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Literacy and learning how to read simple children’s books and information texts, to tackling complex novels and passages, demands students to expand their palettes. To be a teacher who is committed to continually building their students’ reading abilities by not stopping at the familiar and safe levels, but guiding them to challenging and unchartered territories that literature has served on a silver platter. Reading is not a mere escape, but a way for our students to enjoy the powerful energy that words can provide and influence. Strengthening one’s literacy requires the devotion to test limits and overcome them with a hunger for more. Teaching reading to students is a particularly noble act and craft because it is the gateway to unlocking their unique voices, choices, stories, and they all have within them. We are storytellers. To teach students how to read, comprehend, and truly appreciate others’ stories through the written word is an essential tool that opens them to a continuous stream of knowledge, fosters their intellectual growth, and always keeps them engaged with the ever-changing world around them. This act of nurturing literacy is foundational in shaping informed, articulate, and inventive scholars who can contribute thoughtfully to society and the learning community of our classroom.

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A Writing Piece of Mine, that illustrates the power of literature can have on a young mind, when they have a true "reading teacher" who has a blazing passion for literacy knowledge, but also something much more than that, they have a desire and a need to go deeper, in both reading and writing.

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A Writing Piece of Mine, that illustrates the power of literature can have on a young mind, when they have a true "reading teacher" who has a blazing passion for literacy knowledge, but also something much more than that, they have a desire and a need to go deeper, in both reading and writing.

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Faulkner is our Shakespeare. In The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner threw me directly into a world of nitty-gritty, harsh realism. His eloquence with language is like nothing I have ever experienced before. His style consists of sentences that are merely streams of consciousness that contain no periods, punctuation, or capitalization. Also, he goes on without noting when he is switching character, place, or even time. All these things come together to enhance both character and plot. What seems like absurd writing, is actually the characters’ thoughts - it is Faulkner’s way of showing us the character’s self. In this novel, there are four sections and each section is through the eyes and mind of one of the four major characters. Besides the first section, the rest focuses on the Easter weekend of 1928. There are so many concepts and characters that I could discuss; however, Benjy Compson is the character that made my heart ache the most. Benjy is a mentally challenged, thirty-three year old, bear-like man who is nothing but loving and affectionate. He has the intelligence of a  three year old and is not able to speak, but bellows and moans instead. His family sees him as a curse and treats him as such. The thing that is so heart wrenching about his character is that we, the readers, know him as a person, but his family and everybody else does not. We see his grace, kindness, and innocence. We see through his eyes - his observations of his surroundings as simple yet poetically beautiful. We also see his pain and longing for his sister that he misses dearly. It is the story of a broken family. With the closing scene of the novel order is stored, but no resolutions are made. Order is not always restored or remains intact for it will never stop being disturbed because we, the characters of this story called life, have the reins. We have control and we abuse this power. In this exquisite novel, you see that the people who should have the upper hand do not, and the kind ones are seen as curses, and the cruel ones are praised. I fell in love with Faulkner’s writing for he is linguistically stunning, but profoundly tragic. If it was not for my English teacher, Mrs. Bickford, I would not have absorbed all the wonders Faulkner and The Sound and the Fury have offered to the world. Through critical analysis and excerpt dissections I dove deeper than the words on the page. I dove to the work’s depths and emerged from it knowing those characters inside and out - knowing the workings of both their souls and minds. This was an empowering moment for me because this novel helped me learn more about my abilities as a reader and a scholar.

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S is for Standards: What content-specific standards do I want to target? What key understandings do I want students to develop? What content-specific knowledge or skills will they need to acquire?

T is for Texts: When selecting texts, be creative and consider options in addition to the textbook. Can you find opportunities to incorporate primary texts? Up-to-date online content? High-interest readings? How about multimedia, video, or visual resources?

A is for Assessment: Well-designed assessments will require students to demonstrate a deep understanding of what they’ve read and learned (e.g., by explaining, evaluating, applying, or expressing an opinion). Assessments should also test students’ command of the reading and literacy skills you choose to target.

R is for Reading and Literacy Skills: Target specific literacy skills in your lesson. These can be reading, writing, speaking, listening, or language skills. You can also pick skills that will help students demonstrate their learning either orally or in writing—skills like writing a well-organized paragraph, supporting a position with evidence, or summarizing, better yet, contextualizing (annotating) a passage from a text.

T is for Tools: Look for instructional tools and strategies that will help students develop the literacy skills you identified and deepen their understanding of the content.

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Vol. 81

No. 4

Abstract

How to START

What Does START Look Like in Practice?

Why START?

All teachers can create content-rich lessons that simultaneously develop core literacy skills.

Credit: Rawpixel.com / SHUTTERSTOCK

Abstract

How to START

What Does START Look Like in Practice?

Why START?

Developing core literacy skills is crucial for student success, both in school and beyond. Although schools and teachers have been working to achieve this goal for decades, their efforts have not always been successful. This is because the work of building reading and literacy skills has been left primarily to elementary and English language arts teachers. What we, as educators, realize now is that building high-level literacy skills requires a team effort; teachers across grade levels and content areas need to work together to achieve this goal.

Evidence for this across-the-curriculum approach to literacy can be found everywhere, from our informal conversations with educators to formal education documents. Take a quick look at many states' current standards, and you'll find standards for literacy in science, social studies, and other subjects. In other words, today's educators are being asked to make the commitment to literacy across the curriculum. But committing to something is not the same as making it a reality. As their comments show, some teachers we work with are understandably concerned about the idea of making every teacher a teacher of literacy:

"But I've got so much on my plate already!"

"Won't teaching literacy skills take time away from teaching my content?"

"How am I supposed to teach literacy? I'm not an English teacher!"

If we truly want to integrate literacy skills across the disciplines, we must get past these concerns. The question then becomes how: How can we engage all teachers in the valuable work of building key literacy skills-such as determining main ideas, gathering and evaluating textual evidence, contributing meaningfully to discussions, and developing evidence-based arguments-without interfering with their ability to teach their content?

Building high-level literacy skills requires a team effort; teachers across grade levels and content areas need to work together to achieve this goal.

As Mike Schmoker (2018) reminds us, simplicity and clarity are crucial to bringing about meaningful change. At the Thoughtful Classroom , we (the authors) have been working with schools for over 40 years to implement solutions that are both simple and clear. To help schools address the challenge of incorporating literacy across the curriculum, we've developed a simple and clear framework for getting started, one that helps teachers at all grade levels infuse texts and literacy skills into their everyday lessons without sacrificing their regular content.

How to START

We designed the framework around the acronym START because it spells out a set of planning components that all teachers can use to create content-rich lessons that develop core literacy skills. Here's what the acronym stands for:

S is for standards.

Use your content standards as a starting point for mapping out your lesson. Ask yourself, What standards do I want to target? What key understandings do I want students to develop? What knowledge or skills will they need to acquire? Use this information to develop lesson-specific learning targets and share those targets with students.

T is for texts.

Select a text or texts that align with your learning targets. Develop a question or prompt that will give students a purpose for reading and engage them in thinking deeply about the content (e.g., "Does treating everyone fairly mean treating everyone the same?" or "What does it mean for a chemical equation to be balanced?"). When selecting texts, be creative and consider options in addition to the textbook. Can you find opportunities to incorporate primary texts? Up-to-date online content? High-interest readings? How about multimedia, video, or visual resources?

A is for assessment.

Well-designed assessments will require students to demonstrate a deep understanding of what they've read and learned (e.g., by explaining, evaluating, applying, or expressing an opinion). Assessments should also test students' command of the reading and literacy skills you choose to target. Assessments don't have to be formal to be effective. They can involve anything from observing a student's note-taking process, to listening in on a discussion, to reviewing a polished piece of writing.

R is for reading and literacy skills.

Target specific literacy skills in your lesson. These can be reading, writing, speaking, listening, or language skills. You can focus on skills that will help students understand the content-skills like previewing a text before reading it, calling up prior knowledge and comparing it with new information in a reading, or taking organized notes. You can also pick skills that will help students demonstrate their learning either orally or in writing-skills like writing a well-organized paragraph, supporting a position with evidence, or summarizing.

T is for tools.

Look for instructional tools and strategies that will help students develop the literacy skills you identified and deepen their understanding of the content. Ask colleagues for suggestions. Look online for tried-and-true standbys. Or try one of the following literacy tools we've developed (Boutz et al., 2012; Silver & Boutz, 2015). These tools address common challenges students face when we ask them to use literacy skills to deepen their understanding of classroom content, and they're designed for easy integration into lessons and units:

Single-Sentence Summaries help students slow down their reading and create deeper understanding. Students read assigned texts one chunk at a time and summarize each chunk using a single sentence or an image.

Speak-Up Stems help students overcome that "I don't know what to say" feeling that can hold them back in classroom discussions. This tool provides students with a list of options for what to say. For example, "I agree/disagree because ___." "To summarize what I've heard so far, ___." "That reminds me of ___."

Map It Out is a prewriting tool that helps students assemble and shape ideas so they can draft them into common writing genres: arguments, explanatory pieces, and narratives. By mapping out their ideas on specially designed visual organizers, students begin to internalize the structural elements of different kinds of writing.

Most Valuable Point (MVP) helps students focus on the main idea. Students draft a single paragraph in which they identify the most valuable point in the text and elaborate on it using information from the text.

Having a common bank of instructional techniques can be especially helpful in the pursuit of literacy across the curriculum. In Williamsville Central School District in New York, for example, making sure that all teachers are equipped with the same high-impact literacy tools-like "Reading for Meaning" (in Boutz et al., 2012), which uses simple statements to help students collect and evaluate textual evidence-is a goal that's built into the district's teacher induction program. This establishes a common language for teachers to collaborate with one another and refine instructional practices.

What Does START Look Like in Practice?

The examples that follow show how the START framework helped content-area teachers (whose primary focus isn't literacy) build texts and literacy skills into their lessons. As you read the examples, notice how core reading and literacy skills are being developed alongside the relevant content knowledge.

Figure 1 shows how a middle school math team used the START template to design a text-focused lesson around the properties of equality that were embedded in one of their content standards. Because some students in previous years had been overwhelmed by learning about four different properties in a single lesson (the addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division properties), the team designed this year's lesson to help students recognize that the properties are actually quite similar. They opened their lesson by telling students they'd be reading about four different mathematical properties-and that once they were done, they'd use the Forced Choice framework (Silver, Perini, & Boutz, 2016) to make a choice about whether the properties were more alike or more different. When students were ready, the teachers had them share their "forced choices" as a class and support them with concrete examples and equations from the text ("I think the properties are more alike/different because ___.") After continued practice and discussion over the course of the week, the teachers used the MVP tool to assess whether students had gotten the big idea that unites the four properties-that anything goes as long as you do the same thing on both sides of the equation.

Figure 2 shows how the START template guided a middle school science team to incorporate rigorous texts and core literacy skills into a lesson on the impact of plastic water bottles. To get students interested and engaged, the teachers opened their lesson with this provocative prompt: Should plastic water bottles be banned? Students used multiple texts to learn about the issue and developed core note-taking skills by collecting relevant information on a graphic organizer. They then shaped and sharpened their positions using Speak-Up Stems to discuss their thoughts and ideas as a class. To assess students' grasp of the content, as well as their ability to gather and organize key ideas from a text, the teachers had students draft a written response to the prompt for homework. They prepared students to write strong, well-organized arguments by having them use the Map It Out tool to map out their positions and supporting evidence in advance.

Why START?

Vicki Phillips and Carina Wong (2010) encourage educators to think of literacy "as a spine; it holds everything together. The branches of learning connect to it, meaning that all core content teachers have a responsibility to teach literacy" (p. 41). No matter what we teach, when we develop students' literacy skills and give them opportunities to read about, talk about, and write about classroom content, we help them learn and retain that content more deeply. That's why it's so important to get all hands on deck. We need to get students reading, writing, and speaking on a regular basis-and we need to do it in all content areas and grade levels.

But for many schools, getting started is often the hardest part. That's what makes the simplicity of the START process so beneficial. As Jessica Catrett, an instructional coach at South Hall Middle School in Georgia, puts it, "This process has allowed me to show teachers how clear and manageable integrating literacy tools into everyday instruction can be. With it, we have been getting more and more intentional in using literacy tools to ensure our students are learning the content at a deeper level."

Because START works with current lessons in all content areas, it doesn't feel like 'one more thing' to do.

When you're ready to START, keep in mind that much of the foundational work may already be in place. After all, many teachers are already integrating texts into their lessons. And if we expect students to comprehend, discuss, or write about those texts, it means that literacy skills are already implicitly in the mix. Yet START makes this work more focused and intentional by helping teachers regularly build texts and literacy skills into their lessons. Moreover, because START works with current lessons in all content areas, it doesn't feel like "one more thing" to do. And, of course, tapping into the power of the team, so that teachers can design literacy-rich lessons together, always makes taking that first step easier and more enjoyable.

In other words, there really is no better time than now to START.

References

Boutz, A. L., Silver, H. F., Jackson, J. W., & Perini, M. J. (2012). Tools for thoughtful assessment: Classroom-ready techniques for improving teaching and learning. Thoughtful Education Press.

Phillips, V., & Wong, C. (2010). Tying together the Common Core of standards, instruction, and assessments. Phi Delta Kappan, 91(5), 37-42.

Schmoker, M. (2018). Focus: Elevating the essentials to radically improve student learning (2nd ed.). ASCD.

Silver, H. F., & Boutz, A. L. (2015). Tools for conquering the Common Core: Classroom-ready techniques for targeting the ELA/literacy standard s. Thoughtful Education Press.

Silver, H. F., Perini, M. J., & Boutz, A. L. (2016). Tools for a successful school year (starting on day one): Classroom-ready techniques for building the four cornerstones of an effective classroom. Thoughtful Education Press.

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Integrating Literacy Across the Curriculum: An Easy Way to START

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All teachers can create content-rich lessons that simultaneously develop core literacy skills.

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Set your goal or vision for making reading, writing, listening, and speaking a keystone of your daily teaching practices in all content areas!

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Set your goal or vision for making reading, writing, listening, and speaking a keystone of your daily teaching practices in all content areas!

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Speaking and Listening in Content Area Learning

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Oral language development facilitates print literacy. In this article, we focus on the ways in which teachers can ensure students' speaking and listening skills are developed. We provide a review of effective classroom routines, including some that can be enhanced with technology.

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One of my favorite quote by short story writer, Alice Munro: 

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One of my favorite quote by short story writer, Alice Munro: 

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We do not want our students to simply regurgitate what we have taught or the words on the page, but want them to grow into inventive writers and critical readers who produce new and fruitful ideas. Before students can fully digest learned materials, teachers need to give them an opportunity to pause, graze, process what they have learned, and chew it well, and break it down. This process leads students to invention. It is a vital part of the writing process that leads to choices, creativity, critical thinking, and endless possibilities to consider. Invention triggers an appetite, a hunger, for more chances to mature their literacy and rhetorical writing skills.

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Annotations, Contextualizing, and Close (re-)Reading. 

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Annotations, Contextualizing, and Close (re-)Reading. 

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Comprehension and literacy supports during instructional activities (in all content areas in school) can be as simple as the use of whole-class, small-group, and partner close-read alouds (re-reading content-specific texts, excerpts, or even word problems) to help students progress in their language proficiency/skills in the areas of content-specific vocabulary knowledge, grammar, sentence structure, and strong comprehension skills in speaking, reading, writing, and listening. As they read and listen, they will be encouraged to annotate the text: circling important information or starring main ideas, questions they have about certain underlined parts, and notes in the margins (reader's personal thought: real-life connections, predictions, favorite quotes, interpretations).

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To be a "reading teacher," I must challenge myself and my young scholars to deeper thinking and critical/cultural consciousness by teaching them to not unquestionably accept everything they read or hear, but to respectfully question everything. Whether we are talking about last night's assigned reading of a novel, discussing how we approached and tackled a complex math word problem, sharing the outline we crafted for our scientific method for our science projects, or our interpretation of a DBQ of a historical piece of writing or propaganda. Whatever the content-specific discussion is centered around, Socratic Seminars are where literacy is expanded, developed, and challenged. These magical discussions are where diverse contributions are accepted and critiqued, not just a simple, blatant, "correct" response. I loved Socratic Seminar-style discussions in elementary school, all the way through college. My "reading" teachers KNEW how important student-led dialogue is to understanding, learning, comprehending, thinking about one's thinking, and inquiring!

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Our aspiration and responsibility as 21st-century educators of young scholars is to spark and fuel a blazing zeal for reading, writing, and speaking and an undeniable want to grow in those skill areas. This requires us to start with teaching the foundational skills of how to recognize letters and sound out letters, syllables, words, and concepts of print. Then guide, mentor, and model — through interactive read-alouds and active back-and-forth dialog while reading — and encourage higher-order reading skills, like close reading, inferencing, meaning-making/comprehension-monitoring processes, and critical analysis. The nobility comes into play, when one teaches their students to read, write, and speak by blending dedication, empathy, and integrity and is driven by the fundamental belief that literacy is not just a skill, but a gateway to lifelong learning and personal empowerment to be able to navigate the world — and the world of literature — with unyielding confidence, curiosity, critical thinking, and creativity!