21st Century Literacy

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21st Century Literacy

• Addressing the Big Picture Challenges

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Big Picture Challenges

• Globalization
• what happens when the movement of people, goods,
  or ideas among countries and regions accelerates
  (Coatsworth, 2004).
• Will define the world our children will inherit.
• Education, like global businesses must change to
  meet the changed context.

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Big Picture Challenges

• Unimaginable opportunities for students to have
  access to the best teachers worldwide and to
  collaborate with peers across the globe.
• Historically, human interactions and even their
  imaginations were structured by local economies,
  social relations, and local knowledge. Now the
  structures are much larger.

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Big Picture Challenges

• People were likely to be born, raised, schools,
  married, work, reproduce and die in the same
  place.
• Today while we continue to live in local
  realities, we are increasingly being integrated
  into larger global networks or relationships.
• Greater Cultural Diversity
• This is both local and global
• Societys problems are complex and cut across
  disciplinary lines

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Big Picture Challenges

• In terms of literacy, when we engage in reader
  response, we assume a unique, individual
  response. BUT
• When students from different parts of the world
  read the same story, the variations in their
  responses are consistent with the readers
  culture (Patterson et al., 1994 ONeill, 1994)
• Culture is a major source of meaning. Our
  resistance to this idea is shaped by our own
  culture.

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Big Picture Challenges

• Dated Infrastructure
• Factory schools Are schools places?
• subject matter curriculum and testing
• Technology
• Students are more literate than educators
• Access to the worlds greatest minds and teachers

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Big Picture Challenges

• Inequality
• Black and Hispanic Americans are 3 times more
  likely to live in poverty than white Americans.
• Race is a persistent factor in employment
  statistics, educational attainment, literacy
  skills and educational achievement

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Big Picture Challenges

• Literacy Myths
• Myth that literacy is the route to economic
  mobility when in actuality race and gender play a
  role.
• Job loss and low wages are unequally distributed
  across races.

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Big Picture Challenges

• More literacy myths
• Myth that literacy is the ability read, write,
  speak and listen.
• There is a deeper definition of literacy that
  includes not only acquisition of reading and
  writing skills, but also social practice and
  currency that are keys to social mobility.
• Those outside the dominant culture find that
  their access to education and other social
  resources is limited. They are marginalized by
  their cultures, languages, moral and social codes
  as being inferior
• They internalize this experience internalized
  oppression

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Big Picture Challenges

• Myth that the curriculum is cumulative from K-12
• Assumption that the domain of English language
  arts is accurately represented in the state
  standards and in the tests.
• Assumption that the heavy focus on foundational
  reading skills in literacy testing reflects the
  cognitive complexity required in other subject
  areas.

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Institutional Racism

• In education, can play out as standardization,
  tracking and the hidden curriculum.
• Standardization assumes that there is a core
  curriculum and that students need to demonstrate
  mastery at some time and at a predetermined
  minimum acceptable level, of that curriculum.

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Big Picture Challenges

• Tracking sorts students on the basis of race and
  social class
• African American students are up to four times as
  likely as white students to be identified as
  mentally retarded or emotionally disturbed.
• Stereotypes and cultural reproduction of sexism,
  racism and roles in society are present in the
  curriculum and materials

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Policy and Professional Development

• Professional development is an aspect of both the
  professional infrastructure and the policies that
  operate across the classroom, school, district,
  and state and national environments

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Policy and Professional Development

• Policy-related research
• Varied ways by different groups
• Focus on broad reforms involving standards,
  reorganization, governance and other
  non-instructional issues
• Lack information on literacy issues
• Focus on the system of reform rather than on
  teaching and learning

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Policy and Professional Development

• Data are gathered through surveys, interviews,
  teacher self-reports
• Literacy Research
• Even when studying policy issues, focus on
  literacy instruction and learning Ex. Do new
  standards and assessment result in better reading
  and writing instruction and skills?
• Policy is the BACKDROP for literacy research and
  reform

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Policy and Professional Development

• Gap between policy (global view) and the
  understanding of what factors and and how they
  mediate the implementation of policy in the
  classroom.
• Policies do influence teachers beliefs and
  practices, BUT not always in the expected and
  desired ways

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Policy and Professional Development

• Mediating Factors
• Teachers knowledge, beliefs and practices
  economic, social, philosophical, political
  conditions of the school or district the stakes
  attached to the policy, the specificity of the
  policy the quality of support given to the
  teachers and administrators.
• Implementing reforms does not ensure improved
  teaching or learning
• WE DO NOT KNOW ENOUGH ABOUT SUCCESSFUL
  PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT PRACTICES AND HOW THEY
  ARE MEDIATED BY THESE FACTORS.

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Policy and Professional Development

• Problems with research
• Inputs focus on analysis of superficial factors
  such as grouping practices or time spent on
  specific activities.
• Inputs do not necessarily improve teaching and
  learning

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Policy and Professional Development

• Outputs focus, e.g. student achievement,
  graduation rates, teacher knowledge, curriculum
  alignment, time on task or self-reported teacher
  instructional strategies does not give enough
  insight into how student learning is improved

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Policy and Professional Development

• Heavy reliance on outputs high stakes test
  scores narrow curriculum, over-emphasis on
  basic skills, excessive time spent on test
  preparation, marginalization of low-achieving or
  special ed. Students from deep content
• Test scores do not reflect true student learning
  and different performance standards lead to
  variable test results (Linn, 2000).
• Test scores do not reveal what is happening in
  classrooms to produce the scores.

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Policy and Professional Development

• Policy-makers and staff developers tend to focus
  on change as the major indicator of improvement
• Can indicate a lack of stability, indecision, or
  lack of vision
• Lack of change may not be a sign of low quality
  teaching or student learning.

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Policy and Professional Development

• AND
• Change may appear to be more meaningful than it
  really is!
• In schools that complied with policy and changed
  their school structures such as grouping, more
  professional development, shared decision-making,
  classroom observations revealed that teaching
  practices had changed little.
• Teacher self-reports of change in instructional
  practice often are not reflected in their
  observed instructional practices. (CPRE, Elmore,
  Peterson McCarthey, 1996 Mayer, 1999)

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Policy and Professional Development

• The classroom is the primary site for raising
  achievement and student learning. The most
  effect means of improving both is providing
  support for teachers to learn how to use
  classroom assessment to make instructional
  decisions to provide feedback to their students.
  Especially effective with low-achieving students.
  Teachers need help focusing on the quality of
  instruction.

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Policy and Professional Development

• Interest groups and researchers are reading
  policy entrepreneurs who use policy discourse
  and congressional testimony to orient
  policy-makers toward specific instructional
  policies in reading.
• Evolution of America Reading program into Reading
  Excellence NICHD

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Policy and Professional Development

• Policy-makers tend to have an either-or mentality
  about phonics and wholistic instructional
  practices, while practitioners tend to take a
  middle path.
• Also, state standards are not articulated well
  vague, not cumulative AND
• Not systematically aligned with the standards

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Professional Development

• Need to look inside what researchers have called
  the black box. (Black William, 1998)
• Superintendents active participation in
  professional development is related to the
  success of the district in
• Promoting collaboration
• Encouraging a requisite core group of teachers
  (Dutro et al., 2002).

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Professional Development

• Greater teacher collaboration within and across
  grades characterizes the most effective schools
• Team teaching, peer coaching, program
  consistency, seeing all children as everyones
  responsibility
• Despite differences in beliefs and practices,
  staff in most effective schools are united in
  making reading a priority.

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Professional Development

• Word recognition
• Most effective teachers spend more time in small
  group instruction and less time in whole group
  instruction(Taylor et al., 2000).
• Most effective teachers in grades 12 used
  coaching to teach word recognition least
  accomplished spent none. No differences in
  frequency of teaching phonics.

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Professional Development

• Comprehension
• Little instruction seen in grades 1-3
• Most accomplished teachers aasked higher level
  questions about stories
• Asked text-based questions
• Asked children to write in response to what they
  had read

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Professional Development

• Teaching Style
• Coaching as children attempted to respond
• Least accomplished relied on TELLING

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Professional Development

• Communities of Practice
• Network of teachers working together to address a
  specific problem of practice.
• Works against the traditional isolation of
  teachers and also gaps between teachers and
  universities and between novices and experienced
  teachers
• Develops a discourse for the understanding and
  improvement of practice (Raphael, Florio-Ruane,
  Kehus et al., 2001)

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Professional Development

• Dialogic in Nature
• Problem-solving
• Knowledge-construction
• Theory development
• Problems of practice are developed, implemented,
  evaluated, modified, and re-examined by the
  community members (Wells, 1999)

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Professional Development

• Study groups
• Book club - Discussions through reading, writing
  in response to, and talking about books primarily
  related to immigrant autobiography
• Learning in a community of practice read, write
  in response to, and discuss professional
  literature
• Engaging in teacher research and shared inquiry
  in areas specifically related to professional
  reading

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Professional Development

• Cross-site and inter-district study groups
• Combine textual, virtual and face-to-face
  communication
• Addresses the problem of social inequality,
  economic immobility and community isolation
  (Farley, Danziger, Holzer, 2000)
• Created a communicative ecology

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Professional Development

• Enabled the development of an integrated language
  arts curriculum
• Instruction linking oral and written language
  increased
• Changed the way participating teachers taught
  literacy, personalized the teaching and reader
  response in classrooms.
• Established a common commitment to inquiry

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Professional Development

• Characteristics of high reform schools
• Supportive principal and one strong and respected
  teacher/leader who made sure that the teachers
  looked at the data that linked students reading
  improvement to classroom reading practices. Also
  steered study group topics to those that would
  improve reading. Also received support from a
  group of teachers who served as a leadership team.