Teaching Metacognition and Literacy Across Disciplines

Initially, I was drawn to what seems like the common sense idea of modeling the type of metacognitive thinking that we expect from our students.  Of course certain best practices have always included metacognition, including the “apprenticeship” model advocated by Schoenbach, Braunger, Greenleaf, and Litman, which I recognized as the Gradual Release Model1 (134).  Further, technology has undoubtedly made analyzing texts more engaging such as the talking to the text strategy advocated by Reading Apprenticeship and illustrated in an informative, if not very exciting, video included in this post2.  Still, as I thought deeper about the two texts and our previous class discussion, I began to be troubled by the underlying assumption of each text that explicit literacy instruction should occur across subject areas.

In my own experience as a student in middle and high school and again as a teacher in middle and high schools, I don’t think the idea that reading is everyone’s responsibility would be so readily accepted.  Indeed, even towards the end of the class on June 16^th, science subject area teachers made the case that students are not being properly prepared to engage with the kind of texts required of students to be successful in biology and chemistry courses.  As an English teacher, I wholly understand any science (or history or math) teacher’s frustration with unpreparedness due to disorganization at an institutional level.  I point this out because the miscommunication of literacy responsibilities is entirely in a staff’s control and can contribute to gaps in students’ skill sets in literacy. 

A disorganized school can lead to undeveloped skills in students when the role of different content and grade level teachers are not made clear at individual, departmental, and institutional levels.  For example, English teachers are generally thought responsible for teaching the grammar and mechanics of writing as well as the holy trinity of format: expository, narrative, and argumentative writing, with a greater emphasis on argumentative writing as students become older.  Science teachers may feel they are more responsible for teaching the underlying concepts of their field, under the assumption that students should know how to write and so be able to readily adapt to comprehending scientific research articles and develop scientific writing.  I believe both cases are true in parts.  Instead of compartmentalizing literacy as “Apprenticing Adolescents To Reading in Subject-Area Classrooms” suggested that each teacher teaches literacy without any mention of a common link, I think this is a key chance for a literacy teacher to team-teach with a science teacher to ensure that students are seeing the connections between the two disciplines.  English is more than poetry, novels, and five paragraph essays, just as history is more than questions at the end of sections of a chapter, and science is more than dissecting frogs.  By showing clear relationships through collaboration, all teachers would not be burdened by “starting over” teaching reading and writing, rather, a grade-wide or even school-wide approach to literacy could be implemented to help students see the similarities and differences of texts across different disciplines.

While I wish it was this simple, more questions are raised by this solution than answered.  For example, with de-departmentalization comes a loss of control of one’s “own” curriculum, which can lead to teachers becoming anxious and further blurred lines over whose responsibility it is to teach what.  Further, scheduling may be hard at larger schools where not all students would have the same teachers at any given time.  On the other hand, having each teacher explicitly teach reading strategies could be beneficial for students who may not click with their English teacher, and so give reluctant readers another adult (or two, or three) who may help them develop their reading skills; however, if each teacher is going to explicitly teach reading, a great deal of time consuming and (typically) costly professional development would have to be implemented at many schools to make sure each teacher feels comfortable and prepared themselves to tackle the task.  If teachers think they know how to teach reading and they do not (metacomprehension difficulities), students could become frustrated or turned off to reading in that specific discipline.   

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2: http://youtube/qqTzbZv6Hx8