30
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).
