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Strategic Content Literacy Initiative: Focusing on Reading in Secondary Schools

The author: Keith Lenz is a research scientist and Barbara J. Ehren is a research associate at the Center for Research on Learning. This article originally appeared in the September 1999 issue of Stratenotes, a newsletter for SIM Professional Developers.

Administrators and teachers in secondary schools throughout the United States have finally begun to realize the impact that insufficient reading, writing, and math skills have on the ability of students to acquire the information included in the core curriculum. This attention is largely the result of state and local initiatives to set standards and measure the attainment of these standards through standards-based tests. It is important to realize that standards and tests have been around for a long time, and there have always been students at the secondary school level who performed poorly on these tests. However, in the past, the focus was on holding only students accountable. Gradually, policy makers have turned their attention to those determining how students spend their time in school--teachers. Now, whole schools are the focus of accountability, and principals are being held directly accountable for the leadership they provide in helping change curriculum and instruction to increase test scores. Test scores are more public than ever, and administrators are evaluated and rewarded (or punished) based on how well their school performs compared to other schools and how much progress they are making on tests given to measure achievement towards meeting standards.

This is a new journey for high schools, junior high schools, and many middle schools that historically have focused on content acquisition rather than the competencies required to enable content acquisition. Almost no efforts have been made to help faculty develop schoolwide approaches to attacking the literacy problem at the secondary level. However, for the past ten years, several pilot studies and some collaborative efforts between the staff of the Center for Research on Learning, Strategic Instruction Model Trainers, and SIM teachers have begun to shape a model for developing a powerful system for promoting adolescent literacy across the curriculum. Although the model is just beginning to solidify, the initial data and the response from teachers and administrators are encouraging.

The purpose of this article is to introduce what we are calling the Strategic Content Literacy Initiative. Content literacy is defined as the listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills and strategies necessary to learn in each of the academic disciplines. This introduction to the Content Literacy Initiative is to help trainers think about how strategic instruction might fit into schoolwide reform efforts that focus on literacy acquisition. This initiative is just beginning, and research and development conversations and activities should be a part of what we are doing in the SIM Network. The initiative is based on the following five ideas.

1. The purpose of literacy is to increase the learning of critical content. Literacy cannot be developed separately from the core secondary curriculum. Students learn skills because they need them to meet the demands that they face; the skills become relevant because they enable students to do authentic tasks. Simultaneously, direct and regular application of skills in critical content provides the practice and exploration that plant literacy skills permanently in learner knowledge banks.
2. Content literacy requires fluent decoding. Students can be expected to use basic skills to learn critical content only after they have begun to read words fluently. Although some strategies provide a bridge between decoding and comprehension (for example, the Word Identification Strategy), provisions must be put in place to ensure that all secondary students are fluent word readers. For many students, this must begin with work on decoding words. Students reading below a fourth-grade reading level need to be placed in intensive research-based reading programs, such as The Corrective Reading Program (Decoding), published by SRA, to profit from the secondary core curriculum.
3. Common strategies are taught and reinforced across all teachers. The steps of strategies such as Paraphasing, Self-Questioning, Word Identification, and Visual Imagery should be learned by all secondary teachers. The steps of the strategies are then taught in different ways, at different times, by different teachers. The key, however, is that all teachers create a culture within a building where a common set of strategies are valued, discussed, and nurtured, albeit differently, across all teachers. Therefore, when a teacher asks a student to paraphrase, the expectations and criteria for satisfactory performance is consistently applied across courses.
4. Responsive and systematic instruction is provided on a continuum of intensity. The tasks associated with successfully teaching strategies and then ensuring successful content applications require planning and negotiation. The responsibilities of the general education teacher, support teachers, paraeducators, parents, peers, etc., must be carefully defined to ensure that instruction is provided along a continuum of intensity. When students are provided with instruction in a strategy during large group instruction in the core curriculum, that instruction must be consistent with the goals of the subject area. Provisions must be made for when group instruction is insufficient. Instruction that is more sensitive to student needs or more systematic in the process of applying the strategy may be required. Other, more intense learning experiences may be needed to provide more support and to lead the student to mastery.
5. Students master critical content regardless of literacy competence. Finally, and most importantly, secondary teachers must make a major shift in their thinking about curriculum design and delivery. This shift requires that teachers move away from simply covering the available content. Curriculum design should focus on organizing curriculum experiences around the socially compelling critical content and then developing plans and teaching routines that ensure that all students (for whom the core general education curriculum has been judged to be appropriate) master that content regardless of skill levels. This is an important requirement for improving content literacy because it ensures that students acquire the background knowledge required if the curriculum is truly a core curriculum that has high social costs if it is not acquired. Students should not be further handicapped by not ensuring access to the critical content by requiring that they use the very skills we know they do not have to acquire that content. In essence, this outcome should be the standard by which core-curriculum teachers and their methods should be evaluated.

Where should a school begin? This is part of the work that the SIM Network needs to do. Committing to the implementation of a Strategic Content Literacy Initiative will require nothing less than systemic reform in how secondary schools, especially high schools, approach curriculum and student learning. Such a reform effort at the school level must be based on a shared vision, shared knowledge base, shared responsibility, and shared accountability to be successful.