Welcome to our 3rd quarter newsletter. This quarter we are excited to have you join us on a solid discussion exploring and hopefully enhancing content area literacy in the classroom.

Our objective for this quarter's newsletter is to provide you with valuable insights, strategies, and resources to support your students' literacy development within your specific subject areas. We understand that as teachers, you play a crucial role in not only teaching content knowledge but also in fostering students' ability to comprehend, analyze, and communicate effectively within each content area.

Content area literacy is essential for teachers across all grade levels and subject matters. It goes beyond simply teaching students how to read and write; it involves equipping them with the necessary skills to understand and engage with complex texts, disciplinary-specific vocabulary, and critical thinking processes. By integrating content area literacy into your instruction, you can empower your students to become active participants in their learning, enabling them to access, evaluate, and communicate information effectively.

Whether you teach math, science, social studies, English, or any other subject, content area literacy is a fundamental component of your teaching practice. It not only supports students' academic success but also prepares them for the demands of the 21st century, where the ability to navigate and comprehend disciplinary texts is crucial for college and career readiness.

In this newsletter, we will explore various strategies, best practices, and resources that can help you integrate content area literacy into your daily instruction.

Content area reading skills build children’s general comprehension, writing, and study skills across areas of learning such as math, science, and social studies. Here are some reading and writing strategies with a strong research base that we can use within our content area instruction to support children as they gather, synthesize and comprehend information.

1. Provide an approach to content instruction that cultivates the skills for 21st century literacy: critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity.
2. Take charge of designing authentic, real-world experiences and assessments.
3. Commit to a conceptual framework of learning by doing.
4. Provide opportunities for students to use inquiry, key habits of practice, and academic language.
5. Implement ongoing, job-embedded professional development and collaboration by discipline.

Math, history, science, and even art teachers often find themselves trying to work literacy instruction into their classrooms. After all, the ability to read, synthesize, and explain concepts and ideas in writing is essential in every subject.

But how should instructors who don’t specialize in literacy go about helping students do this work at a high level within their discipline?

Example 1: Literacy strategies in a science class should focus on getting students to use precise vocabulary, compose in a passive voice, and favor exactness over elaboration.

Example 2: Students in history class should prioritize learning how to efficiently synthesize information from multiple sources, organize ideas, facts, and evidence, and write in an argumentative manner that prioritizes meaningful connections between disparate information over the sort of evocative, figurative writing that might be prized in an ELA classroom.

Here are some examples of how teachers can go about doing this work.

Getting Disciplined
Commonly used literacy strategies that ask students to pause and consider what they know about a given topic or concept can be easily modified to better suit your classroom.

• KWL: small shifts can customize the strategy to different content areas and align it more crisply with the reading and writing objectives of the discipline being studied. For example, in science class K-W-L can be adapted to ”observe, infer, and conclude.” In math class, it makes more sense for students to “deconstruct, solve, apply,” and in foreign languages to “listen, comprehend, and speak.”

Which Skills?
Confer with colleagues who teach the same content and come up with a tight list of expected skills and behaviors. Teachers may even need to read a book, study up on lesson plans, or take advantage of more professional development to learn the best way to teach these identified skills. Focusing on literacy skills within the disciplines brings to life a much richer schoolwide curriculum as students learn how to use literacy for different purposes in various subject areas.

• Science teachers would prioritize getting students to “use precise vocabulary” in their writing and composing in “phrases, bullets, graphs, or sketches.”
• History teachers might focus on getting students to “create timelines with accompanying narratives”, “synthesize info/evidence from multiple sources,” and “grapple with multiple ideas and large quantities of information” when they write.
• Math teachers, meanwhile, would likely focus on teaching students to effectively “explain, justify, describe, estimate, or analyze” and “favor calculations over words” in their content-specific writing.

Get Students Writing—In Content Specific Ways
Teachers should aim to get students doing as much domain specific writing as their curriculum allows for. Mix informal writing activities like quick writes, stop and jots, or one-minute essays into instruction, but the key is to think through the particular skills inherent to the discipline, and tailor the activities to those objectives.

Example 1: In history classrooms, ask students to examine their possessions from the perspective of a historian from the future. By getting students to imagine themselves as a researcher or archaeologist and conduct a detailed, written analysis of their chosen “artifact,” you can have them practicing necessary skills such as: questioning the significance of the artifact, how it might exemplify a certain culture, and drawing inferences as to what it suggests about society during this time. By asking students to peer-edit each other’s work, you can have them practice skills such as assessing the strength of evidence and arguments in support of a claim, as well as evaluate how differing interpretations of an artifact can shape the way history is perceived.

Example 2: In math classrooms, rework prompts to get students effectively using writing to assess the validity of solutions—an activity that positions them as “mathematical thinkers and writers.”

Let us help you with instruction. Please reach out to us if you find yourself needing instructional or curricular help during these complicated times.

Reach out - we are here to help. tandlsupport@mccesc.org

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If you have a chance, and have not yet read our quarterly ESC Newsletter, the ESC CONNECTION, please feel free to peruse at your leisure. Lots of great things happening at the Madison-Champaign ESC.