Secondary Teachers Learn Together, Strengthening Disciplinary Literacy Skills

This fall and winter, all secondary teachers participated in round two of disciplinary literacy, job-embedded labs. The goal of this professional learning was to deepen understanding of how disciplinary literacy practices appear within instruction and to help teachers identify strategies they can commit to in their own practice.

Disciplinary literacy (DL) practices help students learn how to read, write and think in ways that are specific to an academic field or career. For example, students may be challenged to think like mathematicians in math, read sources critically like historians in social studies or write like poets in ELA. While the first round of labs during the 2024-25 school year focused on DL practices broadly, this year teachers were able to choose a specific practice to focus on: student discourse, disciplinary reading, disciplinary writing or building vocabulary and conceptual knowledge.

Members of the Teaching and Learning team, Emilee Moseley, Cait Seguin, Brittney Vaughn, and Jen Wilcox, led small groups of teachers through an anchoring experience. This included reading and discussing scholarly articles, watching a classroom video example, and participating in an activity that highlighted their selected disciplinary literacy practice. Teachers then had the opportunity to observe the practice in action in a colleague’s classroom.

After debriefing the classroom observation, the afternoon shifted to application. Teachers explored a variety of activities, strategies and protocols for incorporating their chosen DL practice into their courses, and then had time to plan for implementation.

Feedback from participants:

• “I loved getting some new strategies for helping students communicate more effectively with one another.”
• “It was valuable to collaborate with teachers from different subject areas and see both their successes and challenges.”
• “The strategies made me excited to start implementing them right away to support student learning.”
• “I began thinking about ‘reading’ in a new way and how to incorporate analytical skills across all types of sources.”
• “I am leaving with tangible tools and resources I am eager to use in my classroom!”

Brittany Vaughn, Secondary Instructional Coach, said, “Thank you to all who participated in the teacher labs and a special thank you to those who hosted us in their classrooms! Learning alongside one another in authentic settings is invaluable professional development.”