Common Core Chat: Shift 2: Literacy Instruction in All Content Areas

Welcome back!

Today we are going to be taking a look at…

Shift 2: Literacy Instruction in All content areas

When I initially started looking into what this shift would mean to my professional practice, I thought that it would be more applicable to the intermediate grades or to the middle and high-school students, but as I reviewed the standards, I can see that this shift is embedded into what kindergarteners and first graders do too! 🙂

In Kindergarten and First, we teach in units, so, this is somewhat more approachable. I think what is most challenging is that in K and 1, the students are emergent readers. So, how material is scaffolded for them is paramount. There is a difference between reading to solve a word problem, and reading an on grade level text to respond to the question, who is the main character in the story.

One thing that I took away from looking into this shift is that:

Even emergent readers should be encouraged to understand the difference between reading different types of texts and reading text for different purposes that are on their approachable level.

Good readers can tell you why they are reading something. They can also tell you what they ‘took’ from the passage. Struggling readers ‘struggle’ because this type of critical thinking is absent from the way they process text. With an emergent reader, there can be several different reasons for that. Good diagnostic testing will confirm a teacher’s suspicions that the problem could be phonological or phonics related in specific ways that cause the student to not be fluent enough to be able to focus on thinking critically. With an intermediate reader, there is much more emphasis on reading to learn, rather than learning to read. This shift can also be difficult. If an intermediate reader was barely able to read their second grade content fluently, when they are asked in a third grade classroom to produce an essay on something that they’ve written to share what they’ve learned, that student will not be able to be independent.

Think about when you are reading something that is difficult for you. Your mind wanders…you may find yourself reading through half a page and then re-reading it because you realize you don’t know what the text is talking about and you need to slow down. These are strategies that good readers have–and they switch the strategy when they are looking at different types of text. We have stamina and KNOW that we can be good at reading that text with more effort. Students are learning that skill and become increasingly detached from specific subjects if they do not have automaticity and then their grades confirm that they are ‘correct’.

Reading in math is different in some ways than reading for science and social studies. When children are able to understand what they are looking for and can tell you what they’ve learned from the text, they will have long term success as readers. It’s imperative that they learn how to read for meaning in all disciplines.

So, now that we’ve started this dialogue…how does this affect the way we may write our next interdisciplinary unit? One where we incorporate math and literacy or….literacy and science…or even literacy and social studies??

See you soon!

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