Everyone Is a Literacy Teacher

Image from Literacy in Learning Exchange website

On Wednesday, the National Center for Literacy Education, a consortium of organizations dedicated to raising the level of literacy, released the results of a recent survey called Remodeling Literacy Learning: Making Room for What Works. They boiled the data down to five key findings:

1. "Literacy is not just the English teacher's job anymore.
2. Working together is working smarter.
3. But schools aren't structured to facilitate educators working together.
4. Many of the building blocks for remodeling literacy learning are in place.
5. Effective collaboration needs systemic support."

The first finding, that all teachers are literacy teachers, is not a new idea. For years, writing across the curriculum has been a goal in many schools. Research skills, including understanding and paraphrasing during note-taking, and digital literacy lessons show up in a variety of classrooms. Reading primary sources and authentic works has been encouraged in Social Studies, Science, and Math classes. 

So what are the take-aways from this data? That schools need to do a better job of cross-curricular collaboration. That's what I understand from "Working together is working smarter." 

Take my eighth grade team, for example. Due to space issues, there is only one classroom for the four of us core teachers to work in during our common planning time. Therefore, the math/science teachers plan, prep, and grade together in the same room with us English language arts/social studies teachers. Fortunately, this makes the third finding, "But schools aren't structured to facilitate educators working together" untrue for us. We have both the common planning time and the common planning space laid out for us.

Because of this shared space, we overhear their conversations about their units, how students are doing, and adjustments they make in response to student needs. And they, in turn, hear our conversations as well. More and more I find we are having one big conversation about issues we see in all classes, usually centered around following directions, classroom management, and adjusting instruction to scaffold areas such as critical thinking. Finding four, "Many of the building blocks for remodeling literacy learning are in place," fits exactly this situation. We have already established not only the space and time, but the trust and open communication needed for remodeling cross-curricular literacy education.

What seems to be lacking is the fifth finding: "Effective collaboration needs systemic support." The math/science teachers do not think of themselves as literacy teachers. It's easy for us ELA/SS teachers to find cross-curricular literacy connections, to teach reading in the context of primary sources, to teach writing like a historian, to teach vocabulary in targeted ways. And to their credit, the math/science teachers tackle note-taking and organized writing within their big science research unit. But we are not collaborating around literacy learning just yet; we are sharing what we do in our own classes as an "FYI" to the other team. In order to "effectively collaborate", we need the big guns of the curriculum coordinator and/or principal to help us understand why (by looking at MAP reading data), what (by identifying standards and benchmarks within our curricular areas), and how (through professional development) to teach literacy within each course, as well as seeing how we can support each other with this common goal.

In fact, this is just what the NCLE recommended in its Policy Recommendations:

1. Provide the necessary support to ensure that educators know how to teach the elements of literacy pertinent to their content areas.
2. Embed the collaboration of educators in the school day. This is critical for deep student learning and is a necessary prerequisite to the success of other school reforms.
3. Fund professional learning that is ongoing, job-embedded, and collaborative; educators who engage in this kind of learning are better able to engage and advance literacy learning across grades and subjects.
4. Structure the use of educator time to maximize the development of collective capacity for improving literacy learning across a school or school system.
5. Promote accountability by encouraging educators in a school or system to reach shared agreements about successful literacy learning and the steps they will take together to fulfill these agreements.

Collaborative literacy learning is not a priority at my school this year. It would be bad timing to try to jump into this project during the fourth quarter. However, I would like to try to plant some seeds within the eighth grade team, with the curriculum coordinator, and with the principal, and see if we can move a little closer to a collaborative model next year. Perhaps it starts with vocabulary, including academic words like the difference between "explain" and "describe", and content words that have a root or stem that can be applied across many words. Perhaps it starts with research skills, which we do in three of the four classes already (not math yet), using common rubrics to grade note-taking, common outline structures, or common vocabulary to discuss essay parts like "thesis statement". Or perhaps it starts with more sharing of student samples, explaining our goals while looking at the kinds of reading and writing work they produced for the different subjects. The main thing is that collaborative literacy learning needs to start.