An Iterative Refinement Approach to Collaborative Professional Development

• In Event: Addressing Educational Inequality Through School-Based Learning Designs

Abstract

This paper presents an overview of several learning design partnership studies that examine how attention to literate practices in domains like science can present powerful opportunities for teachers to adapt and refine learning in their content domains with positive consequences for their students’ academic progress. Although literate skills and knowledge development are not an explicit part of most United States high school curricula, they are at the heart of learning across all academic subjects. Accordingly, we argue that two critical problems need to be addressed. First, many, if not most, high school academic subject area faculty do not consider explicit instruction of the academic language skills and knowledge of their domain to be a focus of their instructional practice. That is, for the most part, high school faculty members in social studies, mathematics, science, and literature, believe that their primary task is to help students acquire academic content. We have found that science teachers will often assign reading to students, but then didactically teach the “important content” (Gomez, Herman, & Gomez, 2007). This approach fails to hold students accountable for independently accessing and learning from text.

This state of affairs is particularly unfortunate because in recent years, scholars and practitioners have made important progress in developing techniques that make it possible to convey effectively these literate practices to students. For example, empirical understandings with respect to the use of strategies have become more sophisticated. Yet such insights are typically not part of regular instruction. One of few studies at the high school level, Herman, Perkins, Hansen, Gomez, & Gomez (2010) investigated the impact of the combined deployment of three strategic literacy instructional tools, literacy in science instructional routines, and collaborative teacher curricular materials analysis on 9th and 10th grade students’ reading comprehension and science achievement. They found that students who successfully used reading comprehension strategies while reading a science text performed better on a measure of science achievement. They also conducted regression modeling on the relationship between science achievement and reading achievement. Results indicated that reading achievement was a significant predictor of science achievement. Herman et. al. (2010) reported that their research team collaborated with school curriculum administrators and departmental instructional literacy support personnel to form common aims that targeted a high school science department in ways that were customized to each discipline of science. In the first year, they worked with a pilot group of biology teachers to introduce ways to couple literacy activities to science learning goals. The next year the intervention expanded to all 15 biology classrooms, and 860 student participants. All biology teachers were provided with ongoing professional development and coaching. More recently, they took this way of supporting teachers to the design and refinement of a biology high school credit recovery course. Again results were promising. Students were able to improve their science learning, and teachers gained new insights into the tight coupling of language and science discourse patterns in their classroom instruction.

Authors

• Kimberley Gomez, University of California - Los Angeles

• Louis M. Gomez, University of California - Los Angeles