A Leader’s Guide to Reading and Writing in a PLC at Work®, Secondary by Solution Tree

—Melisha Plummer Assistant Principal, South Atlanta High School, Georgia

A LEADER’S GUIDE

“A necessary guide for school leaders who recognize the only way to impact student achievement in every subject area is through improving student literacy. This book presents the compelling argument for why literacy is a schoolwide effort, and it provides specific strategies to close the gaps between students who are proficient in essential skills and those who are not.”

“There are times as a leader when a professional reading crosses your desk, and it stops you in your tracks. A Leader’s Guide to Reading and Writing in a PLC at Work, Secondary was one of those times for me. With essential guidance throughout, each chapter also includes invaluable next steps to support leading.”

E V E R Y T E A C H E R Is a LITERACY TEACHER

A LEADER’S GUIDE to Reading and Writing ® in a PLC at Work SECONDARY

—Julie A. Schmidt Superintendent, Kildeer Countryside Community Consolidated School District 96, Buffalo Grove, Illinois

Daniel M. Argentar Katherine A. N. Gillies Maureen M. Rubenstein Brian R. Wise Michelle Garlick

With A Leader’s Guide to Reading and Writing in a PLC at Work®, Secondary, district and school leaders gain valuable insights about equipping collaborative teams to take urgent action to identify and close gaps in secondary students’ literacy skills, increasing literacy rates school- and districtwide. Every Teacher Is a Literacy Teacher series editors Mark Onuscheck and Jeanne Spiller and authors Daniel M. Argentar, Katherine A. N. Gillies, Maureen M. Rubenstein, Brian R. Wise, and Michelle Garlick outline how leaders at all levels can effectively drive literacy instruction in a secondary setting.

Readers will: u Determine the most effective professional learning approaches for enhancing teacher effectiveness

u Better support collaborative teams through listening, learning, and actively leading

u Recognize the importance of data for measuring literacy growth and choosing appropriate interventions and extensions

u Learn to incorporate proven strategies for reading and writing instruction in all content areas

Visit go.SolutionTree.com/literacy to download the free reproducibles in this book.

SolutionTree.com ISBN 978-1-949539-07-3 90000

9 781949 539073

ARGENTAR · GILLIES RUBENSTEIN · WISE · GARLICK

u Understand the importance of having a schoolwide culture of literacy and being a change agent

EDITED BY

Mark Onuscheck Jeanne Spiller

Copyright © 2022 by Solution Tree Press Materials appearing here are copyrighted. With one exception, all rights are reserved. Readers may reproduce only those pages marked “Reproducible.” Otherwise, no part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without prior written permission of the publisher. 555 North Morton Street Bloomington, IN 47404 800.733.6786 (toll free) / 812.336.7700 FAX: 812.336.7790 email: info@SolutionTree.com SolutionTree.com Visit go.SolutionTree.com/literacy to download the free reproducibles in this book. Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Argentar, Daniel M., 1970- author. | Gillies, Katherine A. N., author. | Rubenstein, Maureen M., author. | Wise, Brian R., author. | Garlick, Michelle, author. Title: A leader’s guide to reading and writing in a PLC at work, secondary / Mark Onuscheck (Ed), Jeanne Spiller (Ed), Daniel M. Argentar, Katherine A. N. Gillies, Maureen M. Rubenstein, Brian R. Wise, Michelle Garlick. Description: Bloomington : Solution Tree Press, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021044109 (print) | LCCN 2021044110 (ebook) | ISBN 9781949539073 (paperback) | ISBN 9781949539080 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Reading (Secondary) | Composition (Language arts)--Study and teaching (Secondary) | Professional learning communities. | Educational leadership. Classification: LCC LB1632 .A68 2022 (print) | LCC LB1632 (ebook) | DDC 418/.40712--dc23/eng/20211018 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021044109 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021044110 Solution Tree Jeffrey C. Jones, CEO Edmund M. Ackerman, President Solution Tree Press President and Publisher: Douglas M. Rife Associate Publisher: Sarah Payne-Mills Art Director: Rian Anderson Managing Production Editor: Kendra Slayton Editorial Director: Todd Brakke Copy Chief: Jessi Finn Content Development Specialist: Amy Rubenstein Copy Editor: Evie Madsen Proofreader: Mark Hain Text and Cover Designer: Abigail Bowen Editorial Assistants: Charlotte Jones, Sarah Ludwig, and Elijah Oates

TA B L E O F C O N T E N T S

About the Authors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix About the Series Editors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii INTRODUCTION

Leaders of Literacy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 The Need for Literacy Instruction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Disciplinary Literacy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Leadership and Intent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 About This Book . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Wrapping Up. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 CHAPTER 1

Confronting the Challenges of Leading Literacy . . . . . . . . . 21 Weren’t Students Supposed to Learn How to Read and Write in Elementary School?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 What if Students Lack Foundational Reading and Writing Skills?. . . . . . . . . . 24 Aren’t ELA Teachers the Ones Responsible for Teaching Reading and Writing? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 How Do Teachers Teach to Both Curriculum and Literacy Standards?. . . . . . . 27 How Can Teams That Have a Hard Time Collaborating Learn to Work Together?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 Wrapping Up. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 CHAPTER 2

Starting With Listening, Learning, and Leading. . . . . . . . . . 33 Listen With Focus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34 Learn With Passion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 Lead With Action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 Wrapping Up. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 v

A LEADER’S GUIDE TO READING AND WRITING I N A P L C AT W O R K , S E C O N D A R Y

CHAPTER 3

Leading With Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 Using Data to Inform Curriculum Goals and Expectations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 Using Data to Inform Instructional Effectiveness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 Using Data to Assess Your Culture of Literacy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 Wrapping Up. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65 CHAPTER 4

Leading Professional Learning. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 The Basics of Professional Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68 Benefits and Drawbacks of Various Delivery Models for Professional Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70 Ideas for Enhancing Professional Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 Wrapping Up. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82 CHAPTER 5

Leading Instruction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83 Choosing Immediate Strategies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 Differentiating Instruction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87 Assessing the Level of Text Complexity. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 Using Fix-Up Strategies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94 Considering Why Students Struggle. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96 Considering Next Steps for Proficient Students. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98 Wrapping Up. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99 CHAPTER 6

Leading Intervention. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 Understanding the Role of Data in Intervention. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102 Examining Your Current RTI Efforts. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104 Wrapping Up. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113 CHAPTER 7

Measuring Growth and Sustainability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115 Assuring Growth Based on Data and Feedback. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116 Sustaining Initiatives Through Personnel and Student Changes. . . . . . . . . . . 120 Wrapping Up. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124

Table of Contents

Epilogue. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127 References and Resources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129 Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Daniel M. Argentar is a literacy coach and communication arts teacher at Adlai E. Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, Illinois. In his previous work as a sixth-grade teacher, Daniel taught reading, language arts, social studies, and science. Since 2001, he has provided academic literacy support to struggling freshmen and sophomores while also teaching college-preparatory and accelerated English language arts courses. In his coaching role, he partners with instructors from across all content areas to increase disciplinary literacy for students by running book studies, professional learning sessions, and one-to-one coaching meetings. Daniel received a bachelor’s degree in speech communications from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, an English teaching degree and a master’s degree in curriculum and instruction from Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago, and a master’s degree in reading from Concordia University Chicago. To learn more about Daniel’s work, follow @dargentar125 on Twitter. Katherine A. N. Gillies is a reading specialist and English teacher at Niles North High School in Skokie, Illinois, where she previously served as a literacy coach. Katherine serves as the lead architect of schoolwide literacy-improvement work, including building a comprehensive system of intervention and support for struggling readers, as well as crafting research-based curricula to ensure continued literacy growth for all students. Katherine leads several collaborative teams and cross-curricular initiatives aimed at using data to inform instruction, building capacity for disciplinary literacy, and employing responsible assessment practices at the secondary level and specializes in building- and district-level literacy-needs analysis and

A LEADER’S GUIDE TO READING AND WRITING I N A P L C AT W O R K , S E C O N D A R Y

improvement planning. She has presented on these topics at local and national conferences, including for the National Council of Teachers of English. Additionally, she has worked collaboratively across the Chicagoland area to help other area schools develop their research-driven multitiered systems of support and literacy systems and has consulted with various school districts to develop staff literacy capacity across all content areas. Katherine earned a bachelor’s degree in literature and secondary education from Saint Louis University; a master’s degree in literacy, language, and culture with a reading specialist certification from the University of Illinois Chicago; and a master’s degree in educational leadership and administration from Concordia University Chicago. She is also a certified Project CRISS (Creating Independence through Student-owned Strategies) trainer and Orton Gillingham instructor and is recognized as a Distinguished Educator by Renaissance Learning. She was a part of the AIM Coaching Model Design Team, where the University of Texas at Austin and University of Maryland research teams partnered to develop a middle school instructional coaching model with research-based outcomes for students with disabilities. This project was funded by the U.S. Department of Education Institute of Education Sciences. To learn more about Katherine’s work, follow @Literacyskills on Twitter. Maureen M. Rubenstein is a literacy coach and special education instructor at Adlai E. Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, Illinois. As a teacher, she works on individualized education plans (IEPs) with students who have diagnosed reading, writing, and emotional disabilities. In her coaching role, Maureen partners with instructors from all content areas to work on disciplinary literacy. She also works with other literacy coaches to coordinate and implement book clubs, professional learning sessions, and one-to-one coaching sessions. Maureen received a bachelor’s degree in special education from Illinois State University, a master’s degree in language literacy and specialized instruction (reading specialist) degree from DePaul University, and a master’s degree in educational leadership from Northern Illinois University. Maureen is also a certified Project CRISS instructor and certified to teach the Wilson Reading System®, a Tier 3 intervention program. To learn more about Maureen’s work, follow @SHS_LiteracyMR on Twitter.

About the Authors

Brian R. Wise is an English department chair at Deerfield High School in Deerfield, Illinois. As a department chair, he facilitates professional learning, provides supervision and evaluation, and guides curriculum and instruction. He has taught a wide array of English language arts and literacy-intervention courses throughout his teaching career. As a former high school literacy coach, Brian worked with faculty members from all content areas to build teachers’ capacity for embedding literacy skills into classroom instruction and assessment. Brian received his bachelor’s degree in English education from Boston University, a master’s degree in English from DePaul University, and master’s degrees in reading and principal preparation from Concordia University Chicago. To learn more about Brian’s work, follow @Wise_Literacy on Twitter. Michelle Garlick is an assistant principal at Woodlawn Middle School in Long Grove, Illinois. Previously, she served as a classroom teacher and instructional coach. While Michelle was a teacher and coach, the school earned distinction as a Model PLC (professional learning community) at Work® School, earned a National Blue Ribbon award for academic excellence, and received the 2018 DuFour Award as a top Model PLC at Work school. Michelle has led staff through the process of unpacking and prioritizing standards, developing rubrics and assessments, and designing standards-aligned instruction to support learning for all. In addition, she has worked to build a high-functioning PLC and maintain a culture conducive to learning for students and staff. She is passionate about engaging adult learners in professional learning to ensure all students have access to a high-quality, equitable learning experience. Michelle received the Illinois State Board of Education Those Who Excel Award for Early Educators in 2012 for supporting all learners. Since 2008, she has served on a teacher advisory board for a nonprofit energy education organization. Michelle received a bachelor’s degree in biology education from Illinois State University and a master’s degree in educational leadership from Concordia University Chicago.

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A LEADER’S GUIDE TO READING AND WRITING I N A P L C AT W O R K , S E C O N D A R Y

To learn more about Michelle’s work, follow @mgarlick96 on Twitter. To book Daniel M. Argentar, Katherine A. N. Gillies, Maureen M. Rubenstein, Brian R. Wise, or Michelle Garlick for professional development, contact pd@ SolutionTree.com.

IN TRO DUCTI O N

Leaders of Literacy Every Teacher Is a Literacy Teacher is not just the name of our series of elementary and secondary books dedicated to literacy instruction and strategies, it is the mantra by which we encourage all teachers and leaders in schools operating as professional learning communities (PLCs) to think of and approach literacy instruction regardless of grade level or content area. To that end, the secondary-level books in this series each focus on best practices and strategies to support the instructional changes collaborative teacher teams must make to support students’ acquisition of essential grade-level reading and writing skills. This growing collection includes the following. Reading and Writing Strategies for the Secondary English Classroom in a PLC at Work (Onuscheck, Spiller, Argentar, Gillies, Rubenstein, & Wise, 2020a) Reading and Writing Strategies for the Secondary Science Classroom in a PLC at Work (Onuscheck, Spiller, Argentar, Gillies, Rubenstein, & Wise, 2020b) Reading and Writing Strategies for the Secondary Social Studies Classroom in a PLC at Work (Onuscheck, Spiller, Argentar, Gillies, Rubenstein, & Wise, 2021) Each of these books provides teacher teams with the insights and strategies they need to support students to read and write effectively in specific content areas. More precisely, and regardless of the content area, the secondary-level books we’ve crafted for this series focus on how subject-area teachers in grades 6–12 accomplish the following.

A LEADER’S GUIDE TO READING AND WRITING I N A P L C AT W O R K , S E C O N D A R Y

Recognize the role every teacher must play in supporting the literacy development of students in all subject areas throughout their schooling. Provide commonly shared approaches to literacy to help students develop stronger, more skillful habits of learning. Demonstrate how teachers can and should adapt literacy skills to support specific subject areas. Model how commitment to a PLC culture can support the innovative collaboration necessary to support the literacy growth and success of every student. Focus on creating literacy-based strategies in ways that promote the development of students’ critical-thinking skills in each academic area. Although each secondary-level series book has the Reading and Writing Strategies moniker, and each book guides teacher teams in ways that promote stronger, research-based instructional practices for literacy in the classroom, no single book supports leading the sustained, needed changes many schools are searching for to support student learning. Leaders, in this case, act as change agents, which requires more than handing out books. Leadership is about building shared commitment and creating sustainable, positive changes to the way schools work. Therefore, we designed A Leader’s Guide to Reading and Writing in a PLC at Work, Secondary to help leaders serving in multiple roles to build that shared commitment and establish sustainable changes in schools focused on ensuring all students acquire grade- and course-level literacy skills. In the following sections, we explain the dire need for focused literacy instruction, highlight the importance of teaching literacy skills across all academic disciplines, explain the role of leaders in fostering an environment within a PLC where students’ reading and writing skills can flourish, and outline the scope and structure of this book.

The Need for Literacy Instruction Picture a reader who is just beginning to learn how to read. What behaviors do you see as this student engages with text? What are they learning to do first? How are they grappling with the challenge of learning how to read? Chances are, you visualize this reader at the beginning stages, working to crack the alphabetic code— breaking apart and sounding out words, one syllable at a time, and likely dealing with simple language and colorful text. The words the student is trying to read are

Introduction

Leaders of Literacy

already ones that he or she likely employs in conversation. This student is engaging in growing basic literacy skills—decoding, fluency, and automaticity. During this early phase of learning how to read, comprehension and meaning making almost take a back seat to decoding. The reader is working on the mechanical process of learning to read. As readers advance beyond the beginning stages of reading and advance in their abilities to read, they become more fully fluent and able to comprehend a text. They begin reading to learn rather than learning to read. At this point, the advanced reader possesses the ability to make meaning from what they read—the process of reading is no longer dedicated to the mechanical process of encoding and decoding a text. Instead, the process of reading is dedicated to learning and thinking. More advanced readers are able to infer from and analyze what they read in a book, as well as the world, even when they have limited experience with a topic. Such readers possess the critical literacy skills they will need for college and success in the workplace. These critically literate students are ready to take on complex tasks and dive into disciplinary literacy tasks, engaging in fruitful text analysis and writing extension activities to demonstrate a thorough understanding of tasks and texts. Now, what about the reader who is somewhere between these two phases—the reader who is not a beginning reader and is not an advanced reader? What about the student who can break the code—he or she can encode and decode—but struggles to apply this information to form new understandings? The reality that we all know and experience in our classrooms is that there are many students who fall into this place along the continuum, and there are many students who leave our high schools without the essential life skill of being critically literate. In fact, the Condition of Education 2020 report from the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Services (Hussar et al., 2020) suggests that only 33 percent of eighth-grade students and 37 percent of twelfth-grade students possess literacy skills at or above the level of proficiency and over 65 percent have not met this readiness benchmark. Additionally, the percentage of students who tested below the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) Basic literacy-skill threshold has grown for fourth-, eighth-, and twelfth-grade students since the previous 2018 report (McFarland et al., 2018). This means that a majority of students are moving through middle school and high school without developing the literacy skills necessary to be successful in secondary classrooms. In fact, the literacy achievement gap is widening. This is the group of students with which we are most concerned in this book. We know that

A LEADER’S GUIDE TO READING AND WRITING I N A P L C AT W O R K , S E C O N D A R Y

this large group of students requires greater attention and a greater concentration on skill development. Moreover, a specific portion of these students will continue to need support in even basic literacy-skill development. It’s this portion of our student population that seems to be the conundrum, and often, these are the students teachers struggle to support. Unfortunately, the struggle among many of this group of students is not always transparent, even though they make up the majority of students in classrooms. The graph in figure I.1 represents a snapshot of the increasing gap in literacy as students grow up within schools, boldly demonstrating the challenges we must work to solve as educators in schools. These students are in desperate need of instruction to cultivate their intermediate literacy skills that serve as a common foundation to disciplinary literacy. These skills include building academic vocabulary, self-monitoring comprehension, applying fix-it strategies in order to understand a text, and applying knowledge to a prompted task (Buehl, 2017). All teachers need to work with their school and district collaborative teams across disciplines to collectively shoulder the responsibility of student literacy and address these alarming statistics. Research confirms there is a real need for disciplinary literacy instruction in the secondary classroom. Literacy experts Timothy and Cynthia Shanahan (2008) note the following. Adolescents in the first quarter of the 21st century read no better— and perhaps worse—than the generations before them. For many students, the rate of growth toward college readiness actually decreases as students move from eighth to twelfth grade. American fifteen-year-olds perform worse than their peers from fourteen other countries. Disciplinary literacy is an essential component of economic and social participation. Middle and high school students need ongoing literacy instruction because early childhood and elementary instruction do not correlate to later success. Among the many concerns within collaborative discussions about teaching and learning, literacy continually ranks as one of the most worrisome. In many of our discussions with teachers throughout North America, teachers across academic disciplines express three running concerns: (1) many students struggle with basic

Introduction

Leaders of Literacy

Grade 4

Percent 100 90 80

2005

2007

2009

2011

2015

2017

2019

70 60 50

40 30 20 10 0

Grade 8

Percent

100 90 80

2013 Year

3 28

3 30

4 31

4 32

4 29

Proficient

60 50 40

2015

2017

2019

30 20 10 0

Advanced

2005

2007

2009

2011

2013 Year

Basic Below Basic

Grade 12

Percent

100

90 80

2005

2009

70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

2013 Year

2015

Note: Includes public, private, Bureau of Indian Education, and Department of Defense Education Activity schools. Achievement levels define what students should know and be able to do: NAEP Basic indicates partial mastery of fundamental skills, NAEP Proficient indicates demonstrated competency over challenging subject matter, and NAEP Advanced indicates superior performance beyond Proficient. NAEP achievement levels are to be used on a trial basis and should be interpreted and used with caution. Assessment was not conducted for grade 8 in 2000 or for grade 12 in 2000, 2003, 2007, 2011, and 2017. Data for grade 12 in 2019 were not available in time for publication. . . . Although rounded numbers are displayed, the figures are based on unrounded data. Detail may not sum to totals because of rounding.

Source: Adapted from Hussar et al., 2020, p. 70. Figure I.1: Percentage distribution of fourth-, eighth-, and twelfth-grade students across NAEP reading achievement levels—2005–2019.

A LEADER’S GUIDE TO READING AND WRITING I N A P L C AT W O R K , S E C O N D A R Y

literacy skills, (2) many students read and write below grade level, and (3) many students do not know how to complete reading or writing assignments. We believe that teachers can bridge these gaps with a strong foundation of high-impact literacy instruction and engaging in the PLC process. The gaps we see in students’ literacy skills are staggering, and these gaps affect all areas of many students’ education. As students are marched through their schooling, the statistics demonstrate that gaps in literacy increase over the course of many students’ elementary, middle, and high school years. Columbia University Teachers College (2016) reports many students find themselves reading three to six grade levels below their peers, many students struggle mightily to comprehend informational texts, and many students graduate from high school unprepared to enter a college-level experience. Columbia University Teachers College (2016) and Michael A. Rebell (2008) further highlight the following statistics, which present significant and long-standing concerns. By age three, children of professionals have vocabularies that are nearly 50 percent greater than those of working-class children and are twice as large as those of children whose families are on welfare. By the end of fourth grade, African American, Hispanic, and poor students of all races are two years behind their wealthier, predominantly White peers in reading and mathematics. By eighth grade, they have slipped three years behind, and by twelfth grade, four years behind. Only one in fifty Hispanic and African American seventeen-year-olds can read and gain information from a specialized text (such as a STEMfocused journal) compared to about one in twelve White students. By the end of high school, African American and Hispanic students’ reading and mathematics skills are roughly the same as those of White students in the eighth grade. Among eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds, about 90 percent of Whites have either completed high school or earned a GED. Among African Americans, the rate is 81 percent; among Hispanics, 63 percent. African American students are only about 50 percent as likely (and Hispanics about 33 percent as likely) as White students to earn a bachelor’s degree by age twenty-nine, and elementary instruction does not correlate to later success.

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Leaders of Literacy

In its U.S. Adult Literacy Facts infographic, ProLiteracy (n.d.) highlights the summation of this long-standing literacy crisis by detailing the reality of literacy in the United States and the catastrophic impact that illiteracy has on a multitude of social and economic factors. For example, ProLiteracy (n.d.) finds more than thirty-six million U.S. adults cannot read, write, or do mathematics above a third-grade level. And 43 percent of adults with low literacy levels live in poverty. When parents have low literacy levels, their children have a 72 percent chance of performing at the lowest reading level, receiving poor grades, developing behavior problems, having high school absentee problems, and dropping out. More than 1.2 million students drop out of high school each year (one out of every six). These jarring statistics undoubtedly reveal a systematic divide between those who are literate and those who are not, consequently deepening the inequities already present in our social structures. Visit https://bit.ly/3hhCdHG to read all of ProLiteracy’s (n.d.) U.S. literacy facts, including statistics regarding English learners, unemployment, health literacy, and correctional facilities. Statistical results like these are a stark reminder that we need to focus our attention on the literacy development of students in every corner of our schools. As we note throughout this book, reading and writing strategies across disciplines often require differing instructional approaches. These approaches must be tailored to meet the needs of every student and demand innovative thinking. In this book, we offer suggestions focused on leading efforts to teach students intermediate literacy skills commensurate with secondary-level reading and writing standards. These are important skills to attain because students with strong intermediate literacy skills have essentially developed an awareness of their own active comprehension, and they know what to do when comprehension begins to feel shaky. It is vital that teachers within all disciplines don’t jump ahead of intermediate literacy but instead continually model this phase to students and provide opportunities for them to practice these skills in a constructive and guided manner independently and confidently.

Disciplinary Literacy Not only are general literacy skills vital to student success across all content areas but also each academic discipline requires and emphasizes a need for specific reading and writing skills. As your teachers gain confidence that students have a good grasp of basic, foundational literacy skills, and as collaborative team members begin to see students develop more intermediate and advanced literacy skills, your

A LEADER’S GUIDE TO READING AND WRITING I N A P L C AT W O R K , S E C O N D A R Y

teams can move forward with tailoring their literacy instruction with an eye toward disciplinary literacy. For our purposes, a discipline is a unique expertise that schools often split into subject-matter divisions such as mathematics, science, language arts, physical education, world languages, fine arts, and so on. Disciplinary literacy focuses on the literacy strategies tailored to a particular academic subject area. Before you continue, consider what would happen if you were to gather teachers from every discipline in a school and track the way they each address reading, writing, and speaking tasks. Predict how different content-area teachers would approach and work through such literacy-focused tasks. What similarities and differences might you observe among these varied disciplines? Because teachers have unique expertise related to their academic field of interest, it is common for them not to consider themselves literacy teachers, even those who are English language arts (ELA) instructors. Further, because all teachers have unique expertise related to their individual academic fields, they often approach literacy-based tasks differently. Those differences stem from the diverse sets of expertise, interests, and background knowledge each professional brings to teaching and learning, and as a result, middle school and high school teachers often attend to literacy tasks differently based on that disciplinary expertise. For example, when a social studies teacher reads, writes, and speaks, that teacher does so with certain goals and objectives in mind, such as determining the main idea, cause and effect, sequencing, and author’s purpose, to name a few. On the other hand, a science teacher might focus on practices related to the scientific method, computational thinking, or the ability to interpret and synthesize data. A language arts teacher might focus on theme and character development, author’s craft, or symbolism throughout a text. And a mathematics teacher may focus on the mathematical story each skill articulates and a specific solution. There are also certain stylistic and conceptual norms professionals attend to in each discipline. A scientist, historian, businessperson, or any other professional addresses literacy tasks with norms and behaviors befitting his or her expertise and profession. This makes total sense; after all, each academic discipline requires unique insider knowledge to achieve proficiency, with more background knowledge, subject-related vocabulary, and subject-related purpose than others without such dispositions. As a result, disciplinary outsiders often lack sufficient background knowledge and vocabulary to navigate a disciplinary text successfully. Literacy expert Doug Buehl (2017) suggests it is the job of educators to teach students how to think like they do—as disciplinary insiders. Any sustained literacy

Introduction

Leaders of Literacy

effort at the secondary level requires the leaders driving that effort to understand how teachers must adapt literacy instruction to their areas of expertise. As such, the stakes for comprehending the necessity of disciplinary literacy are high for all in the classroom and leadership roles. Text comprehension in all disciplines generally follows a similar nine-step process, illustrated in figure I.2 (page 10), but the ins and outs of application, connection, and extension reside within the specific lens of the disciplinary expert and must be modeled accordingly. This figure and process derive from a guide coauthor Katherine A. N. Gillies developed when training peer tutors to help struggling readers navigate disciplinary texts. It provides a pathway for students to follow and teachers to model when comprehending a text. In our secondary-level series books, we explore strategic-comprehension steps and before, during, and after stages of reading in detail. We further demonstrate how application, connection, and extension of literacy skills unfold under specific disciplinary lenses. As a leader, and given the difference between disciplinary insiders and outsiders, it's important to accept that it makes little sense for content-area teachers to instruct students to read and write with the same general strategies and moves in every content area. After all, if we know that each content area has its own thinking style, it makes sense that teachers support students in consuming and producing texts with the same unique thinking style required of each discipline. Even students who have a solid foundation of general strategies may struggle with the specific demands of disciplinary texts. Instead of using generic strategies in every class and across the school, providing students with a varied strategy toolbox to meet disciplinary demands better equips them as disciplinary insiders to read like scientists, mathematicians, historians, and so on (Gabriel & Wenz, 2017). Over time, our literacy team made positive strides toward building disciplinary literacy strategies that support learning in more directed, focused, and attentive ways. We learned that teachers should apply more specific strategies to different disciplines in ways that help support learning. When we speak of this shift to disciplinary literacy and training students to be insiders, we intend for teachers to teach students to think differently in each classroom. However, we also encourage leaders to establish a common schoolwide literacy vocabulary for teachers to use. We believe this helps students build a general understanding of common terms such as claim, evidence, and reasoning. Through this common language, students build on the foundational knowledge of these literacy concepts in discipline-specific ways as teachers become more comfortable teaching students how to read, write,

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Did I . . . ?

Strategic Comprehension Step

Before, During, or After Reading

Preview text, ask questions, and make predictions.

Before:

Recall what you already know about the topic.

Focus and get ready to read.

Set a purpose for reading.

Make a notetaking plan for remembering what’s important.

Define key concepts and important vocabulary whenever possible.

Keep your purpose for reading in mind.

During:

Make meaning by:

Stay mentally active.

• Asking questions • Putting the main ideas into your own words F

• Visualizing what you read • Making notes to remember what’s important • Making connections between the text and people, places, things, or ideas Be aware of what’s happening in your mind as you read. Consider:

• Am I focused or distracted? • Do I need to go back to a part I didn’t get and reread it? • What are my reactions to what I am reading?

Reflect on what you’ve read. Consider:

After:

• Did I find out what I needed or wanted to know?

Check for understanding.

• Can I summarize the main ideas and important details in my own words? • Can I apply what I have learned? • Can I talk about or write about what I have learned?

Visit go.SolutionTree.com/literacy for a free reproducible version of this figure.

Introduction

Leaders of Literacy

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.

Leadership and Intent 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.

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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.

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Leaders of Literacy

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

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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.

Introduction

Leaders of Literacy

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.

About This Book 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

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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

Introduction

Leaders of Literacy

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.

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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.

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Leaders of Literacy

Wrapping Up In the urgency to ensure they cover curriculum standards, teachers sometimes forget they are a part of the story and development of every student’s future. As they work with students every day, educators need reminders that what they do right now matters. We have seen firsthand how what they do right now affects students’ formative development in ways that significantly impact cognitive and behavioral patterns and habits. So, as they work on ensuring students acquire grade-level literacy skills, it’s important to recognize how the many problems and obstacles teachers face will challenge them. Remember, every challenge is a stepping-stone for change, and every day, teachers build a pathway for each student’s future. Stay inspired—even when things feel challenging—believe that every day can make a positive impact. Be careful not to give in to the discouraging issues and challenges you will confront. They are real, and they are difficult to overcome. But, as we begin this book on leadership, you must recognize that every challenge is an opportunity.

C H A PTER

Confronting the Challenges of Leading Literacy The purpose of this series is to assert a singular, unified commitment: every teacher is a literacy teacher. This goal (and the title of our series) stems from three factors that you—as a leader in your school—likely already know: (1) students often struggle with reading and writing (Hussar et al., 2020); (2) gaps in reading and writing skills are often amplified among students from poverty (Jensen, 2019); and (3) many content-area teachers at the secondary level have little or no background in how to teach reading and writing skills. These factors represent long-standing concerns in education and present genuine challenges for leaders as they seek to reinvent how they support teacher teams’ collaborative practices and instruction to profoundly affect student acquisition of high-level literacy skills. We know from experience that changes leaders institute to address these issues will be difficult. Any teacher who has taken on the work to implement the PLC process and culture knows change is hard. But what all who have undertaken this journey also know is change is necessary to overcome inequities of learning and ensure learning for all. Before you begin using this book to inform your approach to leading the charge for literacy improvement in your school, it is important that we be upfront about some of the challenges we’ve confronted in our work to implement instructional changes and literacy strategies across a variety of academic disciplines. Some of these challenges we didn’t expect, and they required creative approaches to sustain successful change. Some challenges connected more directly with long-standing mindsets teachers have about teaching and learning, and, as such, we did anticipate them. Because they involved breaking with wellestablished conventions, such known challenges required leading with purpose and

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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.

Weren’t Students Supposed to Learn How to Read and Write in Elementary School? 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.

Chapter 1

Confronting the Challenges of Leading Literacy

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

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throughout the educational journey. Teachers can learn and share strategies that have (and have not) been successful in helping students to master skills vital to future academic success.

Next Steps for Leaders Assuming students can already read and write when they come to middle school or high school is not an unusual expectation. However, given the reality that many students need to continue to develop as readers and writers even in middle school and high school, use the following questions to consider your leadership approach for how teachers should support students in confronting increasingly complex texts and writing in more sophisticated ways.

How might you address secondary teachers who have inaccurate assumptions about the need for students to continue developing reading and writing skills and their role in supporting literacy growth? How might confronting these assumptions across teacher teams help lay the groundwork for building a culture of literacy in your school?

How might you begin to build partnerships between primary schools, middle schools, and high schools to create articulation among grade levels around the reading and writing skills necessary at each grade level to help support literacy development across K–12?

What if Students Lack Foundational Reading and Writing Skills? While it’s common for students to have gaps in their reading and writing skills that teacher teams must identify and fill for those students to succeed with gradeand course-level content, it’s an unfortunate reality that some students advance deep into their secondary school years lacking even foundational reading and writing skills. For example, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO, 2017) Institute for Statistics estimates more than 617

Chapter 1

Confronting the Challenges of Leading Literacy

million children and adolescents around the world are not achieving minimum proficiency levels in reading. This is a challenge above and beyond mere teacher assumptions about what students should know and be able to do when it comes to reading and writing grade- and course-level content. If you listen to your secondary teachers, they are likely aware of this truth. They might even talk about it regularly, year after year, in every academic department. You might hear them say, “I have students in my biology class who read at a fourth-grade level. They don’t understand a page of the reading I assign” or “I don’t even bother assigning reading and writing anymore. The book is too hard for them.” Confronted with this challenge and with the best of intentions, we’ve watched teachers who have students who can’t read at grade level utilize other ways to get information to students. They create slide presentations using Microsoft PowerPoint or Apple Keynote that are simpler than the course text, give students condensed notes that summarize what they should know from a text, or they just explain to students what they should understand, forgoing any textual content at all. While using such approaches might ensure students walk away hearing the material (or not), they haven’t learned how to learn, nor will they progress in their reading and writing skills without being challenged effectively to do so. Educators are not helping students by allowing them to avoid their responsibilities to understand how to read to learn and convey their thinking about disciplinary content and skills through writing. For these students, there is a dire need to identify foundational skill gaps early and provide sufficient interventions to accelerate their literacy-skill growth to grade level as quickly as possible. In Charting the Course for Collaborative Teams: Lessons From Priority Schools in a PLC at Work (Kramer, 2021a), veteran principal and PLC coach Tammy Miller underscores the need for teams to establish clear connections between essential literacy skills and the essential standards for course curricula. She further suggests that intervention teams must have a clear understanding of what foundational skills a student lacks, what proficiency with those skills looks like, how team members will assess progress with such skills, and a due date for the student to achieve mastery. We suggest leaders coach their teacher teams on how to use this approach alongside the reading and writing strategies we provide in our series books to establish learning supports and scaffolds as students engage in reading and writing tasks. With the right supports, we know all students can learn to read and write at grade and course level. You will learn more about RTI and approaches to literacy-focused interventions in chapter 6 (page 101).

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Next Steps for Leaders When a student lacks foundational reading and writing skills, leaders must ensure teams both understand the need to intervene and have the requisite processes and strategies to do so effectively. Use the following questions to consider your leadership approach to this challenge.

How widespread is a lack of foundational reading and writing skills among your students? Use the insights in chapter 3 (page 53) to look at your school’s literacy data, and explore the scope and scale of your challenge. How will you prioritize your challenges?

How might you ensure teams have the requisite knowledge, processes, and tools to respond to individual student needs while ensuring those students maintain access to grade- and course-level instruction? What ideas can you brainstorm with your faculty to support student literacy to accelerate literacyskill growth among students lacking foundational skills?

Aren’t ELA Teachers the Ones Responsible for Teaching Reading and Writing? As with the first challenge, the short answer is yes. ELA teachers do teach reading and writing, but reading and writing in the ELA classroom is very different from reading and writing in other academic subject areas, which focus on and utilize literacy skills in different ways. Leaders and teachers alike must begin to more fully understand that reading fiction is different from reading science or history, and writing a lab report is different from writing an art critique or an explanation about solving a mathematics problem. For instance, in history, teachers know how the story is going to end, so they approach the purpose of reading history differently from how a science teacher might teach a student how to read a chemistry textbook. This is why we have separate series books focused on strategies that fit specific academic disciplines.

Chapter 1

Confronting the Challenges of Leading Literacy

If a school leader seeks to empower teachers to share the inside knowledge of their discipline with their students, it can be helpful to ask them to articulate what they do as readers and writers in their discipline. For example, allow time for a team of science teachers to identify what is unique about reading a scientific text, such as a scientific study or lab report. What skills are unique, and what skills are universal? Once teachers have the capacity to articulate what makes them academic insiders, they may feel better equipped to share that knowledge with their students.

Next Steps for Leaders Most teachers in disciplines other than ELA do not have a background in how to teach reading or writing skills. As you contemplate how to approach the need for all teachers to be literacy teachers, use the following questions to consider your leadership approach to this challenge.

How might you introduce to teachers the need for all teams to include literacy instruction as part of their curricula? What information will you use to make the case for literacybased instruction to be a part of all content areas?

How might you start small, directing teams to integrate literacy-focused instructional changes in incremental, easy-tointroduce ways through professional learning?

Given there is no one-size-fits-all approach to disciplinary literacy instruction, how will you adjust your approach to fit the needs of specific subject-based teams?

How Do Teachers Teach to Both Curriculum and Literacy Standards? In secondary classrooms, there are always more content standards and skills to tackle than there is time for—in even a full school year. So, when teachers hear they will need to introduce literacy instruction into their curricula, it’s understandable if they’re skeptical or feel overwhelmed. In talking with many teachers, we find they

A LEADER’S GUIDE TO READING AND WRITING I N A P L C AT W O R K , S E C O N D A R Y

often feel like they just need to keep pressing forward to complete the curriculum and don’t have time to add more. We know there is a lot of pressure to do this, and we know teaching and learning are demanding. Addressing this concern is about encouraging teams to think and work smarter, not harder. Literacy leaders should provide teacher teams with examples of how team members can use and adapt literacy strategies that also support curriculum content standards and skills. We believe literacy and subject content work hand in glove together. They are mutually interdependent. By approaching teaching and learning practices that help students read complex disciplinary texts with greater understanding and grow in their capacity to synthesize their learning in writing, students will also learn to think more critically, problem solve more effectively, and more fully conceptualize the challenging expectations of secondary and lifelong learning. In this way, disciplinary literacy skills grow right alongside proficiency with essential standards and learning targets.

Next Steps for Leaders It’s always a challenge to appropriately pace a curriculum for students while ensuring teaching of all essential standards, but educators haven’t taught students if they haven’t learned. In building literacy-focused initiatives, use the following questions to consider how you will respond to team members who question the viability of teaching literacy skills alongside course curricula.

The secondary-level books in the series provide many examples. What models of how to incorporate literacybased instruction into curriculum instruction will best support disciplinary teams? (Use the strategies in the secondary-level series books to help support your approach.)

How might you support teams in choosing, trying, and reflecting on the effectiveness of specific strategies?

How can you model and lead a reflective teaching culture that is responsive to learning?

Chapter 1

Confronting the Challenges of Leading Literacy

How Can Teams That Have a Hard Time Collaborating Learn to Work Together? That a culture of collaboration and collective efficacy is one of just three big ideas of a PLC (DuFour et al., 2016) highlights their importance to the PLC process. (Chapter 2, page 33, lists the other big ideas and additional foundational concepts.) This does not imply that establishing such a culture is easy. Teams, especially those new to the PLC process, often struggle with collaborating around curriculum content standards, assessment methods, and how to respond to data. If your school is just beginning its PLC journey or is struggling to advance on that journey, you know this is true. However, if you’ve been a part of or witness to a truly effective collaborative team, you know and understand the power collaboration has to transform teaching and learning. If you assess that your teams need additional support with the collaborative process, we suggest tapping one or more of the following resources. Learning by Doing: A Handbook for Professional Learning Communities at Work (DuFour et al., 2016) Revisiting Professional Learning Communities at Work: Proven Insights for Sustained, Substantive School Improvement (DuFour, DuFour, Eaker, Mattos, & Muhammad, 2021) Collaborative Teams That Work: The Definitive Guide to Cycles of Learning in a PLC (Sloper & Grift, 2021) Energize Your Teams: Powerful Tools for Coaching Collaborative Teams in PLCs at Work (Many, Maffoni, Sparks, & Thomas, 2022) Transformative Collaboration: Five Commitments for Leading a Professional Learning Community (Flanagan, Grift, Lipscombe, Sloper, & Wills, 2021) In addition, each subject-based book in this series is set up to help teams get better at the collaborative process for the purposes of supporting literacy growth, offering teams guidance on how to examine the value of each literacy strategy in ways related to the skills each subject is meant to develop. In other words, we focus on the subject standards and how literacy strategies support those standards. When teams come together to collaborate, consider using these books to help focus team members on how to learn together to make innovative, impactful, and positive changes to how they approach literacy instruction.

A LEADER’S GUIDE TO READING AND WRITING I N A P L C AT W O R K , S E C O N D A R Y

Next Steps for Leaders Consider the following concerns of your own teachers.

How might your school’s recent history of asking teachers to support new initiatives instill a sense of initiative fatigue, and how might this impact the ways your teachers prioritize a newfound focus on literacy? How will you use your understanding of team collaboration in a PLC to counteract this effect?

What other challenges are unique to your school’s teacher teams, and how might you align a new focus on literacy to address and remedy those challenges?

How will you shape your school’s purpose and culture in a way that prioritizes literacy as a focus of your teams’ collaborative discussions?

Wrapping Up Creating a shared commitment to literacy instruction in secondary schools is filled with unexpected challenges. But, like any change, challenges provide insights and opportunities to build different mindsets, establish creative approaches, and witness new successes. In our experiences, the five challenges we encountered and worked through led our teachers and teacher teams to greater levels of insight into how to better support students’ learning—helping students to not only better know and understand their academic subject but also helping students engage in high-level critical thinking and problem solving. As a literacy leader, consider the following action steps when confronting these challenges. Ensure that you have data that inform you and your teachers about student reading abilities. When student data indicate individuals or groups of students have foundational reading and writing deficits, apply tiered interventions that help students inside and outside of the classroom. (You’ll find more about this in chapter 6, page 101).

Chapter 1

Confronting the Challenges of Leading Literacy

Empower teachers to recognize what makes them disciplinary insiders (Buehl, 2017). Academic teachers are experts within their fields; let them identify the skills they use and make that transparent for their students. Collaborative teams can work within curriculum maps to identify opportunities to combine content standards with literacy skills. If there are specific content pieces that lend themselves to specific reading or writing skills, use them as opportunities to combine content with skill instruction.