I had a discussion with a teacher from a different district than mine and while I was impressed with the individual teacher's thoughts, I was very surprised to hear about the differences between the 2 districts approaches to literacy. The teacher's basic philosophy about literacy was that it was the keystone to all learning and involved the integration of both reading and writing. She felt that it should be incorporated into all aspects of school in order for her students to grow to their highest potential as readers and writers. Her priorities aligned pretty closely with mine, as she stated that students need to learn to read before they can adequately access all other curriculum.
She went on to discuss that her district had no formal literacy guide that was followed by the district. She informed me that each school used different programs/ curricula chosen by the administration. She said the literacy program she used was self-made by her team, using a variety of resources and teacher experience. While this seems unorganized, it leaves much room for using assessment to inform your lessons. On the other hand, my district has a specially designed literacy program with full reading's workshop and writer's workshop lessons, split into a variety of units. Our units are themed based incorporating skills that overlap in both reading and writing. This is much more organized and very strongly aligned to the state standards, but leaves less room for differentiation. While I believe there are pros and cons to both systems, it was very interesting for me to hear about such differences.
Hi Lauren,
ReplyDeleteI’m surprised to learn that your conversation with another teacher involved a reading curriculum generated within the school. So m instead of mandated from above. Much of my understanding of elementary literacy was that many districts take that autonomy away from teachers, and if teachers have strong extension and enrichment units and activities, they have to creatively sneak them into the prescribed in-building program. So many of the programs require teachers to just move forward, and they don’t leave much room for remediation and re-teaching. How nice would it be to find a middle ground between your school’s and her school’s approach to designing a reading program?
It’s interesting to learn about your conversation with someone from a school who tries to incorporate literacy across the curriculum. At Eaglecrest, our English department has been attempting that for years, and they have been met with such resistance from Math, P.E., and Applied Technology in particular. It’s something I’ve supported throughout my career as well, as writing about thought processes, whether in History, Art, or Math, communicating the “why” of something promotes such higher level thinking and metacognitive strategies. I think most content teachers are incorporating more reading and writing than they realize; it’s just in different forms. Students are still building such great skills with graphic organizers, thinking maps, lab reports, summaries, etc. Another thing I think is so important for us as teachers to address is the idea that students need to acquire different skills to successfully access different texts for different content areas and authors.