Date: November 17, 2012 To: Kansas School of Students From: Amy Campbell, School Accreditation Team Member

Subject: Proposal to Integrate Content Area Literacy into All Subjects and Content Classes for Students to Become Self-Teaching. Integrating Content Area Literacy into all subjects and into content classes teaches students to be self-teaching, which moves them toward becoming truly literate. It also advances comprehension and vocabulary, promotes efficient reading and study habits, increases reading and writing to learn and well as preparing student for standardized testing. The field of Content Area Literacy offers research-based insight into learning based processes and practical effective methods for teaching in ways that help our students to see how to learn. We can and should find ways to help students learn how to learn. The best part about integrating Content Area Literacy is that you, as the teacher, must understand that it is not done in addition to you teaching your content; it is best done while teaching your content. Schools are more effective when all teachers accept responsibility for the overall goals of the school. All teachers are expected to contribute to the school-wide literacy program. Effective schools are organized not just to teach students information but to develop their interests and abilities to allow them to continue to be reasonably skilled in future subjects. Integrating Content Area Literacy into all of your subjects and your content classes will make all of the difference.

Definition of Content Area Literacy: Content Area Literacy evolved from Content Area Reading, an idea that began in the 1920s and became a movement that swept the nation in the 1960s. In recent years, the field has continued to evol ve into broader dimensions. Today, most educators and schools understand they are not just responsible for teaching a subject but also responsible for teaching all of their students to be both capable and independent learners. Content Area Literacy is also about teaching students to read to learn. Many believe that learning to read is to learn to decode, or translate, words. Reading actually means constructively comprehending, or making meaning from, print. Reading comprehension generally is defined as understanding the authors message, interpreting the messages meaning and implications and applying the message in meaningful ways. Learning to read is a process that will continue as long as students continue to learn.

Reasons for Content Area Literacy: We believe that Content Area Literacy must be integrated into all content and into all subjects taught. Some content areas, including English, social studies, and science, have apparent connections with reading. Other content areas, including foreign languages, industrial technologies, theatre, vocational and business education, family and consumer science, require a moderate amount of reading. Some other areas including, mathematics, art, music, and physical education, usually feature less reading. Students that do master beginning reading in elementary still need to continue to develop effective strategies for learning from more difficult materials as well as increasing specialized subjects. Even though some students can acquire these strategies without difficulty, others do not. Even in elementary school students begin to fall behind in comprehension. As students expectations increase in middl e and high school, they are more unsuccessful. Content area teachers can expect to have different categories of students in their classroom. Some students will have decoding problems, some will have some serious comprehension issues, and some will need assistance in acquiring comprehension strategies appropriate for their grade level. Students will continue to read and develop needed comprehension strategies on their own, but integrating Content Area Literacy assists all students in the classroom to learn to read and think. Content Area Literacy is based on the premise that all students can be taught to read, learn, and think better, and that you, as the educator, can share the challenges and rewards of assisting them to do so. Content Area Literacy even has a basic approach for students with varying reading achievement levels. These are based on interactive methods for teaching reading which involves thinking concurrently with the subject area knowledge and its applications. With regular use of these methods from grade to

grade and through the subject areas, it supports students development of the independent reading to learn strategies while enabling poorer students to read and learn from material that they would usually find difficult.

Possible School-wide Reading Strategies Considered: There are many different reading strategies that can be used for Content Area Literacy. We want to give you three examples to show you how easy it is to implement the strategies into your teaching. We have decided to give you one strategy for prereading, one strategy for during reading, or through reading, and one for postreading. One strategy for prereading is called the ReQuest Procedure. This strategy is a well-proven method that produces the idea of mental modeling to teachers in learning and literacy. This allows the students to have control and makes a learner of the teacher as well as they grown in understanding the students different constituents of what theyve read. This strategy can be used to present an in-class reading activity or at the end of the class period or even for a homework assignment. This procedure has been used from the primary grades all the way up to the graduate school levels. The strategy we have chosen for during reading, or through reading, is the Paired Reading strategy. This frequent use of Cooperative Structures is an important element in the Framework for Reading-Based Instruction. Teachers cannot physically follow their students during their silent entrance into print. They can provide support in the form of various types of reminders to read purposefully and actively. Thus, the Paired Reading strategy can be used in a Cooperative Structure that allows teams of students to easily use comprehension-prompting techniques with any type of Reading Guide. We have chosen to share the Paired Recitation strategy for the Postreading strategy. Teachers can assist students to develop active Postreading habits in various ways. Traditional class discussions are usually the most familiar way, but creating a good discussion-one that contains advanced participation and rises above existent recitation-is an acquired skill. Paired Recitation involves having students to work in pairs. This has students using three verbal reprocessing activities for fiction which are reworded to extend their usefulness to nonfiction material. Recommended Strategy: The strategy we recommend is the Paired Reading strategy. This is an important strategy since creating any type of Reading Guide can be an insightful experience for educators. The idea of reading guides is to simplify difficult material. It pulls educators into a deeper analysis of test material and a better understanding of the processes that their students have to draw upon to read in a given condition. It can get their creativity flowing and it surprises the educators at just how much insight into the students learning and reading needs that they gain. This strategy can work in all content areas as well. Reasons for Recommended Strategy: Any type of Reading Guide can be tuned to work well with Paired Reading. Reading guides are designed to teach reading processes and to improve information acquisition. The students are expected to refer to the guide while reading, then back to the text, then back again to the guide. It can contain vocabulary and concept preparation as well as guiding purpose questions. The most fundamental advantages of guides are that they permit the teacher to focus student attention on key information and concepts in a passage and that they require each student to attempt some type of reflective and active response to at least the points referenced. The Paired Reading Instruction is a Cooperative Structure that teams easily with any of the comprehension-prompting techniques and with any type of Reading Guide.

Implementation Considerations of Recommended Strategy:

You may have some questions and concerns about using the Paired Reading Instruction. The Paired Reading Instruction to implement this Guided Silent Reading approach greatly increases the number of times students see and hear strategies used by peers, as well as the amount of opportunities to try them out and become more comfortable with using them. The Paired Reading Instruction can be used in all Content Area classes. Students are put into pairs and take turns reading aloud softly while the other follows along. The student that followed along then asks the student that read at least two questions, then vice versa. Knowing this, this strategy can be used in elementary, primary, and higher education. This can be used in any Content Area classes, such as English, science, social studies, mathematics, foreign languages or support subject areas, including theatre, art, physical education, health, and vocational classes. This is even useful for ELL students. The students are working together, and if the one student gets stumped, the other student can help the student to decode the word or make sense of it. Summary: Content Area Literacy is desperately needed in all schools and needs to be implemented in all subjects. Content Area Literacy teaches students to be self-teaching and it teaches them to read to learn. Substantial research supports the propositions that you, the teachers, can teach reading-thinking strategies, just like the ones we have provided for you that can meet the needs of a wide range of student reading levels in a single classroom. All subjects being taught require reading. The common assumption is that if students can decode, they should be able to understand. Content Area Literacys response to this is that intelligence is a function of the sa me learning strategies that produce reading comprehension, and that although these can be acquired through trial and error, they also can and should be taught. Using Content Area Literacy strategies and methods in your classroom awakens both you and your students to the possibilities that you are more capable than you had previously believed about reading and learning from text. We hope that the strategies and examples we have provided for you shows you how easy it is to implement into your daily teachings. Content Area Literacy is necessary for creative and critical literacy for your students futures!