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Literacy Development in Content Classrooms

Guiding Question: How can I help all students develop their literacy skills in my content

classroom?

Explore

This module provides perspectives and tools that support the literacy development of

multilingual learners during content instruction. It addresses multiple interpretations of what

constitutes literacy, the nature of developing literacy through more than one language and

activities that encourage the kinds of collaborative conceptual development that is at the

foundation of academic success. We start with the wider picture that applies to all learners and

then describe the unique aspects of multilingual literacy development.

Key Understandings

There are multiple definitions of literacy and even more ideas of how best to support its

development in school. Overall, literacy represents a particular way that humans have developed

to express ideas and communicate through the use of symbolic representation of speech and

thought. Importantly, beyond the simplistic notion that literacy consists of decoding what is on

the page and writing down words, is the view that literacy is a politically contextualized and

multimodal process that is developed through all the languages and dialects that students speak

(Freire, 1970; García et al., 2017; Luke, 2012).

Literacy is situated in social context. Literacy development in school is tied to factors

outside the classroom including political and cultural contexts, social power, and cultural capital

(Street, 1984; Luke, 2012). It affects both the learner and the society at large. Paolo Freire (1970)

who worked in the 60s and 70s to bring literacy to Brazilian campesinos, offered the perspective

that educators must do more than teach people how to read and write words, but to read the
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world around them in an active participatory process. In reading not just the word, but also the

world, Freire argued for a pedagogy that disrupted oppression, where the lines between teacher

and student were blurred and where the ultimate collaborative goal was the end of oppression

(not just the oppressed becoming the oppressors). Literacy, according to Freire was an active,

revolutionary, liberatory process that included, but was not limited to the written word. Thus,

learning to read and write is a political act, an awakening, that results in a growing awareness of

the realities surrounding students’ lives (Christensen, 2017; Freire, 1970).

Students whose reading skills in English do not match arbitrary grade level expectations

or whose English proficiencies are not deemed adequate are often labeled as struggling readers, a

designation grounded in a deficit orientation to the learner (Brooks, 2020). Yet, these same

students often demonstrate great capabilities and brilliance when literacy and language

proficiency are understood in broader terms (Brooks, 2020). Content instruction can provide

students with needed access to and understanding of the discourses and literacy practices that are

inherent in and maintain structures of power. This includes learning to read beyond the words on

the page to understand the context within when they were written and for whose benefit, and

who has access to what information for what purposes. Content teachers can build on students’

existing abilities to analyze, critique, and reconstruct ideas in relation to their lived experience as

students craft arguments, distinguish fact from opinion, and/or synthesize and succinctly

organize their thoughts using all of their linguistic resources. Students then can draw on these

capabilities to express their identity, make their way in the world, demand their rights, fight

oppression, or better their communities (Commins, 2012).

Educators must also examine their content and consider the way the literacy materials

they use promote particular political perspectives, hide issues of inequity and/or limit students’
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engagement with and critique of issues of power and privilege. Milner (2020) proposes a

framework for disruptive movements that educators can take to reimagine the who, the what, and

the why of knowledge construction in reading. He poses three questions that are particularly

relevant to literacy in the content areas: Who builds knowledge? What counts as knowledge?

Why is knowledge constructed? We would add, which languages count as languages for

learning?

It may seem easier for teachers of English Language Arts or Social Studies to adopt this

stance, but Mathematics, Science, Art, PE, Health, indeed every school subject, is shaped by the

external context and how knowledge is used and valued for different purposes in different

communities. While understanding chemical bonding or algebraic equations may seem like “pure

content” unadulterated by politics, consider how these understandings get applied in the real

world. For example, whose communities are polluted and who has access to the knowledge

needed to mitigate the pollution? What is the difference to the community in real dollars when

costs are considered in relation to the profits generated by the polluters? Content classrooms

should be spaces where students learn to multilingually read the word and the world (Freire,

1970) and develop the skills to positively impact it (Teemant & Hausman, 2013).

Literacy as Multimodal. Becoming literate is a multifaceted endeavor, requiring

individuals to not only read and write but to listen and view, think critically, synthesize multiple

streams of information and produce new information in multiple ways (Cloud et al., 2011).

Freebody and Luke (1990) argue that effective reading draws upon a repertoire of practices and

suggest that literacy instruction should help students to break the code of texts, participate in the

meanings of text, use texts functionally, and critically analyze and transform texts. Serafini

(2012) expands their ideas to a multimodal view of literacy where the role of the reader shifts to
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reader-viewer who must attend to many different modes, including visual images, structures and

design features along with printed text in a process of constructing meaning and situating the text

in the larger sociocultural context. Each way of conveying information - visual, audio, gestural,

tactile and spatial - carries its own system of symbolic representation.

The use of multiple modes and languages to communicate conceptual information

increases multilingual students’ ability to focus on underlying concepts and deepen

understandings. Many multilingual students already have experiences with and skills for deriving

meaning garnered through languages other than English. While all languages allow for the

expression of complex meanings through all of these modes, the signs and symbols are not

necessarily correspondent across languages and cultural contexts. This makes it important in

multilingual classrooms to draw attention to what the different modes are, how they may be

culturally grounded and how they interact with and extend each other to create meaning or result

in miscommunication. The students themselves can become the experts in uncovering unique

and shared meanings using the platforms they are already familiar with such as Instagram,

TikTok and Triller which have great potential as resources in multilingual classrooms. While

some content can be perceived of as trivial, by looking more closely it is possible to see the ways

in which students display their thinking through contrast and comparison, irony, hidden

messages, or conveying implied meanings, all of which have the potential to be used for

academic purposes.

Multilingual Literacy Development. Multilingual literacy is best understood as its own

phenomenon rather than an aberration compared to monolingual literacy (e.g., Soltero-Gonzales

et al., 2012; Escamilla & Hopewell, 2014). Research (e.g., Cummins, 1991) has long illustrated

how “literacy skills are acquired only once through one language and then applied to the new
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language” (Brisk, 2007, p. 5). Research also strongly supports that multilingual students who

have developed strong literacy skills in their multiple languages achieve at higher levels than

those schooled solely through English. For this reason, literacy skills are best initially developed

in the language in which the child has the strongest proficiencies, something that is out of the

control of most content teachers, but important to embrace.

When students are literate in a language other than English—even if it uses a different

alphabet or organizational structure—instruction can be focused on building students’ conceptual

knowledge and language repertoire in English to map onto their existing literacy practices. For

the relatively small number of newcomer students who are not yet literate in any language, they

must both acquire formal literacy skills and learn the content. These students advance most

quickly when the content curriculum become the basis for building literacy skills rather than

using a decontextualized skills-based approach.

Too often, however, policies and practices crafted by districts and states regarding

literacy development are guided solely by research about what works for monolingual English

speakers making it less likely that multilingual learners will receive the kind of instruction that

will advance their intellectual and academic progress. For example, the recommendations of the

controversial Report of the National Reading Panel (2000) which failed to include multilingual

learners placed a heavy emphasis on reading instruction that prioritizes decontextualized

decoding skills. The panel’s findings were reviewed and challenged in light of research on

effective instructional practices for multilingual learners (August et al, 2006; August et al, 2009;

August et al, 2014). These researchers argue that it is not enough to teach language minoritized

students reading skills alone. A narrow focus on decoding diverts teachers from attending to

other facets of good literacy pedagogy including oral language development, building
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background knowledge, as well as making connections to students’ communities, their native

languages and cultural practices all of which can increase motivation and self-efficacy as well as

be supported in content classrooms.

For students reading through a language that they know well, texts open doorways to new

ideas, conceptualizations, and ways of understanding the world. However, text itself, that is the

words on the page, can also act as a barrier to gaining access to those same ideas if students do

not already have the requisite literacy skills or sufficient knowledge of the language the words

are written in. Meaning, then, is the key that opens the door to comprehending the text.

Instructional activities must assure that students can work at their cognitive level and not be

trapped into being provided information solely through simplistic texts because they have been

determined to be at their reading level as assessed by often inaccurate tests (Commins 2012).

Rather than using text as the main vehicle for introducing new information, for students not yet

fluent in English, text is often more appropriately used for confirming, deepening, and extending

understandings that students develop through multiple modalities. In content classrooms this can

mean using texts after various multimodal activities that develop vocabulary, predict

information, anticipate ideas, or build conceptual and background knowledge are engaged with.

Attending to students’ development of language and literacy specific to the ways they are

used across content disciplines has implications for assessment practices in content classrooms as

well. Noguerón-Liu (2020) recommends the use of qualitative and formative assessments which

provide greater opportunities to examine language and literacy performances. These perspectives

are all grounded in the assumption that students do know something. The purpose of instruction

is to deepen and expand that knowledge and the goal of assessment is to uncover that knowledge
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regardless of the language that it is encoded in or the modes through which it is expressed (for

more information see: Multimodal Assessment).

Teachers seeking to develop multilingual literacies in content classrooms need to attend

to these opportunities and complexities—both in terms of the technical aspects of literacy

development, but also in terms of the positive view of the abilities multilingual students bring to

literacy learning opportunities. In such learning processes, students themselves can and should

become active agents in uncovering multiple meanings while also creating their own complex

communications. Overall cognitive and conceptual development and expanding multilingual,

multimodal, multiliterate student voices should be at the center of literacy related activities in

content classrooms, rather than getting through the textbook chapters or a narrow focus on

increasing test scores.

Classroom Applications

Literacy instruction in content classrooms is part of helping students develop their

academic linguistic repertoire, or the ways that students are expected to use both oral and written

language in academic settings. Many schools have already taken the position that every teacher

is a language teacher and have embraced the goal of literacy development across the curriculum.

Based on this module’s key understandings, we have identified three overarching areas that play

important and necessary roles in the literacy development of multilingual learners - centering

meaning, organizing information and making connections. The module Oracy: Authentic Talk in

Multilingual Content Classrooms extends these ideas.

Centering Meaning. Centering meaning happens through your actions, the resources you

use and the attempts you make to uncover how meaning is constructed in students’ lives outside

the classroom. It includes demonstrating that you value all languages as languages for learning
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and is expressed in the ways you encourage students to make sense of their instruction using all

their available linguistic channels through multiple modalities. Centering meaning extends

beyond the instructional space by situating what students are learning into the larger

sociocultural context and asking whose knowledge counts, how the information is relevant to

students’ lives outside of school and how it can be used to strengthen their lives in their

communities.

Knowing your learners. The more you know about your students, the easier it will be to

make your instruction meaningful. You can review student records, and/or conduct short

interviews or surveys that ask your students how they already gather information about the world

around them, through which formats and importantly which languages they use to build

understandings about the world. It is especially important that you take note of students’ literacy

experiences in languages other than English whether it came via formal instruction, informal

exposure or self-exploration, so you can more directly engage and promote the knowledge they

already have.

Knowing your learners means finding out about the contexts, conditions and issues that

surround their lives outside of school. These efforts can be guided by asking yourself what it

means to know this content and how students can use the understandings to their advantage.

Working with students in small groups as described in the Module Dialogic Teaching increases

formal and informal opportunities to gather information and connect what you are teaching to

what you have learned about students’ lives outside of school

Resources and strategies. Meaning is also expressed through the resources you use and

how you incorporate them into your instruction. Especially for students who are newer to

English, your role is to help them make sense of your teaching by focusing their attention on the
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big ideas of instruction. They will benefit greatly from being able to interact with materials on

the major topics of instruction at a range of reading levels, complexity and from a variety of

sources such as videos, podcasts, artwork or other visual and audio representation of ideas,

described by Muhammad (2020) as layering texts. All learners will benefit from having multiple

ways to access and internalize the ideas of your instruction. Presenting information in a

multimodal and comprehensible manner is fundamentally necessary to support your multilingual

students’ learning.

Choosing a variety of materials also increases the likelihood that students will encounter

multiple viewpoints that can disrupt the dominant narratives contained in many textbooks, as

well as people, places and circumstances that are more representative of who all the learners are.

If you decide to go this route it is important to review the materials to assure that any

modifications made to reduce the difficulty of the reading don’t alter the essential understandings

of the topic or perpetuate stereotypes or false narratives.

We want to stress the need to seek out and make available materials in students’ home

languages even if you don’t speak them. This is not always easy, but you can work with the

students themselves, their families and other community members including public librarians, to

locate meaningful texts in languages other than English to support your instruction. These may

be available commercially, can be written by students or translated by family and community

members. Start small and recognize that this is a process that happens over time. Making

available even one strong resource related to your content area in students’ home language sends

the message that English is not the only vehicle for learning your content. All of these

recommendations require moving away from a single textbook or other reading materials as the

only or main sources of input. Despite the obstacles you might encounter, we urge you to try.
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The possibilities for using online resources are ever increasing. One platform that we

recommend is Binogi which was developed in Europe and used extensively in Canada. It offers

short, animated lessons related to the essential concepts of many content areas that can be read

and/or listened to in multiple languages. For example, when students watch the lessons, they can

listen in their home language and view the captions in English or the other way around or any

combination of the languages they know or are interested in. In this way, students can access the

ideas through visual images, oral descriptions and at the same time see how these ideas are

represented through print. The lessons and language choices also lend themselves to use outside

of school with family and community members.

A particularly useful instructional strategy is to Teach the Text Backwards, especially in

classrooms where textbooks are either required or the main resource provided to teachers. Teach

the Text Backward, at its core centers meaning, and its underlying approach can frame your

overall planning, as well. Rather than beginning by plunging into a textbook that may be beyond

students’ current reading levels, the sequence of activities provides all students the opportunity to

encounter, discuss and build schema around the topic. The cycle begins with enrichment

activities, suggestions for which are often found under extensions at the end of a chapter. These

introductory activities are followed by oral discussions focusing on big ideas, key concepts and

important vocabulary. Next, students review study questions at the end of the chapter and predict

where they can find the answers, and finally they read the textbook itself.

The most effective initial activities incorporate multiple modalities such as modeling an

experiment, watching a movie, a virtual tour of museums or historical sites, or other kinds of

visual and interactive presentations. The attention is on the big ideas in anticipation of

subsequent reading of the text itself. In all of the steps, and especially in the small group
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discussions, students can use all of their ways of speaking to make sense of the concepts. When

students get to the stage of reading, the textbook becomes a tool that students can use to

independently review and deepen their understandings of key ideas and thus strengthen their

literacy skills. As part of this process or as a stand-alone effort you can enlist students who are

strong readers to make audio recordings or podcasts of key materials. Such resources are helpful

for students who don’t yet have the decoding skills needed to make sense of the text on their own

but do have the conceptual capabilities to listen and follow along to gain access to the concepts

orally.

Classroom Snapshot #1 Math and the Real World

At a recent faculty meeting at César Chavez K-8, several teachers expressed concern that

their students didn’t see any connection between their math instruction and their lives outside of

school. There was wide agreement among the staff that this was an issue they should and could

address together. They took a few minutes in the meeting to discuss as a group generally how

they could make real world connections. From there, they decided to dedicate their upcoming

grade level meetings to brainstorming specific ideas relevant to their own curriculum. When the

whole school faculty met again, grade level teams presented their ideas. The 6th grade team

shared that students were studying the calculation of percentages and their application to

compound interest. Teachers posed several questions for students to investigate. How can a

difference of 1% of interest affect both savings and debt? In our community, who gets charged

what rates? Who has access to the lowest or best rates for both savings and debt? Students

decided they would have to identify the financial institutions in their neighborhoods, review their

websites and try to talk to bank personnel either by phone or email to see what they could find
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out. One Arabic speaking student volunteered to talk to his uncle who was a mortgage broker to

get his input about the issues.

The third grade team decided to encourage students to find out for themselves how math

was connected to their ‘real lives.’ With teachers’ help, students in each class created a draft of a

short survey for friends, relatives and community members about how they use math in their jobs

or everyday life. They compared the drafts across the three classrooms and agreed upon three

common questions for all students to ask. The questions were then translated into all the

languages spoken in the classrooms. When the results from oral interviews, texts and emails

came in, they were compiled and represented through different kinds of graphs in each class. The

students also created posters documenting home school math connections and compared the

results across the classrooms and each class added to their own connections list. Using the

students’ information, the faculty created a spreadsheet of the topics and possible connections

between each topic to issues and happenings in the school community. It was posted in the

faculty lounge as a visual reminder and to inspire other grade levels to use and add to the ideas.

Reflection Questions:

1. What might you have done in this situation?

2. What if students or colleagues in this scenario hadn’t wanted to collaborate to do this

work? What else could you do?

3. What would you do next to continue ensuring that content learning is contextualized to

students lives outside of school so that students are learning to read both the word and the

world?
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It can feel overwhelming to do all of this work alone. Identifying resources and activities

should be part of unit planning where you and your grade level or content area colleagues can

work together in conjunction with your school’s media specialist and local librarians to build

class, grade level or content area collections either physically or virtually. These can be entered

into a school or district data base that all teachers can access to find resources across content

areas and languages. When districts invest in resources that facilitate language and content

development, especially in languages other than English, a clear message is sent that all

languages are languages for learning and the multilingual literacy is an asset in becoming

academically proficient. The Module Scaffolding Instruction goes deeper into the why and how

of centering meaning.

Organization of Ideas. Another way you can facilitate students’ learning is by framing

the content and students’ thinking in logical ways. You can remove extraneous barriers to

understanding by showing students how information is typically organized in your content area,

a suggestion that is grounded in systemic functional linguistics (SLF). SFL is a theory of

language that posits that everything we say or write is shaped and constrained by the social

context. Halliday (1994) called learning language as ‘learning to mean’ and argued that meaning

making happens within the conventions of the particular situation. Goldenberg (2020) advocates

that the development of academic register is best situated within the genres that are relevant to

each content area or discipline and the ways of communicating required for classroom

participation. For example, in social studies students are often asked to write reports on events or

biographies of important people or to explain the causes and effects of particular events. Writing

in science classes often includes descriptions of procedures, justifications, reports of findings,

and arguments about what the findings may mean.

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Maria Brisk (2015) and Pauline Gibbons (2009; 2015) whose scholarship and writing are

dedicated to multilingual learners both advocate incorporating genre studies into content

instruction to build students’ literacy skills. They argue that by uncovering and understanding the

aspects of the particular genres that characterize your discipline, you can help multilingual

learners make sense of your teaching by organizing their thinking around the important concepts

of instruction. This also helps students see the target they are aiming towards. Both Brisk and

Gibbons describe genre studies as interactive and cyclical processes where teachers guide

students through each genre through modeling, joint construction of written products, targeted

feedback and independent writing which is the essence of Joint Productive Activity and

Instructional Conversation described more fully in the Module Dialogic Teaching.

Brisk (2015) provides a comprehensive explanation for why and how to approach genre

studies particularly at the elementary level. Her goal is for students to feel the power of language

to instruct, recount, inform and persuade. She focuses on those genres most commonly

represented in state standards—procedures, recounts, and historical genres, reports, explanations,

arguments and fictional narratives. She presents each genre in terms of its purpose, the stages of

their development and features of language that characterize them. As part of her work with

teachers she models the work and the process so they in turn can model the genres with their

students. Gibbons (2015) organizes and describes genres in three broad areas: personal/creative;

factual; and analytical, with subgenres in each category. For each, she provides an example,

describes the purpose, typical organizational structure, typical conjunctions that help structure

the text and typical language features. This teaching-learning cycle involves first building

knowledge about the topic, modeling the genre, exploring its features through a variety of

activities, and putting visual representations in the physical environment. In the process, students
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take on responsibility for examining their own work with your guidance. Instead of focusing on

points of grammar, you can help students see the patterns of the genre so they can take it on

themselves once pointed out.

You don’t need to know the details of every genre to begin to identify which ones are

used in the topics you are teaching. You can start by pointing out to students that genres exist,

they have inherent purposes, structures and ways of using language and that you will learn more

about how genres are used in your content area as you explore and utilize them together. It is

helpful to begin with more familiar topics to teach a new genre so students can first focus on the

process and structures that characterize the genre and then later use the genre’s framework to

approach and delve into new topics. Part of the process is to provide students with mentor texts,

such as lab reports, newspaper op eds or examples from previous students’ research reports so

students can see how the ideas they will encounter through reading are typically organized and

how to structure their expression of those understandings.

Other frameworks for organizing ideas that transcend particular topics include Harvey

and Goudvis’ (2017) focus on comprehension strategies which they associate with thinking skills

and building schema around the topics of instruction. They highlight questioning, visualizing and

inferring, determining importance, and summarizing and synthesizing as strategies necessary in

all content areas. They argue that when you provide opportunities for talking responding and

discussing you are supporting multilingual learners to become better readers, writers and

thinkers. In the viewing guide for the video series Reading the World (Goudvis & Harvey, 2005)

they suggest that the goal of content instruction is understanding, and that students’ literacy skills

are strengthened when they move between text, images, photographs, realia, and experiences.
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Making Connections. The need for making connections which is grounded in both

sociocultural learning theory and critical literacy, centers on building schema—that is developing

a comprehensive understanding of the relationships among ideas and not simply learning a set of

facts. Connections can be made between, among or across people, languages, different content

areas or parts of the day, and especially between the topics of instruction and students’ lives in

the community. Making all of these kinds of connections may not be possible in your particular

circumstances, but anything you do to increase multilingual learners’ comprehensive

understanding of your content through multiple modalities and across their languages will

enhance their learning.

Connecting to students’ lives. An important role you play as a teacher is to situate

learning beyond the classroom and help students see the relevance of your content to their lives.

This can increase their motivation, interest, and engagement and provide them the tools they

need to read the world. You can begin by examining your content and seeking information from

others in your discipline who are attempting to make real world connections. For example, the

National Science Teachers Association (NSTA.org) and the National Council of Teachers of

English (NCTE. Org) both provide specific resources related to social justice. Just type ‘your

content area and social justice’ into any search engine and you will find ideas from other teachers

like you. Rethinking Schools and Educators for Social Justice are also good places to look. At

the same time, pay attention to what is happening in the community by asking students and

family members what issues are of concern to them, watching the news, and connecting with

community organizations for more ideas. See the Module Community Engagement for a more

thorough explanation.
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Language focused connections. Language focused connections happen within and across

languages. You can create a space for the productive use of language by integrating listening,

speaking, viewing, reading, writing and other means of expression on a daily basis so that

students explicitly connect important ideas with how we talk about them and represent them. It is

important that you send the message that students can learn about and deepen their content

understandings using all of their languages which directly disrupts the monolingual ideologies

that pervade schooling. You can engage students in examining how their ideas are expressed in

similar and different ways in each of their dialects inside and outside of school. In addition to

finding resources in languages other than English, you can bring in speakers to talk about the

content in different languages or to work with small groups of students in their home languages

to help them articulate their understandings of the big ideas of the topic.

Cross content area connections. Another thing you can do is to work with your

colleagues with different areas of expertise to brainstorm ideas about how concepts being taught

in each of your content areas can be connected to each other. Questions to consider in these

collaborative conversations include: What will students read, write and view as they participate

in your planned activities? What do students do in other parts of their day that can connect to the

big ideas of their different content areas? How can we find resources in languages other than

English to include? Another idea is to pair fiction and non-fiction texts around particular topics.

For example, the fictional Stella Luna by Tomie DiPaola can be read alongside expository books

about bats. There are several publishers who have built collections of resources around this idea,

including for students at upper grade levels. Under Tools and Resources, you will find a sample

graphic organizer that can be adapted to your role or situation.

Classroom Snapshot #2 Making Connections Across the School.

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Ida B Wells Middle School serves an economically, ethnically, and linguistically diverse

student population in grades 6 – 8. Of the 3 teams at each grade level, one is part of the district’s

two-way Spanish English bilingual program. There is a common curriculum across the strands,

team teaching at each grade level (more at 6th less at 8th) and they have tried to create an inviting

learning space. School climate surveys filled out by students, faculty and parents at the end of the

year indicated a concern about growing divisions among the students from the bilingual and

monolingual English strands, evidenced in part by a perception that students in the bilingual

program were learning something different than the rest of the school, but more significantly by

name-calling, students separating into cliques during lunch and in the hallways, and little contact

outside of school across different groups. A major complaint from students was that even though

their teachers seemed to care about them, everything seemed disconnected from class to class

and they didn’t see how what they were learning mattered outside of school.

The faculty discussed the issues and came up with several ideas to work on over the

summer and into the school year. Their main goal was to incorporate interdisciplinary curriculum

planning and promote more intentional interactions among different groups of students. They

began by planning the schedule to mix students at each grade level across the strands for Art,

Music, P.E. and other electives. Over the summer teachers from each grade level attended a

series of workshop on curriculum planning and presented what they had learned before the

opening of school. In their discussions, the faculty agreed to move towards interdisciplinary

teaching, but recognized that doing it well would take at least a year to plan. They decided they

could move in that direction by choosing some overarching themes that would bridge content

areas, promote higher order thinking and be applicable to students’ lives outside of school. Each

of the themes—interdependence, relationships, movement, adaptation, evidence, and change—

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would be the focus for 6 weeks. They did initial brainstorming sessions in grade level, content

area, and language groups to begin to document the ways that the themes could be integrated into

their teaching. Teachers agreed to try to integrate the theme into each unit’s common

culminating activities across the strands and to use the walls in the hallways to display student

work around the themes. Prior to each 6-week unit, they planned to take time at a faculty

meeting to review, share and add to the ideas made at the beginning of the year.

At the beginning of each 6-week period, they would introduce the themes in the small

group advisory classes where students would receive an overview of the theme, talk together to

define it for themselves and begin to generate examples of how the concept might apply to and

affect their own lives. The concepts, with examples, were also translated into all the languages

spoken in the school and shared with families and community members. Teachers asked for

input from about how the themes affected or appeared in their lives as well. Finally, they created

a form to keep track of which concepts were more successful in getting students thinking,

interacting and applying to their lives.

Reflection Questions:

1. What might you have done in this situation?

2. What might be the outcome of this deliberate work across grade levels in addressing the

ways students are segregated and not engaged with one another?

3. What would you do next to grow the opportunity for students to read the word and the

world across their school day and beyond?

While it is ideal to find ways to directly link what students are learning in social studies

or science with math and language arts, there are other ways to make connections. For example,
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everyone in the school can use the same format for headings for assignments, or common note-

taking protocols in every grade level and / or content area, so students don’t have to figure out

from classroom to classroom what to do to please the teacher. At a deeper level your school or

grade level could adopt themes such as adaptation, similarities and differences, equity or other

concepts that transcend content areas to allow students to see how ideas apply in every setting as

described in Classroom Snapshot #1.

Interactive instructional strategies. You can make connections by promoting interaction

and dialogue among the learners, and between yourself and your students. Two reading strategies

that are particularly well suited to the content classroom are Reciprocal Teaching (Oczkus, 2018;

Palinscar & Brown, 1984) and Collaborative Strategic Reading (CSR) (Klingner & Vaughn,

1999) both of which rely on dialogue and students working together to co-construct their

understandings of what they are reading, how information is imparted through text materials, and

articulate the ideas that they are expected to learn through all their languages.

In Reciprocal Teaching small groups of students take on assigned roles as they read,

question, and discuss portions of an assigned text to build comprehension through four important

strategies—questioning, clarifying, predicting and summarizing. CSR combines elements of

Reciprocal Reading and cooperative learning in a step-by-step process implemented before,

during and after interacting with text. Students take on specific roles including acting as leader of

the discussion, being in charge of identifying connections and roadblocks to meaning, identifying

main ideas, and reporting out. Beyond what they accomplish to uncover meaning, these

approaches build community among the students as they share and switch roles and help each

other accomplish the group task. Both provide spaces for students to use all of their language

resources as they co-construct the meaning of texts, which you can facilitate by sometimes
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grouping students from shared language backgrounds to discuss the ideas and make sense of the

concepts together.

Other literacy strategies that can be applied to any content area are Readers Theatre and

Dictogloss (Brisk & Herrington, 2007). In Dictogloss students attempt to reconstruct the actual

wording of a textbook passage read to them orally and then work with partners to discuss both

what they wrote down and what it tells them about how information is presented in many

expository texts. In Readers Theatre students act out scripts that either they develop themselves

or that are prewritten. By accounting for different literacy and language performance levels in

assigning roles all students can participate in the overall production in collaboration with their

peers.

All of the strategies recommended throughout this book, require explicit teacher

modeling of the strategies, monitoring their use by students, providing feedback as students take

on the roles, and eventually stepping back and allowing students to take over responsibilities

with guidance. Implementation of all these practices in the classroom is facilitated through

professional learning that allows teachers to try strategies out in collaboration with their peers

before taking them to the classroom with their students

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