Literacy as a Vehicle for School Reform

Literacy as Educational Reform in Secondary SettingsConsider three initiatives that used content area literacy methods to “turn around” failing schools in dire need of reform:

(1) Herbert Hoover High School which enacted the Seven Defensible Strategies

(2) New Dorp High School which enacted explicit instruction in analytical writing

(3) Thurgood Marshall Academic High School which enacted the Academic Literacy required elective course for all ninth grade students

Herbert Hoover High School and San Diego State University Participatory Action Research Project

• “Content area classrooms should be organized around themes, big ideas, or essential questions” (p. 24).

• “Students are expected to read and write in every class”

• The general focus was on strategies for helping students read and write increasingly complex text.

• Use better, readable texts to motivate students to read– “Using one grade-level textbook often ensures that students who struggle

will have to rely on just listening to learn the required information” (p. 52).

• Seven Defensible Strategies for Reading and Writing in All Content Areas– Transportable Literacy Strategies:

• “Students use the strategies they learn in one class to comprehend in another” (p. 22).

– Transparent Literacy Strategies:• “Strategies become part of the students’ thinking and students automatically

apply the strategies ‘on the run’” (p. 22).

New Dorp’s Writing Intervention

1. This school placed an intense focus, across nearly every academic subject, on teaching the skills that underlie good analytical writing.

2. Students were taught explicitly how to turn ideas into simple sentences and how to construct complex sentences from simple ones by supplying the answer to three prompts—but, because, and so (a complex sentence has an independent clause joined by one or more dependent clauses).

continued3. Students were taught to use appositive clauses to vary the

way their sentences began (an appositive is a word or group of words that identifies or renames another word in a sentence).

4. Students were taught how to recognize sentence fragments

5. Students were taught how to pull the main idea from a paragraph.

6. Students were taught how to form a main idea on their own.

continued7. Students were taught to use specific phrases to add detail to

a paragraph (e.g., specifically, for instance, for example)

8. Teachers stopped giving “fluffy” assignments such as “write a postcard to a friend describing life in the trenches of World War I and instead demanded that students fashion an expository essay describing three major causes of the conflict.”

Academic Literacy

At Thurgood Marshall High School, all students took a class in ninth grade called “academic literacy.”

“The goal of academic literacy was to prepare our students to become more confident and competent in reading the kinds of texts they would be assigned in different disciplines throughout the rest of their high school classes and beyond” (Schoenbach, Greenleaf, Cziko & Hurwitz, 1999, p. 47).

Academic Literacy was Predicated on a Goal of Reading for Understanding

Academic Literacy Addressed The “Quiet Crisis”“Students’ limited reading proficiency keeps them from accomplishing

the challenging work necessary to meet high academic standards” (p. 4).

And, entailed the following perspectives/methods:

•Teaching with Multiple Texts• Offers many points of entry into learning (please remember the

multiple texts power point from the previous learning module)• Protects students from boredom

•Reading is Problem Solving

•Fluent Reading• Prosody• Automaticity“Fluency grows as [students] have opportunities, support, and

encouragement to read a wide range of text types about a wide range of topics” (p. 19).

Theories of Reading for Understanding present in the Academic Literacies course continued• Proficient Readers Share some Key Characteristics

• Mentally engaged• Motivated to read and to learn• Socially active around reading tasks• Strategic in Monitoring the interactive processes that assist comprehension

• Setting goals• Monitoring their emerging understanding of a text• Coordinating a variety of comprehension strategies to control the reading

process

• Dimensions of Classroom Life• Social Dimension (classroom environment)• Personal Dimension (developing students’ identities and goals for reading)• Cognitive Dimension (developing students’ mental processes)• Knowledge Dimension (developing the kind of knowledge readers bring to a

text)

The Cognitive Dimension of Reading• Getting the Big Picture

• Breaking text down• Close reading (linking interpretations to specific textual

evidence)

• Monitoring comprehension

• Using problem solving strategies to assist and restore comprehension (summarize, retell, visualize, intertextual connections, create graphic representations, create metaphors, reread confusing sections)

• Setting reading purposes and adjusting reading processes

The Knowledge Building Dimension• Activate and building prior topical knowledge

• Develop knowledge of text structures• Identify ways texts are structured• Notice patterns in structure across texts of similar kinds• Identify the particular kinds of language used in particular kinds of

texts• Identify roots, prefixes, and suffixes of Latin and Greek derived words• Create word families associated with particular ideas or subject areas• Use text organization and structure to assist in comprehension• Preview text and notice structural markers such as headings,

illustrations etc.• Notice particular words or phrases that indicate a shift in meaning

(e.g., however, in spite of, yet, in contrast to)

Academic Literacy• Academic language

• Disciplinary and discourse-specific knowledge (communicative competence)

• Portray of different views of the role of reading in people’s lives

• Give students practice with a variety of disciplinary readings in all content areas

• Select appropriately challenging texts such that students have to use strategies to comprehend

• Teach students reading pedagogy terminology (e.g., metacognition, schema, engagement, fluency, strategy etc.)

• Confusion is ok

• Build concentration, stamina, and fluency (even if the book is boring and even if you don’t want to read, you can)

• Critical literacy (reading as power and fuel for life goals)