Literacy in all content areas is critical for learners. The Common Core Standards related to Disciplinary Literacy was first introduced to our staff in the fall of 2010 with a PowerPoint presenting the roll out of our ELA Curriculum which you can view here: 2010 ELA Curriculum Power Point. We used what we had learned from Cris Tovani as a launching point for beginning the discussion of Disciplinary Literacy. It is time for us to revisit and reflect on what we are doing to help students meet these standards. To help make sure we have a common understanding I encourage you to view the following 4 minute video: Literacy in Other Disciplines
The Wisconsin DPI has created a site with support for teachers of all content areas: Wisconsin's Approach to Disciplinary Literacy! This site provides good information for all of us including their Disciplinary Literacy Suitcase which has great professional development available. Not all resources they hope to provide on this site are there yet but, there are enough to be helpful for most of us. Another resource from the WI DPI is their worksheet for Developing Performance Tasks which is helpful for teachers to review as you reflect on the work students are doing and how that work might change to align better with the CCSS. To compliment that there is a template for how you might write a performance task for your content area: Performance Task Template
It is so critical for every teacher to support and teach with strategies that will help our students master the standards. Close Reading is one strategy that can be implemented in every classroom to help meet the standard requirements. This video 2:47 video of Douglas Fisher explains what it is: Douglas Fisher: Close Reading and the CCSS Part 1, I encourage you to follow up with the 3:01 video of part 2 Douglas Fisher: Close Reading and the CCSS Part 2 The above graph shows that by 12th grade the CCSS expect 70% of the reading students do to be from informational texts. This is not expected to happen in the English Classroom. Yes, they are making a shift to using more informational texts but the only way we will get to the recommended levels is if we as a system all support ensuring our students are reading and meaningfully processing (comprehending) content specific text. If you have not yet read the CCSS for ELA & Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science and Technical Subjects I encourage you to do so today! Pages 3-8 provide much of the reasoning behind the standards and are worth your time. Again, it is essential for all content area teachers to ensure students are reading content specific text, and teach students how to use textual evidence meaningfully in their application of content specific standards..
