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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
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
