Bridging the Gap Between Experts and Beginners

Subjects where literacy should be a focus

This week’s readings focused on incorporating a thoughtful integration of literacy strategies across the different disciplines taught in high schools. As noted in “Teaching Disciplinary Literacy to Adolescents: Rethinking Content Area Literacy,” there exists a false belief that building up students’ basic literacy skills early on in education is enough to ensure that they will automatically develop the ability to deconstruct complex texts. In essence, many educators incorrectly assume that giving students a strong foundation in literacy will guarantee the furthering of their reading and writing abilities (Shanahan & Shanahan, 2008). However, as you can imagine, these assumptions do not pan out. Of the three levels of literacy specialization listed in the article--basic, intermediate, and disciplinary--it was noted that many students do not progress into the disciplinary level because literacy instruction comes to a halt during the secondary grades (Shanahan & Shanahan, 2008). I found this especially interesting because it is during high school that challenging texts are usually introduced to students. With this in mind, as well as the NCTE policy brief’s statistics on declines in secondary literacy, it seems obvious that literacy should be at the forefront of education.

To play devil’s advocate, though, the lack of literacy-based focus in schools may be interpreted as the misguided use of the gradual release of responsibility model. As experts, teachers often forget that their students may not have a lot of background knowledge on their discipline because they have been so deeply immersed in mastery-level text. For that reason, teachers may model concepts, assume that students are understanding the material because 1) the students have no questions and 2) the teacher thinks the material is “simple.” When it comes time for a student to start more independent work, teachers are then confused by the lack of comprehension.

Students may often feel some of the listed emotions when introduced to a new concept

   As a student, I have seen this play out in the classroom far too many times to count. For instance, during my undergraduate organic chemistry lectures, one of my professors would explain topics thoroughly, but far too quickly for most of the class to really comprehend what was going on. He’d model a reaction a few times, then set up a reaction and ask us to help him complete it. So far, so good, right? Well, then he’d receive answers from the smartest kids in the class (since they were the only ones who wanted to speak up) and finally give the entire class a multiple choice question to answer independently via iClicker. Most of the results would be all over the place, so he would quickly explain the correct answer and move on because there was so much more to cover. My point in mentioning this example was to highlight how teachers may be so accustomed to being experts that they forget what it feels like to be a student being introduced to new material.

What does this mean to us as (future) educators? We need to be mindful of the ways that we present information. What may be extremely familiar to us could be absolutely foreign to the students in our classrooms. I feel that while it is necessary to acknowledge our mastery of our respective content areas, it is even more important to acknowledge that there are students who will have difficulty understanding what you may consider “basic.” For this reason, teaching students how to approach disciplinary texts should be explicitly taught, rather than assuming that these skills will be picked up independently.