While English Language Arts curricula and Common Core State Standards revolve greatly around reading and reading skills, our classrooms are not the only ones in which students will be using (or even learning) those skills. I remember reading just as many , if not more, pages per week in my AP European History class than in my AP Literature and Composition in my senior year of high school. The readings were extremely different and yet I used many of the same skills and strategies (for example, using context clues to try to figure out the meaning of an unknown word before looking it up in a dictionary). In science classes our students will be reading content information from textbooks which are a form of non-fiction reading that we can incorporate into a non-fiction unit. 

Now that I have this knowledge I need to figure out how it affects my future teaching. While the teachers in other contents should certainly, and most like will, teach their students how to successfully approach and read the texts within their content, it certainly does not hurt if our students already have an existing knowledge (or schema) of transferable skills from our English classes. This is where teaching for transfer after mastery comes into play. There is no way that we will ever have enough time in a semester or year to teach our students how to tackle every type of text that is out there, in fact we will not even be able to tackle all of the strictly ELA related texts; however, we can teach students the skills that they need in order to be able to transfer their reading skills to other types of similar texts (remember the example of using context clues being easily transferred between disciplines). 

This all goes along with the idea that we want our students to succeed in all of their classes and throughout all of their lives, not just within our classroom. Teachers need to work together across disciplines to make sure that the skills that students are learning simultaneously are compatible. If we teach them how to transfer the reading (as well as writing because this conversation can be transferred into that domain as well) skills that they learn in our class to other texts in other classrooms or areas of their lives that contain different content then we can rest assured that they have the skills that they need in order to succeed.