Leadership and Intent

and think like experts in the classroom. This is the goal of disciplinary literacy and why we often ask teachers who wonder how to teach a text, “How would you, as an expert, address the task?” As teachers think through their own processes, often a strategy or a focus unique to their discipline emerges. This helps literacy leaders support teachers and teams to recognize the value of thinking about their discipline in relation to literacy.

In Leading With Intention, coauthors Jeanne Spiller and Karen Power (2019) provide strategic advice for school leaders dedicated to making significant improvements to teaching and learning. The great power you have as a school leader is to engender a collaborative school culture, set priorities for school improvement, and limit the many distractions that can hamper change. Focusing on literacy-focused efforts as a collaborative priority in every secondary classroom is a win for teachers and students alike. It promotes shared responsibility and commitments related to the habits students need as they learn to read and to write more effectively for a variety of academic purposes.

As you consider how you will lead the literacy work of your school, the following eight leadership areas from Spiller and Power (2019) offer wise advice to any dedicated, determined, and optimistic school leader.

1. Achieve focus and stay intentional. 2. Establish and maintain organization. 3. Build shared leadership. 4. Use evidence for decision-making and action. 5. Prioritize students.

6. Lead instruction.

7. Foster communication.

8. Develop community and relationships.

By emphasizing these areas, leaders ensure teachers stay focused on the right work of a PLC. The following sections explore each of these leadership areas, which we deem essential components of any leadership effort to establish a strong foundation for literacy instruction and ensure it sustains into the future.

Achieve Focus and Stay Intentional

Among the many roles a school leader must play, one central role is focusing his or her faculty on a clear, intentional focus. Because student literacy development is a central concern for learning in all subject areas, teachers must focus and be intentional about supporting all students to read and write according to grade- or course-level competencies for a given subject. Learning how to read and write effectively are foundational skills instrumental to expression, as is developing clarity of understanding. What’s important here is that subject-based teachers work to help students read and write like an investigating scientist, a research historian, a reflective artist, and an insightful mathematician. The intention of this literacy series is to interconnect literacy-based skills with the standards and expectations built into each subject’s curriculum.

Establish and Maintain Organization

This book series is designed to establish and maintain a strong level of organization for approaching holistic changes. Regardless of the content area, we highlight the importance of the PLC processes to teaching collaboratively, and we specifically focus on prereading, during-reading, and postreading strategies as effective vehicles for ensuring students develop organized habits for how they approach any reading assignment. Establishing these habits for reading and writing helps students enter the reading or writing process consistently. We unpack the purpose for these processes and strategies more specifically in each book and within each subject. As a school leader, maintaining an organized approach to literacy can help to establish stronger, more focused, and more sophisticated collaborative conversations within your differing teacher teams to support instructional improvements.

Build Shared Leadership

While you have great power as a leader, your greatest power in leadership is to share it by cultivating teams that value collaboration and reflection. As we describe the value of a PLC culture in this book, we provide advice for collaborating effectively in ways that share the role of leadership among the teachers as stakeholders on your subject-based teams, focusing on goals that lead to change. Teams thrive when they own their decisions and when leaders nurture their expertise within this process. Shared leadership will inspire team insight and innovation and encourage teachers to engage in high-level questioning and problem solving.

Use Evidence for Decision-Making and Action

Schools have a lot of data about student literacy. Students’ reading and writing abilities are among the skills teachers most frequently measure over the course of K–12 schooling. Many secondary districts also have access to performance on SAT, ACT, or state-mandated reading or writing assessments that provide insights into student literacy levels, but many schools also collect schoolwide and districtwide literacy data or even receive incoming historical data dump files filled with teamlevel literacy data. Ironically, although leaders are often data rich in their understanding of student literacy, they can struggle to take the action steps necessary to manage systemic changes to respond to what the data communicate about student learning. Often, literacy data are collected and stored as the end game, which we believe is a true waste of instructional minutes. If literacy data are not going to inform instruction in some capacity, leaders must ask the question, “Why are we taking the time to collect the data?”

In our series books, we look at data use for different purposes, but we also encourage teams not to spend their time staring at data for too long. Instead, we encourage teams to react to data and innovate instructional changes as the PLC process suggests. If the data suggest students are reading and writing at or below grade level—it’s time to make changes to instruction. If you do not see increased improvement in your data—it’s time to make changes. Recognizing data reflecting student acquisition of literacy skills is lacking isn’t the hard part of making a change. Learning, leading, and implementing instructional changes so students acquire these skills is the hard part. In this book, we provide concrete guidance for leaders to make actionable changes, using their existing knowledge of the PLC process as a guide. However, if you need a refresher on essential PLC knowledge and concepts, we briefly review these in chapter 2 (p. 33).

Prioritize Students

Working as a school leader can often feel removed from the experiences of students. Prioritizing students helps keep them at the center of every conversation about teaching and learning. Further, it helps school leaders to be hands-on with student development. Building on your review of data, begin to develop insights into every student. As you become more acquainted with better assessment practices—the formative assessments your teams conduct and the standardized testing reports you receive—drill down into the data to investigate every student’s specific needs. This allows you to prioritize those needs and help your teams structure

more robust intervention programs to support students’ acquisition of literacy skills. Teacher teams must keep students at the center of their collaborative process and continuously learn how to respond to the varying needs of every student.

Lead Instruction

Approaching how to lead instructional changes is a demanding task for any school leader—often, time and resources are limited, or there is a lack of followthrough. Teachers might work through an excellent professional workshop but then not have the time to actually think through the implementation of new approaches to teaching and learning. In our series and in our advice to school leaders working to implement changes, we encourage teams to work with one idea at a time— to build small wins and to get comfortable with new instructional practices. We believe better professional learning occurs regularly and over time—not in a oneday workshop. To that end, we make many suggestions that help focus team discussions on new ways to incorporate and shape literacy strategies to support student learning within each subject. We designed a consistent structure for presenting literacy strategies in each secondary-level book in this series to help teachers talk with students in a more consistent way and approach a focus on literacy skills in similar ways. In doing so, we encourage schools to establish a greater sense of unity among different teacher teams so students benefit from a great sense of instructional cohesion among their different teachers.

Foster Communication

Communication is vital to both a PLC culture and advancing a culture of literacy for two important reasons. First, as we discuss early in this book, it helps school leaders listen to their teachers and learn more about what they need to better support their students. Leaders who listen are a vital part of the collaborative-learning process that represents the spirit of a PLC culture (DuFour, DuFour, Eaker, Many, & Mattos, 2016). They lead by example, learn by doing, and promote positive changes from the legitimate concerns teachers observe, as well as concerns from student-learning data. Fostering this level of communication between teachers and school leaders is crucial in building trust and change. The second reason this advice is important is related to how teachers communicate among themselves and with students. Creating a shared language related to literacy encourages teachers to adopt a consistent approach in how they discuss learning with students and how they approach collaborative discussions within and among their teams.