3 minute read
Wrapping Up
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?
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).
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.
“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.”
—Melisha Plummer
Assistant Principal, South Atlanta High School, Georgia “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.”
—Julie A. Schmidt
Superintendent, Kildeer Countryside Community Consolidated School District 96, Buffalo Grove, Illinois
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 Understand the importance of having a schoolwide culture of literacy and being a change agent u Better support collaborative teams through listening, learning, and actively leading u Learn to incorporate proven strategies for reading and writing instruction in all content areas u Determine the most effective professional learning approaches for enhancing teacher effectiveness
u Recognize the importance of data for measuring literacy growth and choosing appropriate interventions and extensions
Visit go.SolutionTree.com/literacy to download the free reproducibles in this book.
