High School Literacy

he Academic Literacy course began as a 10-unit, year-long course for all our freshmen in Fall 1996. My colleagues and I knew that for students to become active readers, they had to first believe that reading with comprehension was something that could be learned; that it was not a mystery that you either "get" or "don't get," and that 9th grade was not too late to learn.

e thought that if we could create classrooms in which students could use some of the energy they put into hiding what they don't understand into revealing and working to figure out their confusions, we might create a powerful new learning dynamic. We thought about ways to make it "cool" to be able to articulate what in a particular text is confusing and why, and about how to invite the entire class to contribute strategies to unlock difficult text.

e began by reading works by authors including Martin Luther King, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Frederick Douglass writing about the role of reading in their lives. In addition to exploring questions such as: "What roles does reading serve in people's personal and public lives?", we prompted students to think about their own relationships to reading, reflecting on questions such as, "What are my characteristics as a reader? What strategies do I use as I read?"

e also read and discussed articles that provided a common conceptual vocabulary for thinking about one's own cognitive processes. Students learned about schema, metacognition, and attention management. The following comment illustrates how students internalized some of these ideas and strategies.

"In Academic Literacy they taught you about different channels of your brain. Like my teacher would say, 'You have one channel for being with your friends, and one channel for getting dressed, and you have a channel for being in school" And so then we would be supposed to ask ourselves, "What channel am I on now? Am I on my school channel?"

nother key element was in our modified version of Silent Sustained Reading. Books were self-selected, but students were expected to finish a 200-page book each month and keep a record of both what they were reading and what they were learning about themselves as readers. They were introduced to and given frequent opportunities to practice a variety of cognitive and "text-wise" strategies: questioning, clarifying, summarizing, and predicting; use of graphic organizers; and breaking down sentences into manageable parts.

fter seven months of instruction, students on average moved from being able to independently read a text at the level of Charlotte's Web to a text comparable in difficulty to To Kill A Mockingbird. According to the test developers, this is equivalent to a change from the early 7th grade level to the late 9th grade level.

tudents' survey responses and letters showed that they came to value reading in new ways, too. One student explained: "I found out what kind of books I like to read and I understood more about reading...Also now at least sometimes I enjoy reading."

Additional Resources

Online Resources

http://www.artslit.org

Arts/Literacy Project
Contains a project overview, handbook, resources, and contacts. Offers ideas on how to use the arts to make connections between students’ lives and literary classics.

http://www.wested.org/stratlit/ideas/
twentyfiveword.shtml

Creating a Twenty-five Word Abstract
This activity was created by a science teacher who wanted his students to use summarizing to better access the classroom text. This activity can be applied in any content area.

http://www.indiana.edu/~reading/ieo/
bibs/graphsec.html

Graphic Organizers in Secondary Schools
This non-comprehensive coverage of the use of graphic organizers in secondary education was assembled from various resources on the World Wide Web, bookstores, libraries, and other places.

http://forum.swarthmore.edu/powchanged to http://mathforum.com/pow

Problems of the Week
The Math Forumís Problems of the Week (PoWs) are designed to provide creative, non-routine challenges for students in grades 3-12. Problem-solving and mathematical communication are key elements of every problem.

http://curry.virginia.edu/

RdngStratAwareInventory.htm

Reading Strategy Awareness Inventory
Provides a self-assessment tool for evaluating the use of reading strategies from the University of Virginia.

http://www.execpc.com/~dboals/think.html

Research and Critical Thinking
This is part of the History/Social Studies Web site for K-12 teachers. It has links to other Web sites with information on concept mapping.

http://www.wested.org/stratlit

Strategic Literacy Initiative
Provides general information about the research-based, literacy-focused professional development initiative that has demonstrated results with high school students.

http://www.ericfacility.net/databases/
ERIC_Digests/ed412309.html