When manufacturing ruled the U.S. economy, a high school graduate who was clever with his hands could make a living just as well as one who was clever with his head. Not so in this age of information industries, says Stanford education professor Michael Kamil.
Today, "if you look at the workplace, the literacy demands are extremely high," Kamil says. Even military jobs, a longstanding option for high school graduates, require a new level of sophistication, he points out.
Like many other educators, Kamil asserts that the current lackluster reading abilities of many adolescents pose a severe problem that needs to be addressed now. Society cannot simply wait for better-taught elementary school readers to eventually take their place in the nation's high schools, he warns, "because there's a current generation in crisis."
To defuse the crisis, reading specialists—sometimes called literacy coaches—can help content area teachers intensify their students' abilities to comprehend what they read. With improved reading comprehension, students will be better prepared to excel in a complex economy based on information, adolescent literacy advocates say.
Varied Materials
Kamil concedes that elementary reading instruction is getting better and that a growing preschool focus on literacy is helping to address the issue. However, at the root of the adolescent reading problem is a lack of exposure to a variety of texts—especially informational texts—during elementary school. Stories and literature make up the bulk of early elementary school reading, but in the real world, informational reading is called for most often. "When you read for information, you have to read the detail," Kamil says. He advises that even young students should be exposed to a variety of reading, so that by 3rd or 4th grade they know the difference between textbook reading and story reading.
By high school, students need to understand how different disciplines use reading and writing for their own purposes: for example, a summary for a lab experiment in science will differ from a summary of history, Kamil says. For students, that difference won't always be evident unless teachers show it to them.
Before helping the students, however, teachers need to clearly understand these disciplinary differences themselves. That's where literacy coaches play an especially important role. For example, they can help teachers show students how to adapt tools from an English class for a science class—such as graphic organizers to show cause-and-effect or sequencing, says Elizabeth Sturtevant, author of The Literacy Coach: A Key to Improving Teaching and Learning in Secondary Schools, published by the Alliance for Excellent Education in Washington, D.C.
"Instruction in each [content] classroom has to be good, effective instruction—not just for kids who are struggling readers. Even kids in AP classes struggle with college-level material," says Sturtevant, a professor at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. Sturtevant coordinates the literacy program for the university's College of Education and Human Development.
"There's a growing recognition among content area teachers that they need to know more strategies to teach reading in their area," Sturtevant adds. Kids weren't necessarily better readers 20 years ago, she says, but society's expectations are higher now for college and the workplace.
Defining Who Can Coach
One crucial question for schools embarking on a literacy program: How do you define "literacy coach"? A literacy coach and a reading specialist are essentially the same, answers Cathy Roller, director of research and policy at the Delawarebased International Reading Association (IRA). Roller's group recommends that qualification as a literacy coach should require at least a master's degree or reading specialist's certification, but some schools have a hard time finding educators with those credentials.
"What we think is happening is that schools want to hire a reading specialist, but there's not enough to go around," says Roller. With looser qualifications, schools may fill more literacy coach slots, she notes, but the effect of coaching on achievement depends on a coach's abilities. Quantity does not necessarily equal quality.
The demand for literacy coaches has increased, especially at the elementary level, because of No Child Left Behind's continuing emphasis on literacy. Currently, however, little money is available for literacy efforts at the secondary level, where the need for improved comprehension and content-area reading skills may be critical, say experts. The practicality of a homegrown definition of "literacy coach" is clear, but it may come with costs.
"Any district and state can define literacy coaches any way they want. Sometimes those who are not well qualified get hired. It really is a problem," Roller says. "So often in education we have an innovation that could work, but we implement it poorly," she says. "Then when it doesn't work, the schools abandon it." Literacy coaching has the potential to make a big difference, if it is done right, Roller says.
By the end of the year, the IRA and professional groups in English, math, science, and social studies plan to develop common standards for literacy that include a definition for "literacy coach."
Literacy coaches take on roles not only in instruction but also in assessment and leadership. They ideally play a major role in developing an overall literacy program for a school. "A well-trained literacy coach would have an understanding in each content area—although not certification in 12 areas!" notes Sturtevant. That basic content area knowledge equips the coach to work with a variety of teachers and understand a teacher's goals for students in each subject area.
But the literacy coach's toolkit goes beyond teaching reading strategies to teachers, Sturtevant emphasizes. Coaches also help teachers improve instruction in listening skills, note-taking methods, and even strategies for public speaking and small-group learning. These skills can augment students' abilities to communicate and can contribute both directly and indirectly to improved literacy, she concludes.
Coordinated Efforts
A statewide program in Alabama has tackled elementary and secondary literacy improvement over the last eight years. Because of budget shortfalls, however, the Alabama Reading Initiative (ARI) has lately focused on paying for literacy coaches mainly at K–3 schools. Secondary schools that have employed such coaches in the past are now finding financing in other ways, according to Katherine Mitchell, ARI director and assistant state superintendent for reading.
Literacy coaches are currently chosen by the school or district based upon a candidate's experience, qualifications, and interest in coaching. The program does not require a specialist's certification yet, says Mitchell, but she acknowledges that ARI may make changes based on research by an outside evaluator. "At this point we trust ourselves more than a credential."
ARI's initial 10-day professional development plan includes schoolwide sessions sharing current research on struggling readers; planning for informal assessment, comprehension instruction, and reading and writing in specific content areas; and holding a faculty meeting to hammer out a plan to serve struggling readers.
Successful Strategies
Mike Merold is an ARI regional literacy coach responsible for 35 secondary schools in southern Alabama. Merold works intensively with reading coaches at schools that are undergoing recertification as literacy demonstration sites, which other educators can visit to see practices applied. At such schools, at least 85 percent of the teachers must undergo 30 hours of professional development in literacy strategies in order to receive recertification.
In general, the literacy strategies Merold teaches can be used with any subject, he says. The anticipation guide, for example, is a prereading strategy that lets the teachers and students discuss content they are about to read and identify important information. Using such a guide, students might answer true/false statements about the text before reading the passage, and then revisit the statements after they've read the passage.
Merold has found that graphic organizers work well for science and math teachers. For vocabulary development, Merold recommends the quadrant card—one quadrant for the new word, one for the student's definition, one for associations or examples of the word, and one for antonyms or illustrations.
Unfortunately, math teachers often "have the mindset that they are not about to teach reading," Merold notes. But they're more receptive when they realize that their students have difficulty with the Greek prefixes used repeatedly in geometry and metrics, he says.
This year, for the first time, 7th and 8th graders will need to take the Alabama Reading and Math Test, which will require them to write an explanation for how they solve certain math problems. "Math application problems are some of the most difficult reading because they pack so much information into a small narrative. Even the directions give students a hard time on these tests. Students may have the calculation skills, but may not understand what the question is asking," Merold explains.
As content teachers explore reading strategies, they tend to find reciprocal teaching helpful, Merold says. Reciprocal teaching uses four strategies to encourage student-teacher dialog and engagement with a text to increase reading comprehension. Merold encourages teachers to give students ownership of the strategies. Working in groups of four, each student takes on a role related to one of the strategies: summarizer, question generator, predictor, and clarifier. As students read a passage, their roles help them focus on important information, clarify information or words, and use prior knowledge to anticipate where the text might lead. "The goal is for students to use those strategies when they read on their own," Merold says.
The hardest part of Merold's job as a literacy coach is getting teachers, often at the secondary level, to change how they teach. To win them over, not only does he make sure that the strategies meet their content needs, but he also tries to counter their objections through demonstration lessons.
When reciprocal teaching was first presented to site-based facilitators, for example, some teachers told Merold that they felt small-group work would get students off task. After witnessing an experienced content teacher use reciprocal teaching with classroom students, however, they saw that discipline did not become a problem, he says. Reciprocal teaching's reliance on collaborative learning, which is a sound instructional strategy on its own, allows teachers to work with small groups of students who need more intervention, Merold emphasizes.
Working with teachers is an art, say those who train literacy coaches, and one that requires substantial preparation. George Mason University graduate students who have enrolled to become reading specialists usually have three years of teaching experience and take courses exploring how to work with other teachers.
"Working with adults is a big shift for some teachers, who have to recognize that teachers are at different stages, from brand new to veterans," Sturtevant says.
Because a coach must build a good working relationship with the teacher, the latter must help to set the agenda. "It can't be a top-down [directive] from an administrator who points out a needy teacher. That sets up a negative interaction," she points out.
Instead, the principal must support the leadership efforts of the literacy coach, says Melvina Phillips, who works with secondary school principals in the Alabama Reading Initiative. A principal who acts as an instructional leader will not only be familiar with the reading strategies advocated by the literacy coach but will also create opportunities during the school day for the teacher to work with the coach.
The administrator is "like the ring leader in the circus big top" who has to marshal the schedule and the school's resources so teachers have the time to work on reading strategies and students have engaging reading material for their content area classes, says Phillips.
Solidifying the Learning
In Reading Next: A Vision for Action and Research in Middle and High School Literacy, authors Gina Biancarosa and Catherine Snow outline the major elements that should ideally comprise secondary literacy programs. Providing explicit comprehension instruction, embedding effective instruction in content areas, and conducting ongoing formative assessment of students are all givens. "Intensive writing," Snow and Biancarosa assert, is another crucial element of ideal literacy programs. A variety of such writing tasks, including summaries, response papers, and journals are important avenues for engaging students with the text. And if students probe the texts more thoroughly, with the help of comprehension tools and disciplinary lenses offered by literacy coaches and content teachers working together, their understanding of what they read should deepen, experts say.
"Students shouldn't just pick up a history book and read it like a novel, nor should they read it like a science journal," advises Snow, an education professor at Harvard. "In general, we believe science, because we're reading it for the facts. But we don't read history for the facts beyond 6th grade. We should read it for orientation because history is always interpretation."
For practical reasons, class experience with reading and writing in a particular content area should reflect how professionals use language in that field, Biancarosa and Snow's report suggests. Ultimately, teaching students to understand and profit from the subtleties of what they read may be a lofty, but not insurmountable, goal.
