Disciplinary Literacy: A Science Focus

Carrie Sand contributed today's post. Carrie's other posts about planning professional learning can be accessed here.

As a literacy coach who is housed in a high school building, I spend a lot of time thinking about and having conversations centered around disciplinary literacy. 

Recently, my principal asked me to incorporate one hour spotlight refreshers during our monthly inservice days on the topic of disciplinary literacy for content area teachers grades 6-12. Using a small group approach, I recently worked with the science department to incorporate some ideas and strategies from the Doug Buehl's book Developing Readers in the Academic Disciplines. 

When discussing disciplinary literacy, the elephant in the room tends to be, “How do I teach literacy on top of all of my other content requirements?” In order to address the issue, I like to begin all content area conversations with some sort of reflection on values and requirements. For this particular inservice, I had the science teachers begin by engaging in a free write activity reflecting on the questions: “What do you value teaching students about in your content area? In other words, what must students walk out of your classroom knowing and what skills do you give the kids to achieve this?” 

After writing, I encouraged the teachers to share ideas, and we noted patterns. After examining our beliefs as content area teachers, I lead teachers through a conversation of how these values do and possibly do not match with our requirements as teachers. In this particular conversation, I used the Wisconsin Foundations for Disciplinary Literacy to mark where our values are emphasized within the standards versus where there may be times when the standards conflict with the things we value. Typically, though, this conversation tends to empower teachers that the literacy standards for content areas support their goals in helping students become proficient readers, writers, speakers, and thinkers in their content field.

After establishing our values and requirements, we were finally ready to investigate some strategies to help us reach our goals. Within his book Buehl claims that students in our content areas often feel like “discourse outsiders.” This phrase refers to the idea that many students come into our classrooms without the vocabulary, concepts, or experiences to proficiently interact with the content of our curriculum. Therefore, as the classroom expert, teachers must find the strategies to help students engage in our curriculum by, what Buehl calls, “bridging the gap.” 

As a science team, we began an investigation of strategies in the book that would best help our students “bridge the gap” within our science classrooms. One strategy that I modeled for our teachers was a text marking protocol, utilizing text structure frames. Buehl provides a protocol for marking that requires students to first determine the structure of the text. By giving students skills to identify specific structure traits and guiding question stems, students are able to identify different text structures such as cause-effect or problem-solution. Once a structure is identified, students can mark using a coding strategy based on the structure. For example, in a cause and effect text, students may use a C or an E to identify key concepts within the text. By using the structure and then a specific protocol for marking, students no longer “guess” at what is important enough to highlight or mark. Using the strategy as a team, we created a model by using a piece of text from Buehl’s book:

Part of the tenuousness of our personal knowledge base in science is that science knowledge does not stay put. (P) Instead, as life-long learners, we, just like scientists, need to continuously evolve our understandings to reflect new evidence,new findings, new explanations, and new theories. (S1) Hence a critical role of complex texts in science is to present on-going evidence based alternatives to unschooled conceptions of the physical and biological world. (S2)

Together we created  a coding system that identified the problem with a P, one solution as S1, and a second solution as S2. After looking at our markings, we decided that we could take the strategy one step further by making some summarizing annotations in the margins of the text. Together we summarized the passage in our words by saying that Buehl is claiming that:

• Science is always changing which can be a problem for students and teachers
• Teachers need to keep developing their own understanding as well as provide opportunities for students to work with evidence to expand their conceptions (or misconceptions) as well.

After examining our values, looking at our requirements, and using a resource to help us identify a strategy, the science teachers left the inservice feeling empowered by their identified values, invigorated by collaborative approach, and a new strategy, with a model, ready to implement.