Whose Literacy Is It, Anyway?

In the late 1990s, after 17 years as a secondary teacher and supervisor in New York City, I became the English department head at a moderately sized suburban high school on Long Island. The staff could be characterized as veteran, and I immediately became concerned about students' ability to read many of the texts assigned in their English classes. At one of our department meetings, I raised the subject of literacy instruction. How were we going to meet the literacy needs of our students? What instruction could we provide? How will we offer texts that are more appropriate, both in terms of interest and in reading level? Many of the ers looked me as though I had sprouted three heads. Upon reflection, two reasons for this response emerged. First, they had never been trained in the teaching of literacy, so how could they be expected to provide such instruction to their students? Second, they were teachers of literature (and, perhaps tangentially, writing about literature), not of "reading. " These English teachers considered reading to be a skill students should have learned in the lower grades and, therefore, not their responsibility.Not all teachers responded this way. Indeed, some of the most senior teachers regularly provided literacy support and instruction, teaching skills such as annotating, summarizing, paraphrasing, and using context clues to define vocabulary. But the perspective that literacy instruction was not part of their jobs reflected the beliefs of many secondary English teachers at the time. When I later became district director of English, with responsibilities for four secondary schools, I discovered that many English teachers, both veterans and neophytes, wanted to give learners the literacy support they needed but felt unprepared. To address this, I offered professional development and hired literacy teachers who could push into English classrooms, partnering with content teachers and modeling strategies to support all students. This two-pronged model, though costly, presented enormous advantages for both teachers and students. The literacy teacher was able to provide direct whole-class instruction (often minilessons based on a skill), work with various smaller configurations (half class, small group, even individual students), and/or give support to the English teacher's lesson. At times, I also asked these literacy teachers to push into content classes (usually social studies) to offer the same services, generally with positive results. In this way, the content teachers (English, social studies, or any other discipline) had the best possible professional development experience in literacy, right in their classrooms. The transference of skills to the content teacher's instructional repertoire was also accelerated, enhanced by individual meetings with the literacy teacher (an essential part of the program was joint planning) as well as by the literacy teacher's presence at team and department meetings. The success of this model, however, required a commitment by district administration to prioritize literacy and to encumber the resources (staffing) to make this a reality.Flash forward nearly 20 years and we are still discussing who owns students' literacy. English teachers (and most enlightened educators) will tell you that all teachers should play a role in literacy learning. Whatever your feelings about the CCSS, they clearly support this premise by including standards for literacy in grades 6-12 in history/social studies, science, and technical subjects. Yet while these exist on paper, the shift to actual practice in the classroom takes time. Indeed, the mindset of today's content teachers echoes the arguments I heard from those veteran English teachers 20 years ago. They often feel overwhelmed by what "they have to cover," especially preparing students for state assessments. Focusing on rigor, teachers may overlook the fact that many students may be unable to read the texts they have been assigned. …