21 st Century Literacy

1. 21st Century Literacy Addressing the Big Picture Challenges

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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 • Society’s problems are complex and cut across disciplinary lines

5. 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 reader’s culture (Patterson et al., 1994; O’Neill, 1994) • Culture is a major source of meaning. Our resistance to this idea is shaped by our own culture.

6. 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 world’s greatest minds and teachers

7. 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

8. 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.

9. 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

10. 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.

11. 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.

12. 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

13. 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

14. 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

15. 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

16. 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

17. 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.

18. 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

19. 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

20. 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.

21. 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.

22. 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)

23. 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.

24. 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

25. 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

26. Professional Development • Need to look inside what researchers have called the “black box.” (Black & William, 1998) • Superintendent’s 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).

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

28. 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 1&2 used coaching to teach word recognition – least accomplished spent none. No differences in frequency of teaching phonics.

29. 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

30. Professional Development • Teaching Style • Coaching as children attempted to respond • Least accomplished relied on TELLING

31. 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)

32. 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)

33. 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

34. 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”

35. 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

36. 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.