Language, Literacy, and Leadership: Building Teacher and School Capacity to Deepen All Students' Academic Growth

• In Event: Building Professional Expertise for 21st-Century Teaching: The Imperative of Integrating Knowledge About Language Development

Abstract

A key lever for improving teaching practice and students’ academic growth across a network of urban high schools has been the Language, Literacy and Leadership (L3) Project guided by a major university. Its main strategy is building teachers’ capacity to apprentice students in how to access, acquire and use academic language for deeper understanding in the disciplines. The logic model is grounded in the research that language development and cognitive development are interrelated and interdependent (Bunch et al., 2013). But most high school teachers have not been provided this framework.

Teachers are supported in the design and facilitation of instruction that will increase students’ agency and stamina as learners, including explicit guidance in reading and understanding complex text and multiple opportunities to use academic language through dialogue and authentic discipline-based learning experiences. Teacher professional development is rooted in learning principles that parallel the desired outcomes for instruction and student learning. Based on the Reading Apprenticeship Framework, the aim is to raise teachers’ metacognitive awareness of themselves as readers and writers, as well as their metalinguistic awareness of the vocabulary, text structures and language codes used by their disciplines to produce, disseminate and evaluate knowledge (Schoenbach et al., 2012). The ultimate goal is that students will independently guide their own learning—an essential skill for college success, democratic participation and for understanding and shaping their world (Walqui & van Lier, 2010).

To provide learning experiences that create “engaged, strategic, and independent readers” (Schoenbach et al., 2012), teachers must understand:
• The purpose of language in learning and how language develops;
• Their practices as a reader in their discipline and how to make those practices explicit;
• That the language and literacy structure of a discipline are inextricably linked to learning content; and
• How to use embedded formative assessment to set goals and plan instruction.

Teachers must also learn to:
• Engineer varied and multiple opportunities for students to formulate, articulate and critique ideas using the language of the disciplines, and
• Use progressively complex content, texts, instructional methods and activities that scaffold the knowledge and skills students need to access and communicate complex ideas (Walqui, 2011).

The L3 Project seeks to build coherence among schools’ instructional improvement programs and professional learning. It develops collaborative structures that build ongoing teacher development and sustain a culture of continuous improvement (Bryk et al., 2010). The project also builds collaboration and coherence across a network of high schools, instilling “cultural change that is both deep and necessary, and one that needs to occur, not in this or that school, but in all schools and the infrastructures within which they operate.” It is a system change that permanently deprivatizes teaching in order to build in continuous improvement (Fullan, 2006).

This paper answers the questions: if teachers are to become experts in disciplinary literacy practices that deeply engage and challenge all students in meaningful learning experiences, what does this pedagogical knowledge development look like in action, and what are the supports necessary to advance and sustain this professional development?

Authors

• Mary Ann Pitcher

• Julie Daly, University of Chicago, Network for College Success