Albert Einstein once said, "If you always do what you always did, you will always get what you always got." As many of you know, Alva Public Schools has started a strategic planning initiative at the beginning of the year.  The Continuous Strategic Improvement (CSI) plan will include everything from facilities to personnel to curriculum and instruction and will guide us in our decision making for the next five years. I personally have always believed that we should always strive to be better at what we do on a daily basis, and I'm very excited to see where this process takes us.  That being said, our principals and teachers have already been tackling the topic of curriculum and instruction through targeted professional development this year.  We have taken a look at all relevant assessment data to identify where we can become stronger.  The most impactful area that we have identified is literacy instruction.  When we think of literacy, we think of reading, but literacy instruction really encompasses so much more than that.  Literacy instruction encompasses daily opportunities in class for students to speak, listen, write, read, and develop vocabulary about the content that they are studying. 

 

When considering how to impact learning in the classroom, I have come to believe that you cannot change achievement without changing the way that we instruct in classrooms.  This means changing deeply rooted cultures in schools.  One aspect of those deeply rooted cultures is breaking down the walls between content areas.  Too often teachers believe that they have to stay within the strict confines of their own content areas as well as teaching in the same way they were taught.  History, math, and science teachers stay within the confines of the content standards rarely challenging their students with complex texts and exploratory writing.  Writing in the classroom can mean much more than simply writing essays.  Simply learning to annotate in the margins of a complex text can be hugely beneficial.  Those types of writing exercises fall into the category of writing to learn.  When students engage in those types of exercises they are creating new knowledge from the lesson and attaching it to prior knowledge.  These are very engaging types of strategies that are much more impactful than lectures.  It is clear that all content teachers are responsible for teaching reading and writing.  Throughout the standards documents that govern the content that each teacher must cover, you will find a second list of literacy and process standards the clearly indicate that every teacher is a reading and writing teacher as well as a content teacher.  It isn't an accident that these literacy and process standards are present.  The professionals that created the standards documents were guided by 70 years of research that concisely lay out the case for teaching reading and writing in every classroom.

 

All teachers are responsible for using rigorous methods to teach both and one cannot be taught without the other.  They are reciprocal in nature.  The testing culture created by NCLB inadvertently pushed us away from those methods in an effort to measure whether we "covered the material."  History teachers feel like they have to cover the material so they rush to lecture and worksheet students as a check of their learning.  I will admit that I was late to this discovery until the last few years that I was in the classroom. Once I started using primary source documents and writing assignments, I started to recognize the limitations to what was possible from a lecture model.  Students had a thin veneer understanding of the history concepts that I was teaching.  State testing regimes also were not a good check of understanding of the concepts.  Writing allowed them to think through the concepts, receive feedback, and revise their understanding.  Using primary source documents written by the agents who acted in historical events allowed my students to be challenged by the language of the period and forced them to use reading comprehension strategies that would serve them in future endeavors. 

 

"Writing can get 'locked out' of the curriculum because it is time consuming for students to produce and teachers to assess (Coppola & Woodard, 2018).  How do we overcome the time consuming nature of writing?  Teachers must create time in their pacing guides specifically for writing.  Those same writing assignments do not need to be long, term paper type of assignments.  Collaborative writing assignments in cooperative learning groups can also limit the amount of paperwork to be assessed by teachers.  The key to this idea is creating standards within the assignment for each individual to contribute.  Blogging coupled with non-evaluative feedback can also take the place of traditional homework assignments.  High level critical thinking skills cannot be achieved without "unlocking" time for students to articulate and revise their own ideas about the material. In closing, it is the responsibility of all teachers to teach reading and writing not only for the sake of the standards, but also for the sake of critical thinking and problem solving.  These are time tested and evidence based strategies that can better prepare our students for college and career readiness as they leave the halls of Alva Public Schools.

 

In the coming weeks and days, you will see articles in the newspaper about the exciting things that are happening in our classrooms with regard to engagement and literacy instruction.  We are spending a great deal of time and effort to provide our teachers with the professional development that can lead to these engaging strategies with specific regard to the ACT aligned instructional strategies (aka literacy instruction).   

 

Sincerely,

Shane Feely