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Literacy Leadership

Literacy Leadership. If not you , who. Follow the Yellow Brick Road. As educators, we’re a little like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. We ended up in a place we don’t recognize and don’t quite know how we got there, a place inhabited by odd little people we’ve never seen before.

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Literacy Leadership

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  1. Literacy Leadership If not you, who

  2. Follow the Yellow Brick Road

  3. As educators, we’re a little like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. • We ended up in a place we don’t recognize and don’t quite know how we got there, a place inhabited by odd little people we’ve never seen before. • We don’t know where we’re going and we don’t know what we’re looking for. • We’ve found ourselves in a tornado of directives we can’t control. • We’re looking for a wizard to solve all our problems.

  4. Like Dorothy, we are not alone in our journey. We often travel with people who are missing something: • Heart (Tin Man) • Courage (Cowardly Lion) • Brains (Scarecrow) Do you work with anyone who lacks these qualities?

  5. There is no wizard. The solutions to our problems and the answers to our questions lie in our own back yard.

  6. Suppose all the syllabi and curricula and textbooks in the schools disappeared. Suppose all the standardized tests were lost. Suppose that the most common obstacles impeding innovation in schools simply did not exist. Then suppose that you decided to turn this catastrophe into an opportunity to increase the relevance of the schools. • What would you do? • What is really worth knowing? • What is really worth teaching?

  7. What really matters? Who really matters?

  8. Reading Orphans: We’re Out There

  9. We have to supply what’s missing: Heart: We have to listen and care about what our students say they need. Brains: We have to acquire and use the resources to change what needs to be changed. Courage: We have to find the courage to ask the tough questions.

  10. The word educate is derived from the Latin educare, “to lead forth.” If you don’t lead them, who will? Ten Things You Can Do to Build Literacy

  11. 1. Help establish literacy as a school-wide priority. • Everyone on staff must be involved. • All teachers must be accountable for enabling students to read. • You don’t have to be a reading specialist to teach kids how to read and understand.

  12. The measure of success is not whether you have a tough problem to deal with, but whether it’s the same problem you had last year.John Foster Dulles

  13. 2. Develop an appropriate research platform. Components of the reading process: word recognition, fluency, comprehension, vocabulary

  14. 3. Ensure quality instruction It’s not rocket science.

  15. Good Teachers • Read aloud and model thinking. • Talk about reading and facilitate student conversations about reading. • Show students how to make connections between texts and themselves. • Prepare students to read. • Have students actually read and write most of the day.

  16. Good Teachers • Use graphic organizers. • Assess student reading and monitor progress. • Reflect with and about students. • Teach vocabulary and reading strategies. • Ask and solicit meaningful questions. • Use flexible grouping and small group techniques.

  17. Knowledge: arrange, define, duplicate, label, list, memorize, name, order, recognize, relate, recall, repeat, reproduce state. • Comprehension: classify, describe, discuss, explain, express, identify, indicate, locate, recognize, report, restate, review, select, translate. • Application: apply, choose, demonstrate, dramatize, employ, illustrate, interpret, operate, practice, schedule, sketch, solve, use, write. • Analysis: analyze, appraise, calculate, categorize, compare, contrast, criticize, differentiate, discriminate, distinguish, examine, experiment, question, test. • Synthesis: arrange, assemble, collect, compose, construct, create, design, develop, formulate, manage, organize, plan, prepare, propose, set up, write. • Evaluation: appraise, argue, assess, attach, choose compare, defend estimate, judge, predict, rate, core, select, support, value, evaluate.

  18. Good Teachers Don’t… • Laminate their lesson plans. • Assign instead of teach. • Rely on worksheets or computer programs to do the teaching. • Replace reading with videos or lectures. • Use whole class instruction exclusively. • Ignore the data.

  19. DATA: Lessons Learned in Reading • Words and Phrases in Context: 8th and 10th graders made little progress and rely on previous knowledge of word meanings rather than on context. • Main Idea, Plot, Author’s Purpose: 8th and 10th graders made progress, but were unable to analyze implied information, make inferences about characters and settings, make judgments, and identify details late in the passage.

  20. Comparison, Cause/Effect: 8th and 10th graders made slight improvement, but relied heavily on illustrations and made assumptions about words rather than referring to the passage. ER/SR items lacked specific support and were based on personal experiences and key words in passages rather than on close reading.

  21. Research and Reference: 8th and 10th graders scored lower in this cluster than any other and had problems determining the strength of an argument or the validity of information; ER/SR answers lacked text-based support and reflected personal experiences rather than content of the passage. Most were unable to synthesize information from different sources.

  22. DATA: Lessons Learned in Writing • Students have problems with • Using organizational patterns other than the five-paragraph essay • Writing effective conclusions • Providing specific details to explain or persuade • Varying sentence structure • Choosing appropriate, effective words

  23. More than their parents, their socio-economic status, their materials, or their programs, the single most important factor in student achievement is quality of teacher instruction.

  24. Handbook of Reading Strategies for Secondary Teachers 2001-2002 Handbook for Santa Rosa School District

  25. Created by Santa Rosa Teachers for Santa Rosa Teachers • Practical guides to best instructional strategies with instructions and samples • Teacher-friendly handouts • Graphic organizers and examples of how to use them • Read-alouds and vocabulary strategies in every subject • Pre-reading, during reading, after-reading strategies

  26. Reading Informational Text: We stop teaching them to read when the text gets most difficult. Three Main Barriers 1. Understanding of text features and construction of informational texts 2. Prior knowledge, content knowledge, and thematic knowledge 3. Content-specific vocabulary

  27. Read Aloud (7 – 21) • Why should I? • How do I choose material? • How do I actually do it? • When do I do it? • What selections relate to my subject area?

  28. Vocabulary Strategies(24-51) How each instructional strategy is presented: • Why do it • How to do it • Graphic Organizers • Samples

  29. Narrative the gist of the story is more important than a single vocabulary word vocabulary is contextual and relational - we understand its context and relate to prior experience terms are usually not related Informational the meaning of the word is closely tied to the lesson in the text specialized content has focused connotations that we cannot relate to prior experience or context terms are usually closely related or define one another Content-Specific Vocabulary Must Be Taught.

  30. Pre-reading Strategies (52-68) • Activate prior knowledge • Set purpose for reading • Connect to experience • Explain text features

  31. Understanding Text Features Helps Determine Importance. • Fonts and Effects • Cue Words and Phrases • Illustrations and Photographs • Graphics • Text Organizers • Text Structures

  32. Note-taking Key Words and Ideas Organizing Information Recognizing Inferences Cause and Effect Sequence Questioning text Identifying and Distinguishing Details from Main Ideas During Reading Strategies (69-82)

  33. After Reading Strategies (83-97) Activities to support • Reflection • Comprehension • Summarizing and Synthesizing

  34. General Reading Strategies (98-124) • Graphic Organizers • Writing-to-Learn Strategies

  35. 4. Maximize learning. Teach what matters!

  36. Reading Facts… • Students have a 1 in 20 chance of figuring out a word meaning by context in textbooks. • High school science texts contain at least 3000 new, distinct vocabulary words. • 40% of all math errors are reading errors. • Students who read more score higher in every subject on every test than students who read less.

  37. 5. Construct a quality, focused program. • Are we encouraging achievement for all or accepting failure routinely for some? • Are we providing all students with the tools they need? • If we continue to require students to read Moby Dick, and they can’t, what good is it? • If all students at all grade levels are not making progress in reading, we need to get off that dead horse.

  38. 6. Assess performance and ensure accountability.

  39. It’s possible to go too far.

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