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Multimedia resources for K-12 classroom instruction and teacher professional development

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Content Area Literacy vs Disciplinary Literacy Minilecture

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Fairfax Network - Fairfax County Public Schools

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The Power of Literacy: Read, Write, Think, Discuss—Disciplinary Literacy

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Disciplinary Literacy defined by a 4th grade teacher

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Disciplinary Literacy defined by a 4th grade teacher

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Vol. 74

No. 5

Abstract

Divergent Perspectives

Discipline-Specific Strategy Instruction

Instructional Practice: Choose Disciplinary Texts

Instructional Practice: Model Expert Practices

General Strategy Instruction

Instructional Practice: Use Multimodal Text Sets

Instructional Practice: Do What "Good Readers" Do

Engagement in the Discipline

Instructional Practice: Engineer Teachable Moments

Teaching Disciplinary Literacies

Which approaches to literacy instruction are right for your content-area classroom?

Credit: Kevin Davis

Abstract

Divergent Perspectives

Discipline-Specific Strategy Instruction

Instructional Practice: Choose Disciplinary Texts

Instructional Practice: Model Expert Practices

General Strategy Instruction

Instructional Practice: Use Multimodal Text Sets

Instructional Practice: Do What "Good Readers" Do

Engagement in the Discipline

Instructional Practice: Engineer Teachable Moments

Teaching Disciplinary Literacies

Over the last 10 years, federal reports, the standards of professional education organizations, and the Common Core State Standards have all called for a focus on literacy instruction in the content areas. Disciplinary literacy instruction has gained traction as an educational priority because of its potential to support adolescent literacy and increase students' access to deep content knowledge that engages them in school and prepares them for life after graduation.

At the same time, there have been multiple and at times conflicting messages about what disciplinary literacy instruction is and what it should look like in content-area classrooms. In our review of more than 200 articles describing literacy instruction in content-area classes, we identified a spectrum of approaches to disciplinary literacy instruction, each with its own set of instructional strategies. From these, we've singled out three specific perspectives that reflect the diverse purposes of disciplinary literacy.

Divergent Perspectives

Here is where most educators agree: The academic disciplines are communities that collaborate to produce knowledge about the world and human experiences. In these communities, there are agreed-upon conventions that guide the production, communication, and critique of disciplinary knowledge. The central goal of disciplinary literacy instruction is to help adolescents develop "insider status" in these communities. In that light, disciplinary literacy instruction can be viewed as an apprenticeship in which students are carefully guided as they engage in specialized ways of thinking, reading, writing, and talking (McConachie et al., 2006).

Learning the skills or habits of mind of a discipline allows adolescents to become smart consumers and critics of subject-area knowledge, rather than passive recipients (Fang &amp; Coatoam, 2013; Moje, 2007). Understanding how knowledge is created in the disciplines can help adolescents assess claims made in political discourse and act as informed citizens. They can apply these same skills to act for social justice by challenging accepted knowledge and generating new knowledge (Moje, 2007).

But perspectives on disciplinary literacy begin to diverge when it comes to what literacy instruction should look like in content-area classrooms, including whether educators should teach discipline-specific strategies, apply general reading strategies to content goals, or engage students in subject-specific experiences that involve reading and writing.

What follows are descriptions of three approaches that could support content and literacy goals for adolescents, including how and when each approach might be useful in the classroom. The approaches are not necessarily distinct, self-contained versions of disciplinary literacy instruction to be used separately. Rather, each is a valid mode of instruction that supports literacy in the disciplines in a different way; teachers can adopt practices related to each approach at different points of instruction, depending on their curricular goals and students' needs.

Discipline-Specific Strategy Instruction

One approach is focused on the practices that disciplinary insiders use to read complex disciplinary texts (Fang &amp; Schleppegrell, 2010; Shanahan &amp; Shanahan, 2008; Shanahan, Shanahan, &amp; Misischia, 2011). This practice is guided by the understanding that disciplinary texts are unique and contain highly specialized language and text structures (Schleppegrell, 2004).

The challenge for adolescent readers is that they lack highly specialized skills and knowledge, which are a prerequisite for engaging with complex disciplinary concepts. This leaves many of them, even those who have developed general comprehension strategies, ill-equipped to read and learn from disciplinary texts independently. So, rather than drawing from a general toolbox of literacy skills to apply across disciplines, the goal of disciplinary literacy instruction from this perspective is for adolescents to develop multiple sets of highly specialized literacy tools that allow them to "read like a historian" or "write like a scientist."

Instructional Practice: Choose Disciplinary Texts

If students are to develop discipline-specific skills, they need text types and purposes for reading and writing that provide opportunities to apply and refine specialized skills. Teachers working from this perspective are careful to choose texts that are specific to their discipline. This often means avoiding textbooks because they present knowledge as uncontroversial, obscuring the way experts use arguments to generate, critique, and refine knowledge. For students to learn about argumentation in the disciplines, they need to engage with texts that allow them to see how experts structure arguments, support their claims with evidence, and use technical language.

Instructional Practice: Model Expert Practices

The discipline-specific skills needed to learn from these types of texts are best identified and taught by content-area teachers who know what it takes to read, write, and critique texts in their area of expertise. These teachers model the specialized practices they have developed as a result of participating in the discipline themselves, pointing out what makes the texts unique and providing strategies to address these features.

Teachers using this approach reflect on their own habits as expert readers so they can name and demonstrate these routines for students. These teachers explain why they do what they do, and then provide opportunities for students to practice those skills. A science teacher may model how to read charts and graphs to make inferences about data. A history teacher may demonstrate how to establish the provenance of a primary document. Helping students try out expert practices allows teachers to explain how the text or task shapes how they read.

General Strategy Instruction

A second approach is focused on efforts to extend or adapt general literacy skills to fit the reading and writing found in content-area classes. Because the texts found in content-area classrooms are often written at or above grade level, the primary reason adolescents struggle with them is that they need to be better readers and writers across the board. Therefore, the goal of instruction in the content areas is to support students' overall literacy proficiency by helping them develop general strategies they can use flexibly across the disciplines.

To plan instruction from this perspective, teachers try to find easier sets of texts to convey content so that students can read texts at or just above their level. Instead of reading a textbook chapter to learn about mitosis, students might read the chapter, watch a video clip, read a cartoon version, and use an interactive model of the process. This provides students who find the textbook difficult with other sources of information and allows them to consider a range of representations of the same information. Teachers often assign different texts to different groups of students or lead students through multiple representations of the same content.

Instructional Practice: Do What "Good Readers" Do

In addition to providing text sets, teachers also try to make difficult texts more comprehensible by teaching general strategies (for instance, visualization, annotation, and summarization). For this reason, this approach often calls for collaborations between literacy specialists and content-area teachers-each drawing on their expertise to make general literacy skills relevant to disciplinary learning. To apprentice students into higher levels of reading ability, rather than into specialized types of reading practices, teachers might name and demonstrate a strategy that "good readers" use. Teachers who follow this approach are often found referring to a set of common strategies that students recognize from all of their classes.

Doing what good readers do isn't necessarily different from reading like a scientist, mathematician, or historian. In fact, some argue that the skills needed to engage in disciplinary inquiry are the same skills needed to be a critical reader in any content area and that students can learn to adapt those skills to fit many reading tasks (Nokes, 2011; Quinn &amp; Thomas, 2013; Gillis, 2014). From this perspective, well-developed general strategies should allow students to navigate a range of texts. When you believe that students lack adequate literacy abilities and need support for both content and literacy learning, strategies inspired by this perspective might be a good fit.

For example, a current events teacher might demonstrate setting a purpose for reading a newspaper on the basis of its features (headlines, photos, infographics, and so on). The teacher might also demonstrate how to make connections within an article, perhaps between paragraphs and data representations, by looking back and forth between the elements as new information is presented. Teaching generic strategies like these that can apply across content areas helps students learn important skills required for reading success.

Engagement in the Discipline

A third approach encourages full participation in the discipline, rather than only engaging students in the acquisition of content or literacy skills. Teachers working from this perspective don't ask students to do things "like a scientist"; they ask students to "do science." If scientists collect data, students don't just read about how data can be collected; they collect data themselves. "Doing" the discipline will inevitably require reading and writing of some kind, so the goal is to support students with the skills and strategies they will need to be "doers" as the needs arise.

Instructional Practice: Engineer Teachable Moments

With this approach, teachers frame questions and problems for students to investigate and "engineer teachable moments" (Cervetti &amp; Pearson, 2012) in which they can teach or support specific literacy skills. For instance, a 7th grade STEM teacher decides to start a community garden that will also be a site for students to conduct experiments with plants and soil. Students are engaged in all parts of the planning for this garden from design to building to evaluation. When preparing students to write e-mails to potential funders, the teachers use exemplar texts to show how expert fundraisers write to donors, and they provide a writing process for students to refer to. When students report the results of experiments conducted in the garden, teachers may provide discipline-specific models so that students can share their ideas with a scientific community.

The instructional practices might be similar to the first two perspectives (some discipline-specific, some general), but the reasons they are used are different. Students are not learning to write to become better writers or to learn how to "write like a scientist." They are doing so because such e-mails are central to the work of funding a community project and communicating scientific ideas is an essential part of doing science. In other words, it's the intentions behind text selection-not the texts-that differentiate this approach from the others.

These teachers are often found modeling literacy skills and strategies "at the point of need" during disciplinary inquiry (Cervetti &amp; Pearson, 2012). For this reason, a lesson objective might be task-oriented ("students will write compelling e-mails to funders") and the lessons, examples, and models would be literacy oriented (for example, revising and editing). The focus is not necessarily on what experts do or what good readers do, but on whatever it takes to accomplish the project. Therefore, teachers might demonstrate both general and specific strategies depending on what students need. You might see disciplinary texts and leveled texts in use, but they are selected and used in the service of some line of inquiry (not just because of their level or text features).

Allowing for authentic engagement-and acknowledging that reading, writing, and talking will be required along the way-is what defines this approach to disciplinary literacy. When you believe your students need a compelling reason to engage in academics and reach content and literacy goals, this approach might be a good fit.

Teaching Disciplinary Literacies

Because there are multiple possible goals for disciplinary literacy instruction, there are also multiple approaches to planning and implementing disciplinary literacy instruction (see Figure 1, " Practices for Disciplinary Literacy Instruction "). Rather than allowing contrasting messages to overwhelm or stymie teachers' efforts, it's important to understand the breadth of possibilities, as well as when and how various approaches might apply. Each of the approaches exists on a continuum that spans different instructional goals, materials, and strategies, but they can be used in complementary ways within a single classroom, especially when teachers feel empowered to integrate them to meet the needs of their students.

Figure 1. Practices for Disciplinary Literacy Instruction

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Three Directions for Disciplinary Literacy

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Vol. 74 No. 5 Abstract Divergent Perspectives Discipline-Specific Strategy Instruction Instructional Practice: Choose Disciplinary Texts Instructional Practice: Model Expert Practices General Strategy Instruction Instructional Practice: Use Multimodal Text Sets Instructional Practice: Do What "Good Readers" Do Engagement in the Discipline Instructional Practice: Engineer Teachable Moments Teaching Disciplinary Literacies Which approaches to literacy instruction are right for your content-area classroom?

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Disciplinary Literacy good for Elementary-aged students?

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Disciplinary Literacy good for Elementary-aged students?

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Few issues are hotter now than disciplinary literacy. The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) established disciplinary reading goals for grades 6-12, and most of the research on that topic has been done at those grades, too. That means elementary teachers can breathe a sigh of relief, right? Not really. There might not be specific disciplinary goals set for the young'uns, but elementary teachers still have an important role to play if their students are to eventually reach college- and career-readiness.

What is disciplinary literacy?

Disciplinary literacy refers to the idea that we should teach the specialized ways of reading, understanding, and thinking used in each academic discipline, such as science, history, or literature. Each field has its own ways of using text to create and communicate meaning. Accordingly, as children advance through school, literacy instruction should shift from general literacy strategies to the more specific or specialized ones from each discipline.

That makes sense for several reasons. Disciplines are cultures of practice, and each has its own norms for how knowledge should be created, shared, and evaluated. Take, for example, the differences separating history, science, and literature.

When historians create historical accounts, they rely on documents from the period under study (primary documents) and on what others have written about the event (secondary documents). Because their study is limited to existing sources and there can be disagreements among these sources, historians expect their interpretations to be contested as new documents come to light or alternative perspectives are weighed differently. In contrast, scientists don't usually rely so much on existing data as on the creation of new data through systematic observation and experimentation. This allows them to place greater trust in their interpretations. The issue for them is whether their methods were truly appropriate and systematic. Finally, literature doesn't depend on such formal analyses of data, but on the transformation of human experience through language and literary technique. Literary evaluations tend towards the aesthetic and consider issues such as authenticity.

These differences in how knowledge is created and evaluated have implications for how reading and writing are used. Thus, historians treat historical accounts - even narratives - as formal arguments, evaluating the text's claims and evidence (Lee, 2005), seeking to corroborate evidence across sources (Wineburg, 1991). They also read with an eye to the perspectives that may have been admitted. Since historical accounts are always contestable, historians read everything critically. Scientists read critically too, but they do it differently. Uncovering author bias isn't as central to the reading of experiments as is an analysis of the adequacy of a study's methods and instrumentation. And to bring this full circle, literary critics are much more likely to evaluate an author's craft considering the language choices, use of metaphors, or how emotions are characterized. It follows that teachers can help students understand their history, science, and literature texts by teaching them how to apply these disciplinary lenses to their own reading, That insight is the crux of disciplinary literacy: We should teach students the way reading in various fields differs rather than only expecting students to apply the same general lens across everything they read.

Disciplinary literacy matters because general reading skills can only take students so far. Students can learn to use general reading strategies (i.e., summarization, questioning, visualization) and those can improve their comprehension of content texts, but not to the same extent that more disciplinary approaches would (e.g., De La Paz, 2005; Reisman, 2012). Although most of the research has been conducted in grades 6-12, there is some research that seems to have implications for the elementary grades (VanSledright, 2002; Cervetti, Barber, Dorph, Pearson, & Goldschmidt, 2012).

For example, general summaries tend to look pretty similar across different texts, which means such summaries tend to neglect the nuanced information central to discipline-appropriate understanding. The issue has to do with what kind of information is important in this discipline. It's not enough, for instance, to inventory the names and dates from a history text; a good historical summary would include the relevant social, political, or economic causes and consequences. Similarly, literary summaries need to do more than capture plot elements; they need to include characters' emotional responses and motivations. Research reveals that students tend not to understand these nuances unless they're explicitly taught (Stahl, Hynd, Britton, McNish, et al., 1996). One-size-fits-all reading strategies may help struggling readers as they help such readers to think while reading. However, college- and career-readiness requires more than that.

What should elementary teachers be doing?

The CCSS standards specify that students must read informational text, not just literature, and they indicate that 50% of elementary school reading should be devoted to such texts. Initially, informational texts tend not to distinguish the disciplines. There just aren't big differences between the science texts and social studies texts used in the primary grades. There aren't big distinctions across these texts in the nature of their vocabulary or grammar, the use of graphics, the organization or structure of the information, the visibility of the author, and so on. By middle school, those disciplinary differences will become evident. However, the shift doesn't take place as abruptly as that. It is not uncommon to find upper elementary texts that exhibit some of these differences. The heavy emphasis on informational text will increase the likelihood that students will confront these differences earlier, and as such, the informational text demands serve as a precursor to the disciplinary reading to follow. Students who mainly read stories in the elementary grades obviously will not be prepared for middle school and high school work; the same can be said for students who read informational texts as if they were stories. So, elementary teachers can teach students to read informational text, distinguishing the differences among them and between informational texts and literature.

The informational texts used in the elementary grades should represent a wide range of text types (e.g., biography, scientific explanation, letter, or speech), modalities (e.g., picture, map, graph/chart or prose - online or on paper), and purposes (e.g., to explain/inform, entertain, or argue). And through such texts, elementary teachers can begin to prepare students for disciplinary reading by helping them distinguish among the texts. Each kind of text has different features. A map, for example, may have an inset and a key, or a biography may be chronological and include pictures. Studying the key features of various texts is highlighted in the Common Core Standards. One of the second-grade informational text standards (RI.2.5) calls for students to "know and use various text features...to locate key facts or information in a text efficiently," and another (R1.2.7) asks students to "explain how specific images [in a diagram showing how a machine works] contribute to and clarify a text." A newspaper article about a scientific finding is written in a different style from the scientific article from which it is derived, and a second-grade standard (RI.2.9) asks students to "compare and contrast the most important points presented by two texts on the same topic."

Another way to prepare students for disciplinary reading is to introduce and guide the reading of multiple texts on the same topic, much the way experts in history, science, or English think about and evaluate what they read across sources. The CCSS require that students learn to compare and contrast ideas in texts. Students might need to make general comparisons of different text types, features, or content of texts, both informational and literary. For example, a second-grade informational text standard (RI.2.3) calls for students to "describe the connection between a series of historical events, scientific ideas or concepts, or steps in technical procedures in text." And a fourth grade literature standard (RL.4.6) asks students to "compare and contrast the point of view from which different stories are narrated, including the difference between first- and third-person narrations." One way to address this standard might be to have students read such narrations side-by-side. Another way might be to change the point of view in a story from one to the other and consider the effect those changes have on the reader.

Additionally, elementary teachers can teach vocabulary not only from stories but also from science, social studies, or even mathematics texts. In literature, the standards call for students to "determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including those that allude to significant characters found in mythology (e.g., Herculean)" (RL4.4). Different words come up in different subjects, of course, but different types of vocabulary should be expected, too. For example, technical words in science often are built from Greek and Latin roots and combining forms. This often means that scientific names not only reveal what a word means but also its relationship to other words (e.g., annual, perennial). Scientists use such words because it helps other scientists anywhere in the world figure out the words' meanings and relationships.

History, in contrast, uses terminology that may be ideological in nature. Historical terms like the Middle Ages, Dark Ages, Civil War, and War Between the States do more than name events; they convey a political position on the events. It is not enough that students learn the meanings of such words. Students need to understand how and why such words are used in the various disciplines; these distinctions between science and social studies can be taught as soon as they become evident in the texts being read. Likewise, students should learn the kinds of words to which they should pay special attention during reading. For example, character motivations are particularly important in literature, so words that describe emotions will carry a lot of weight during such reading. And, the disciplines also differ in how precise their definitions are. It might be okay to paraphrase a definition in literature or social studies, but in mathematics, definitions are exact; changing an a or a the can alter the meaning in an important way. Elementary students can be made aware of these characteristics, too, ensuring that they will be more prepared for disciplinary literacy.

In summary, elementary teachers can do quite a lot to prepare their students for disciplinary literacy. We have mentioned just a few: ensuring that students read and understand the often nuanced differences among a wide range of text types, helping students make sense of information and ideas across multiple texts, and teaching vocabulary in every subject area in a way that helps students understand the specialized nature of discipline-specific words.

Closing thoughts

Our field sometimes argues about how early disciplinary literacy should be introduced. On one side, it could be said that, even though there is no cognitive reason for any delay - young children can start to think like scientists - there just isn't much reason to promote such ideas early on, since texts don't offer much opportunity for engaging in such thinking.

The other side of this argument says not to wait. Even young children can understand that two people may explain an event in different ways because of their different perspectives. Or they can make observations and inferences regarding a picture or artifact from the past. That means, when texts do begin to differentiate, students will already have some of the habits of mind needed to interpret them in sophisticated ways. Elementary teachers would be wise to study not just the informational and literary text reading standards for their grade levels, but to also cast an eye to the disciplinary standards for the upper grades. For example, a grades 6-8 history/social studies standard calls for students to "analyze the relationship between a primary and secondary source on the same topic." Middle schoolers, thus, might read the "Gettysburg Address" and a historian's take on that speech. Elementary teachers can prepare the ground, albeit with easier "texts," such as having students compare a picture with a description of it. What do these texts reveal? And what do they hide?

The disciplines pose specialized and unique literacy demands. Through such activities, teachers can help ensure that students will be ready to negotiate these gateways to college and career success. It is never too early.

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Does Disciplinary Literacy Have a Place in Elementary School?

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This commentary discusses what disciplinary literacy is and why it is important. It then discusses the ways in which elementary school teachers can infuse aspects of disciplinary literacy into elementary instruction. It argues that the Common Core Standards, even those at the K-6 level, are providing avenues for preparation for disciplinary literacy.

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Practices for Disciplinary Literacy Instruction

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Practices for Disciplinary Literacy Instruction

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Content Literacy VS Disciplinary Literacy

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Content Literacy VS Disciplinary Literacy

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Teacher 1: The Common Core highlights that every teacher is a reading and writing teacher in their discipline. I think this idea is important in combination with the best practices for content area learning. My main interest in this is based on helping students who struggle to learn to read in early grade levels, and, as a result, can quickly get behind when "reading to learn" in the secondary grades. Teacher 2: What is the place of disciplinary literacy in elementary school? I am also aware of the work of Nell Duke and the importance of informational text with young children as well as the significance of teaching academic vocabulary and scaffolding its use by the children. Teacher 3: I very much like your explanation of Content Literacy vs. Disciplinary Literacy. With this in mind, how would you best support kindergarten-first grade teachers in the area of Disciplinary Literacy? Non-fiction informational texts, read alouds, inquiries, academic vocabulary, learning to read charts, photos etc. ...The ways to scaffold Disciplinary Literacy are much more clear to me as the children move up the grades. Teacher 4: What would you say are some current best practices for secondary content area literacy?
Shanahan responds:

One hears the term disciplinary literacy a lot these days. That's because the Common Core standards (CCSS) address the teaching of disciplinary literacy (as do non-CCSS states like Texas and Indiana).

Of course, the term is often misused. Disciplinary literacy is based upon the idea that literacy and text are specialized, and even unique, across the disciplines. Historians engage in very different approaches to reading than mathematicians do, for instance. Similarly, even those who know little about math or literature can easily distinguish as science text from a literary one.

Fundamentally, because each field of study has its own purposes, its own kinds of evidence, and its own style of critique, each will produce different texts, and reading those different kinds of texts are going to require some different reading strategies. Scientists spend a lot of time comparing data presentation devices with each other and with prose, while literary types strive to make sense of theme, characterization, and style.

The idea of teaching disciplinary literacy is quite different from the long promoted content area literacy teaching. The latter has often championed the disciplinary literacy notion, but the result has been an emphasis on general comprehension skills and study skills, rather than apprenticing young readers into reading like disciplinary experts. K-W-L, three-level guides, Frayer model, 4-squares, etc. are all great teaching tools-they can enhance kids learning from text, but you are unlikely to find chemists or historians who use those approaches in their work. Thus, content area reading aims to build better students, while disciplinary literacy tries to get them to grasp the ways literacy is used to create, disseminate, and critique information in the various disciplines.

This can get pretty confusing. Educators have a tendency to latch onto new terms without developing much of an understanding of them. These days many teachers think disciplinary literacy is just the cool new term for content area reading. Even some "scholars" are playing this game; grabbing onto family resemblances and seeing identical twins.

For example, Cyndie Shanahan and I studied chemists and learned the key information that they looked for when reading chemistry text and some of the techniques they used for making sense of that information. They even provided us with cogent explanations of why their approaches were beneficial, given the purposes of their inquiry and the nature of their texts.

We turned that into a method that chemistry students could use to summarize information in a chemistry-centric way. Some "scholars" decided such charting made disciplinary literacy the same as content area reading (since it often recommends charts, too), ignoring that the categories of disciplinary-specific information were the essential element, and not the piece of paper on which the kids were recording the information (Dunkerly-Bean & Bean, 2017).

Not surprisingly, since disciplinary literacy is a relatively new thing for schools, there is a flood of questions about it. And, because the research is lagging classroom demand, there is only a trickle of research-based answers to provide. Much of what O will write here will be based on my own personal experiences (teaching and co-teaching middle school and high school classes in various disciplines).

So what are the big issues in implementing disciplinary literacy?

First, reading has to be a big part of students' disciplinary classes. I can't think of anything more fundamental. If there are not real reasons to read in these classrooms, then there is no reason to teach disciplinary literacy or for kids to try to learn it. I do not believe that teachers of biology, algebra, American History, British Literature, economics, or any other subject in the curriculum should be deterred from teaching their subject matter. But part of that teaching should come through text.

What too many teachers do is to seek ways to avoid text. A biology textbook is hard to read, 15-year-olds struggle with it, so teachers present the pertinent information some other way: Powerpoint lectures, dumbed-down study sheets, etc. Those teachers often tell me that students have the option of reading-though why they would, given that all the test answers are provided fully digested, I can't imagine.

Even math classes should include reading. I don't mean story problems, though they have their place. I mean that kids should be reading theorems, problem explanations, formulas, proofs, and whatever mathematical information is appropriate. "But my students aren't good readers?" I get it... and, yet, it is hard to see how avoiding math reading could possibly improve that situation.

In the elementary grades, making sure that kids are reading about geography, economics, history, culture, biography, environmental science, life science, physical science, music, art, and current events is really important. Building kids' stores of knowledge in those areas and giving them practice dealing with that kind of language and content is imperative. Stories are great, but a narrow diet of stories alone can make you sick.

Second, if students are to read, there needs to be text... disciplinary appropriate text. That means in a history class it is essential students be given opportunities to pore over conflicting evidence and alternative points of view. That doesn't mean that history textbooks have no place, only that students need chances to evaluate primary and secondary texts, too.

Science reading is less about alternative perspectives and more about accurate information carefully grounded in the observations and experiments that identified it. Accordingly, science information tends to be expressed in a multiplicity of forms (e.g., prose, tables, charts, formulae, photos), often within the same account-in part this is done because of the inadequacy of language to precisely summarize findings.

Students need opportunities to work with these alternative forms and to see more than science textbooks (not for alternative information, but to see how scientists report their findings). I taught a group of high-schoolers to read Watson & Crick's landmark report of their discovery of the structure of DNA. Man it was tough slogging-for them and for me, but we got there, and the kids were enthusiastic about results (they asked their real teacher if they could do more of that).

A counter-example. Last year, I was co-teaching some math classes. The math textbook had been written purposely to place as little reading demand on students as possible. The math book was largely a collection of math problems, without explanation (the teachers capably provided that). That book not only failed to provide kids with opportunities to read math, but the parents hated it because if their children didn't understand the math, they couldn't help them to figure it out.

Elementary textbooks and tradebooks often report content information, but they rarely do so from a disciplinary perspective. Historical accounts tend to tell stories rather than revealing controversies, disagreements, or the use of evidence. Science accounts often provide terrific explanations of scientific phenomena, but without much revelation of how this information came into being. And, how often are younger children exposed to literary criticism as opposed to literature.

My point isn't necessarily that such texts should be included in the elementary curriculum, but if they aren't then it doesn't make a lot of sense to try to engage them in disciplinary approaches. Those only make sense when one is reading works that have a definite disciplinary cast or when one is engaged in disciplinary inquiry that includes reading. Until such texts become available-and that could be earlier, but often isn't until middle school-satisfy yourself with exposing students to lots of informational texts and the knowledge they represent.

Third, disciplinary classes should have a deep dedication to imparting the content of the subjects to students, including information about the nature of inquiry in those fields. What does it mean to work as a historian, scientist, geographer, mathematician, or literary critic? What do they read and why? How do they report their results? What constitutes evidence in their field of study? What does criticism look like?

Some curriculum experts believe that means students have to be engaged in inquiry themselves in the various fields. I like that idea, and it often makes sense. Labs are common in high school sciences, though the lab reporting too often seems distant from how scientists report their findings. In history classes, it has become much more common to see students reading text sets that expose them to conflicting accounts (e.g., History Scene Investigations), so kids can weigh in on contested issues in history.

But inquiry is not without problems (I've yet to see a text set that shows students how historians take into account the economic or geographic antecedents of historical events).

Inquiry can be cumbersome and time consuming; it always requires a wise balance of content coverage and the appreciations to be derived from hands-on investigation. And, there are disciplines that simply aren't amenable to inquiry-math is particularly knotty in this regard (making me wonder if math isn't different than the other disciplines in that having students acting like nascent mathematicians might not have the same payoffs as trying to read like scientists or literary critics).

In the elementary school, it makes great sense to emphasize learning as well, and there will be times when inquiry is the way to go. (There might be wonderful benefits for writing reports of various types, but such reports tend not to be disciplinary by nature-a report on photosynthesis written by a fourth-grader is going to be more about finding facts in various sources than about reporting scientific information in the way a scientist would).

However, again, that doesn't mean there is no place for such work in an elementary classroom. Engaging students in trying to solve various kinds of quantitative problems and writing about these explorations makes a lot of sense. Having kids observing some natural phenomenon or conducting an experiment and reading about the phenomenon understudy to combine this information coherently could be very powerful.

The point is that content and inquiry are the point-and that disciplinary literacy should emanate from the demands of that content and inquiry. There will definitely be more opportunities at some levels than at others.

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Teacher 1: The Common Core highlights that every teacher is a reading and writing teacher in their discipline. I think this idea is important in combination with the best practices for content area learning.

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ASCD Express 12.12 - Disciplinary Literacy: A Shift That Makes Sense