What if Students Lack Foundational Reading and Writing Skills? Aren’t ELA Teachers the Ones Responsible for Teaching

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 grade- and 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

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).