating, particularly for teacher teams outside ELA, how literacy skills function to support all academic learning, critical thinking, and problem solving. As leaders in schools ourselves, we believe every challenge is an opportunity to build positive changes, and we believe this book, when paired with the discipline-specific books in this series, will help guide the positive changes you seek to create in your school and your students. When it comes to literacy and student learning, one thing is certain: the challenges are real. However, the role of a good leader is to remove challenges that might stand in the way of positive, innovative change. By confronting challenges and shifting mindsets, leaders begin to create aha moments for teachers and actualize real growth in student learning across subject areas. As you begin to lead work around literacy in your school, we believe it is important to pay attention to five specific challenges, which we phrase here as questions leaders must be prepared to answer quickly. 1. Weren’t students supposed to learn how to read in elementary school? 2. What if students lack foundational reading and writing skills? 3. Aren’t ELA teachers the ones responsible for teaching reading and writing? 4. How do teachers teach to both curriculum and literacy standards? 5. How can teams that have a hard time collaborating learn to work together?
The following sections explore each of these challenges as you begin to focus your collaborative teams on enhancing literacy instruction. Some of these challenges might sound familiar to you, but turning a challenge into an opportunity to further support both teachers and students can begin to pivot traditional mindsets about teaching and learning literacy skills in all subject areas and help to establish new, positive, and unified viewpoints.
Weren’t Students Supposed to Learn How to Read and Write in Elementary School? The answer to this question is yes. Students are supposed to acquire and develop foundational reading and writing skills in elementary school—meaning they can sound out words with varying levels of fluency, demonstrate comprehension skills, and write letters to form sentences and paragraphs (Onuscheck, Spiller, Glass, & Power, 2021). However, as students enter middle school and high school, the expectations for reading and writing shift.
