Reading and Writing?

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.