Framework Fuels The Need To Read

Framework fuels the need to read

Strategies boost literacy of students in content-area classes

A diverse group of urban middle and high school teachers sits around tables in interdisciplinary school teams, silently reading “Father’s Butterflies,” an essay by Vladimir Nabokov. The text’s densely layered sentences, specialized scientific language, and use of multiple languages challenge the fluency of almost all readers in the group. After reading to themselves, participants share their reading processes. A high school biology teacher offers her way of getting into the text: “I know about classification systems, so I skipped all the long-winded introductory stuff, and went down to the part where he starts talking about classifying butterflies.” An English teacher mentions a connection to the author that helped him with the text: “Nabokov … I know he can be very ironic, sophisticated, so I was looking for a kind of undertone in the piece, and that helped me through all the scientific

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Authors

Ruth Schoenbach, Cynthia Greenleaf, and Gina Hale

Ruth Schoenbach (rschoen@wested.org) is co-director,

Cynthia Greenleaf (cgreenl@wested.org) is co-director, and

Gina Hale (ghale@wested.org) is professional development associate of the Strategic Literacy Initiative,WestEd.

Note: The Strategic Literacy Initiative team atWestEd has recently been awarded funding through the Investing in Innovation Fund (i3) from the U.S. Department of Education to scale up their content-specific literacy professional development in four states to reach an estimated 300 schools, 2,800 teachers, 250 teacher leaders, and 400,000 students.

References

Alvermann, D. & Moore, D. (1991). Secondary school reading. In R. Barr, M.L. Kamil, P. Mosenthal, & P.D.Pearson (Eds.), Handbook of reading research (Vol. II, pp. 951-983). New York: Longman.

Ball, D. & Cohen, D. (1999). Developing practice, developing practitioners: Toward a practice-based theory of professional education. In L. Darling-Hammond & D. Sykes (Eds.), Teaching as the learning profession: Handbook of policyand practice. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.