3 minute read
in Elementary School?
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.
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.
Curricula standards, such as those derived from the Common Core for grades 6–12, begin to expect students to read and write to convey understanding (National Governors Association & Council of Chief State School Officers, 2010). These expectations are significantly different from knowing how to read and write. By middle school and high school, students must be able to understand what they’ve read, learn from it, and express their understanding. When learning becomes challenging, they must learn to self-assess, attempt new strategies, and seek out new information sources. Unfortunately, many teachers forget this very big difference between learning to read and reading to learn, and they spend each school year frustrated and confounded with questions like the following.
“Why don’t my students remember what they read?” “Why do I have to tell my students what was important in a reading?” “Why don’t my students read?” “Why do my students write paragraphs that don’t make any sense?” “Why don’t my students write fully developed thoughts?”
Do those questions sound familiar? Unfortunately, many teachers in a range of academic subjects, including ELA, assume that because students can read, they can actually comprehend what they are reading (Onuscheck et al., 2020a). They further assume because students can write, they should be able to compose thoughts. At the secondary level, teachers need to address these long-standing assumptions and take on the responsibility of teaching students how to read to learn. Students need instruction about how to read like a social scientist, mathematician, or artist. They need instruction framed around how to write like a scientist and synthesize information from multiple sources like a historian. They need instruction around how to explain their thinking as an artist or musician and comprehend and infer meaning from fiction texts in ways that deepen their understanding of themselves, others, and the world they inhabit. In short, they need all their teachers to support them in learning both the similar and different literacy skills each subject area demands to support their proficiency with essential standards in a diverse range of curricula.
In order to bridge instruction from year to year, it is essential that schools form vertical partnerships. When collaborative teams can come together to answer the first question of a functioning PLC, “What do we want students to learn?” (DuFour et al., 2016), there can be clear understanding of student learning expectations
