If we cultivate, communicate, and normalize literacy best practices and strategies for all teachers, then every teacher can be a teacher of literacy.
Some might look at me, a former middle school English Language Arts teacher and scold, “Easy for you to say. You are, quite literally, trained to be a teacher of literacy.” To counter that argument, I want to zoom in on an experience I had early in my teaching career when I welcomed in a class of sixth graders that included many students learning to read single-syllable words while others were honing their analytical writing skills. When faced with a spectrum that far-reaching, literacy supports cannot be the sole responsibility of the ELA teacher. The approach had to involve all hands on deck. That meant that the science, math, physical education, social studies, and special education teachers all had to become teachers of literacy. We had to “triage” the situation, as my former principal would say, meaning that we had to prioritize foundational literacy instruction while supporting all students in growing their skills and furthering their literacy progress.
How do we do this? How can we help teachers of all subjects develop the depth of knowledge required to teach literacy effectively? How do we support students in making interdisciplinary connections as they learn to read?
When we facilitate Storyshares professional development sessions, we emphasize strategies that teachers can bring back to their classrooms the following day. Here are some that we would recommend to cultivate an ecosystem of literacy in schools where every teacher is (and views themself as) a teacher of literacy.
Literacy Newsletters
Encourage the teacher or interventionist working with the lowest-level readers to write a concise weekly newsletter that focuses on strategies they use to support those students with reading successfully. The goal is to give teachers across all content areas ideas for how to support and differentiate instruction for those students.
Common Planning Times
Whenever possible, co-plan with teachers of different subjects. It can be incredibly lonely to be a middle and high school teacher, where subjects are often siloed. Department meetings are great and valuable, but so are times when you can get together with other teachers who teach different subjects to the same students and compare and norm on literacy strategies.
Visible Thinking Routines
From Harvard’s Project Zero: “A thinking routine is a set of questions or a brief sequence of steps used to scaffold and support student thinking. Thinking routines help to reveal students’ thinking to the teacher and also help students themselves to notice and name particular “thinking moves,” making those moves more available and useful to them in other contexts.” These routines can be used with any text in any content area. They provide older students with consistent scaffolds that support them in accessing higher-order thinking and promote knowledge-building from texts at all levels. Take a look at this toolbox of visible thinking routines (an amazing free resource) and decide on three that your teaching team will implement across all content areas! These support students with metacognition, which is a key part of literacy development.
Evaluating Curriculum
Choose literacy programs and curricula that make interdisciplinary connections explicit for students and teachers. Word Generation from SERP is a great example of this!
Want to learn more? Watch our webinar on creating coherence, and check out Storyshares’ brand-new intervention curriculum: LIFT!