Transcript Literacy for the 21st Century

st
21
Century Literacy
Addressing the Big Picture
Challenges
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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)
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.
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
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
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).
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.
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.
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
Professional Development
• Teaching Style
– Coaching as children attempted to respond
– Least accomplished relied on TELLING
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, FlorioRuane, Kehus et al., 2001)
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)
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
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”
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
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.