Concerned officials at the district level can do a lot to support teachers as they work to improve student’s literacy strategies.  The first action is perhaps the most obvious: staff at the district level, who are removed from the realities of classroom life, need to recognize that teachers really can help students.  It is within teachers’ power to provide this help to their students, but they themselves need support to do it effectively.

This support can take two major forms:  1) professional development for teachers and 2) support for students whose reading is seriously below grade level. In addition to these two forms of support, districts need to think about literacy in a systemic way that they can create awareness of students’ literacy needs across all high schools.

Professional Development

Well-planned professional development (PD) for all high school teachers can go a long way to raise their awareness that relatively minor changes in instruction can make a big difference for all students, not just those who struggle with their reading assignments.  Successful PD does not tell content area teachers that they must become “teachers of reading;” nor does it consign helping students improve their literacy skills to those in the English department.  Successful PD presents strategies that teachers can use to identify the literacy demands of their content areas and of their reading assignments.  Teachers with strong content area expertise – science, math, English, history, and so forth – probably don’t realize that their text books present ideas in content-specific ways, with technical vocabulary, and particular text structures.  They don’t recognize these characteristics of their reading assignments because they are so accustomed to reading such materials effortlessly, to knowing the terminology, and to adding new information to what they already know.  Heller and Greenleaf (2007) offer great insight into content area reading in a publication distributed by the Alliance for Excellent Education.  Their publication can itself be the foundation of a great PD program.

Content area teachers are expert readers and writers in their subjects, and their students are novices.  When these expert readers take the time to identify potential obstacles to their students’ comprehension, they can explain them in advance or as students are reading.  For example, teachers may need to pre-teach vocabulary before starting a new unit, they may need to point out how much of the information in a science book is presented in graphics, not in text. Likewise, they may need to instruct their students in the stylistic conventions of writing a science report or a persuasive piece in a government class. Giving teachers insight into these simple strategies for changing instruction affirms their experiences as “expert readers” and empowers them to help their “novice readers” in productive ways. 

Teachers within a department or even across a school who recognize how much difference these strategies can make often begin to work together to establish a school-wide approach to improved literacy. This is what happened in Alabama, where high school teachers brought the ideas presented in PD sponsored by the Alabama Reading Initiative back to their schools and put them into action in their classes (Salinger & Bacevich, 2006).

Support for Struggling Readers

Comprehensive professional development that encourages teachers to modify their instruction can go a long way toward addressing the literacy needs of many – but not all – students.  Students whose reading levels are significantly below grade level need sustained, often intensive intervention provided by trained reading specialists.  These services may be expensive to offer, but they are the only way to address the needs of the students who struggle the most (see Kamil, et., al, 2008, especially Recommendation 5).  Without this specialized help, some students will continue to encounter frustration and failure in school and in post-secondary endeavors.

Taking a Systemic Approach

Offering district-wide professional development on content area reading is part of taking a systemic approach to addressing students’ literacy needs, but there are other actions that districts can put in place to create and maintain a comprehensive and coordinated literacy program for all high schools.

Other actions needed to put such a plan in place are acknowledgement at the district level that some students need more time for literacy instruction, either through intense interventions or through tutoring, study skills classes, or after school study sessions. Although these may be mandated by the district, operationalizing them at the school level takes leadership, from the principal or other administrator who can adjust the daily schedule and provide staff to make them happen. 

Schools where a school leader demonstrates commitment to improving the literacy of all students can create time for students and also time for teachers – for them to talk about their students’ literacy needs, to analyze student work and student data, and to process and make sense of what they have learned in professional development.  Encouraging teachers to form teams, with common planning time for meetings, often results in more coordination of instruction and increases the likelihood that students who struggle will be identified and provided the help and services they need.  This was certainly the case in Alabama, where the professional development about reading was the stimulus for teachers to develop stronger communication within content areas and across grades as they worked to create a comprehensive literacy program in their schools.

Although there are many other steps districts can take, one very common approach is to allocate funding within the district or school budgets for secondary literacy coaches. The ideal is for each school to have its own literacy coach, who works with all teachers to help them modify their instruction and understand students’ literacy needs.  Coaches based at the district office can be effective too, so long as they actual spend time in the schools helping to maintain momentum for improving instruction.  The International Reading Association, in collaboration with several of the other content area associations, has published a useful guide for secondary literacy coaches (Carnegie Corporation of New York, 2006).  The guide presents standards that define the position of secondary literacy coach in general and provides specific descriptions of how coaches can work effectively in all the content areas.