About This Book

Develop Community and Relationships

PLC cultures engender spirited, positive relationships, and so should any commitment to making positive changes related to building students’ literacy skills. As you work to build a literacy-centered school, approach the work as a way to develop positive working relationships that focus on the common goal of student success. The best teacher teams focus on relationships. They create norms they adhere to, and they believe in their shared commitment to their subject area and student learning. Introducing teams to discussions related to literacy instruction should align with the commitment of these relationships, and, as we discuss later in this book, such discussions help teachers remember the value of teacher-student relationships. When approaching a student who might struggle with literacy-based skills, who might lack confidence in learning, or who might not be motivated to read or write, creating a positive teacher-student relationship is critical in helping the student to pivot. Likewise, when teachers work together for every student, it is important for individual teachers to rely on their teams to help with the challenges different students present. In our work, we value relationships because we value the idea that we are a team working for every student.

Note that a literacy-centered school is not focused on simply employing a single literacy program or initiative but rather on embracing literacy work as a core value of its educational philosophy. There is no single program, tool, department, or leader capable of tackling alone the literacy statistics we reviewed earlier in the chapter. This is why schools need leaders who are ready and able to cultivate a literacy-focused PLC culture.

Our goal for this book is to support your efforts as a leader to build collaborative partnerships in your school that address teachers’ literacy concerns and better equip them to drive students’ acquisition of literacy skills. Such partnerships may occur on a number of levels, including the following.

 Core content teachers and teaching assistants  Teacher leaders

 Instructional coaches

 School leaders and administrators

 District leaders

Educators across all of these roles can organize to collaboratively take on the responsibility of leading a literacy-focused leadership team or guiding coalition comprised of diverse educators within a school or district.

Your teacher teams can then utilize the discipline-specific books in this series to collaborate around specific prereading, during-reading, and postreading strategies that offer new ways to heighten students’ abilities to approach more complex texts with confidence and advance their abilities to think critically. The following sections explore key concepts and terminology for this book as well as a summation of each chapter’s contents.

Key Concepts and Terminology

For the purposes of this book, and to avoid potentially confusing educational jargon, we recognize the need for a common understanding of literacy and a common language around literacy development. For instance, we use the word text to mean a reading, an article, a chart, a diagram, a cartoon, a media artifact, and so on. There are many texts teachers ask students to read, and they can be in many formats. Additionally, the term literacy leader can apply to a variety of educational roles. A literacy leader can really be anyone in your building, such as an administrator, teacher leader, reading specialist, or literacy coach. It is someone who has a knowledge base in literacy and wants to improve the overall literacy skills of a school or district. If you don’t have a literacy leader at your school, don’t let that stop you. Remember, you are a school leader already. You simply need to establish a focus on literacy as part of your role, working with partners to instill a culture of literacy schoolwide or districtwide. And don’t forget that you can use this book as a thought partner as you do so.

The goal is to get started with the demanding challenges of literacy that need to be tackled now, with or without a literacy coach or a preexisting school literacy leader championing the work. Any teacher and team of teachers can initiate the changes that are necessary to support student learning; we mean for this book to help guide your understanding of how to approach these changes in teaching practices. Working as a literacy leader means that you actively engage in developing a culture of literacy within your school and working toward literacy as a core value across curricula. It does not mean that you need to carry a specific literacy expert qualification credential or master’s degree as a reading or literacy specialist does. We talk more specifically about what makes a literacy leader in chapter 1, but what’s important to know here is that anyone in your building who takes on

driving literacy advancement in the classroom and collaborating around this work is a literacy leader and change agent.

Another key concept leaders must understand is that, in elementary schools, teachers work hard to teach students to learn to read. In middle schools and high schools, their goal is to teach students to read to learn. There is a big difference between the two approaches. As your teacher teams work to approach these challenges, leaders and team members alike must recognize each school is unique, and each student is unique: there is no one-size-fits-all pathway to literacy development. Sometimes teachers might require short-term, immediate literacy triage; sometimes long-term, sustained collaborative development between team members is necessary; or sometimes there is a need for both triage and sustained literacy-based professional learning. We recognize strong, consistently applied literacy strategies can and will help all readers develop their potential, so we invite you to invest your teams in the strategies this series offers. Many of the same literacy strategies that work for less complex literacy tasks still apply to more complex tasks—the only difference is the level of rigor. The skills students need to apply remain the same and, with consistent application, become ingrained habits of the mind.

Although we review some foundational PLC concepts in chapter 2, it’s important from the outset to understand why the concepts and guidance we provide in this book require the support of a strong PLC culture. Recall that a PLC is an ongoing school- or districtwide 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).

Leaders must ensure collaborative teams can meet on a consistent basis to build innovative practices concentrated on student growth and learning. So, we use the term team throughout the book with the understanding that all teams are interdependent and professionally committed to continuous improvement. We know teams may look different from building to building, and we know schools need to configure teams differently based on school resources. In this book, we use teams generically to refer to grade- and course-level teams and leadership team to refer to teams consisting of designated leaders who work with teacher teams—typically those grade- and course-level teams. For example, each grade- or course-level team may work with a literacy coach. Each literacy coach may also serve on a literacy leadership team to ensure goal and vision articulation. There is great value in collaborating around how to use a strategy or make it more effective for your specific students, and in a PLC, every educator must be part of a collaborative team.

Chapter Contents

We designed this book for leaders both to support new literacy-focused initiatives in their schools and to gain a vital understanding of how they can best support their teams as team members do the daily work of ensuring students leave their charge proficient with essential reading and writing skills related to the teachers’ respective content areas. To support this goal, we’ve structured this book as follows. (Note that we refer to schools and schoolwide approaches throughout this text; however, leaders at the district level can and should apply a districtwide perspective to this content.)

In chapter 1, we detail core aspects of leading literacy schoolwide. Chapter 2 deals with understanding where to start when determining how to approach new literacy-focused initiatives. Chapter 3 highlights the importance of data for determining the targets of a literacy-focused initiative. Chapter 4 explains the role of professional learning in ensuring teacher teams are equipped to deliver high-quality literacy instruction. Chapter 5 explains the importance of differentiation to literacy-focused instruction and how to support efforts among teacher teams to accomplish effective differentiation. Chapter 6 examines the role of response to intervention (RTI) programs in ensuring all students have access to the supports they need to develop prerequisite and foundational reading and writing skills needed to be proficient with grade- and course-level content. Chapter 7 addresses the importance of measuring growth in students’ literacy skills and sustaining effective literacy-focused initiatives.

Throughout this text, there are feature boxes called Next Steps for Leaders. We intend for these to provide you with opportunities to reflect on current practices, challenges, and new ideas as you determine the actions you will take as a leader to support literacy growth in your school. We know you might do this naturally, but these are the points in this text where we think it is important to slow down and consider what specific steps you will do to take an active leadership role to support teacher efforts to grow students’ literacy skills. In addition, each chapter ends with a Wrapping Up section that includes a series of leadership actions that highlight ways for teams to discuss, collaborate on, or implement disciplinary literacy ideas. Use any resulting discussions to build more directed literacy practices as you target your specific grade-level curriculum.

Ultimately, we hope this book and series are not only resources for ideas you can implement immediately with your teacher teams but also sources of inspiration for collaborative opportunities between literacy experts, leaders, and content-area instructors to increase literacy capacity in your school.