The highlight for us at ILA15 this past weekend in St. Louis
(aside from the opportunity to present material from our current work-in-progress, Connect: A Collaborative Model
for Using Informational Texts to Enhance Literacy Across Disciplines, to be
published by Rowman & Littlefield some time in Spring 2016) was hearing
dedicated and passionate educators talking about innovative ways to collaborate
around cross-disciplinary literacy and informational text.
Two presentations in particular inspired us.
First, social studies teacher Lauren K. Francese and English
teacher Rebecca Marsick from Westport, CT, shared their “MINDful reading” approach
for enhancing literacy and engagement across disciplines.
According to Francese and Marsick, adolescence is a critical
time for students to make the transition from “learning to read to reading to
learn,” and so teachers of adolescents need to help them develop the cognitive
tools necessary to make that shift.
Toward that goal, they created a model for rigorous,
interdisciplinary nonfiction units that ask students to consider meaningful
essential questions as they put texts related to the unit’s theme into dialogue.
During their presentation, they outlined several impressive
units, including one on World War II, which pairs Hiroshima by John Hersey as a whole-class text with a range of related
texts like Farewell to Manzanar and The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Stories
of the Women Who Helped Win World War II that students can choose from.
By both allowing students to choose from a list of texts
that they have pre-screened and then offering multiple options for the unit’s
culminating writing assignment, Francese and Marsick effect meaningful
differentiation while also providing a rigorous learning experience for all
students.
In their model the students discuss the books in a book club
format for 15 minutes 2-3 times per week, and they are responsible for
preparing themselves for these discussions by completing reading organizers and
bringing their own questions to drive the discussion.
We of course were also very interested in their
collaborative English-social studies high school unit on the civil rights
movement that puts To Kill a Mockingbird
into dialogue with Claudette Colvin:
Twice Toward Justice, centered around the essential question, “What does it
mean to be a strong leader?”
They also talked about how they have adapted the degree to
which they work together over the years according to their respective teaching
assignments. In some years they have been able to collaborate very closely,
while in others they simply coordinate their efforts in order to support and
reinforce each other’s efforts.
And they shared both the tools they use to support student
engagement and critical thinking and to encourage their colleagues to try out
such units.
It was a treat to hear about this very valuable
collaboration, which they have outlined in their book Stretching Beyond the Textbook: Reading and Succeeding with Complex
Texts Across the Content Areas (Scholastic 2014).
The other presentation that we greatly enjoyed was led by a
trio of science teachers. Yes, science teachers!
As we are completing our new book that outlines our
collaborative model for enhancing literacy across the disciplines, the title of
their session, “Integrating STEM Readings with Secondary ELA Curriculum,” attracted
our attention, and we were not disappointed.
In their presentation Adam Aldridge, Eriq Hearn, and Alexis
Wren, all graduate students from Georgia Regents University in Augusta,
outlined their respective efforts to incorporate engaging informational and literary
texts into their biology, chemistry, and physics/math classes.
Biology teacher Eriq Hearn discussed how he guided his
students to consider Darwin’s The Origin
of Species and the way he presents the theory of natural selection as an
argument. He also hooked their interest by pairing their study of Darwin with
short stories from the collection Abraham
Lincoln’s DNA and Other Adventures in Genetics by Phillip R. Rilley.
Chemistry teacher Alexis Wren described how she engages
students by having them consider the moral implications of chemistry in
relation to the Holocaust. Using an anticipation guide, she asks them whether
they think the chemists employed by the Nazis knew what their work was being
used for and how they should have been punished, if at all, after World War II.
She pairs their reading of an informational article, “Chemistry in Nazi
Germany” by Sarah Everts, with The Periodic
Table, a memoir by Primo Levi.
In addition to sharing the wonderful texts that they’ve used
in their classes, these passionate young teachers also discussed the creative
ways they have hooked their students’ interest (e.g., anticipation guides,
written conversations) and encouraged them to demonstrate their understanding
(e.g., creating comic books and movie posters).
Toward the end of their session, Hearn urged the English
teachers in the audience to work with their science teachers to help them
engage all of their students. (If only we all had such eager colleagues – of
any discipline – to collaborate with!) And we wholeheartedly agreed with his
encouragement to start by reaching out to colleagues that you like.
Finally, our ILA convention was topped off by the
opportunity to meet with the two women at the helm of CommonLit, Michelle Brown
and Sarah Mielbye, who were sharing their important work in the exhibition hall.
Brown and Mielbye offer a growing range of accessible, engaging
informational texts as a searchable database for teachers to use to create
their own cross-disciplinary and informational text connections. They are also
negotiating with various content providers (like NPR) and authors to allow
access for student and classroom use.
We applaud and share the vision these two women have for
how teachers need to be the intellectual and creative core of innovations in
education. Technology, like CommonLit, may enable teachers to do this work more
quickly (by providing content and helping streamline the search for content and
connections), but ultimately teachers, through their energy, their experience,
their collaborative impulses, and their knowledge of their students, can and
should be the ones creating curricula and making change.
As is always the case, our attendance at a national
conference, and the opportunity to meet with teachers and innovators from
across the country (like Michele Haiken and her innovative methods for teaching Mockingbird!), has left us invigorated about our work and impressed by the
good work being done by educators, young and old, experts and novices alike.
It isn’t always easy to be a teacher, but after
attending ILA, we know we are in good company.
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