Literacy Teaching Responsibility

For each of the tasks below, select the teacher you believe to be responsible. (They will display one at a time.) When you select an answer, you will see whether your answer is correct and have an opportunity to read Dr. Shanahan's comments. Click continue to go on to the next scenario.

Who is responsible to...
  1. Design/select social studies text sets for a unit?

    Historians agree that to teach history it is essential to have students reading multiple primary and secondary documents. Social studies teachers are the most obvious individuals to take on this responsibility. However, it is important that the texts used have a sufficient range of difficulties or readability levels and the reading teacher might be helpful by participating in this process.

  2. Teach decoding skills to struggling readers?

    Basic reading skills should not be the focus of disciplinary teachers. If a student is struggling just to read the words, explicit general reading instruction would be appropriate and this would best be delivered by a reading teacher.

  3. Teach students how to organize information in writing up a science experiment?

    Teaching how information is organized in various disciplinary texts can have valuable impacts on students’ reading comprehension and writing quality. But text structure is specialized by discipline; a science teacher is the person most likely to have a strong understanding of how experiments are reported and so this should be the responsibility of the science teacher. (Reading teachers usually have knowledge about how to teach text structure, though the often don’t have a very deep understanding of the range of texts that represent each of the disciplines. Thus, the reading coach might be able to help the science teacher to design this lesson.)

  4. Select a science textbook?

    Textbooks play an important role in science education as they provide students with an authoritative account of current knowledge on important scientific topics. Such materials should be selected by teachers with a strong understanding of science. (Reading teachers may help in this with knowledge about text difficulty or readability).

  5. Teach students how to determine the theme of a short story or play?

    Interpreting themes in literary texts is essential to comprehension and yet this skill is pretty specialized (one does not interpret “themes” in histories or science writing). The English teacher needs to teach students how to do this.

  6. Test students to determine their reading levels?

    It can be helpful to know how well a student can read, and what kinds of skills students may or may not have accomplished. However, disciplinary teachers should not be spending their time administering tests or trying to figure out reading levels. This can be relegated to reading teachers (or counselors or special education teachers).

  7. Teach English grammar?

    Often students’ disciplinary writing efforts are undermined by weaknesses in mechanics, usage, grammar, and/or spelling. Explicit instruction in these skills can pay dividends across the curriculum. The generalizability of these skills is the give away here; this one should be taught by the English teachers. (That does not mean that science, math, or history teachers get a total pass on this; if student writing is not grammatical, etc. in your class, you do need to give some feedback on that if it is interfering with the student’s ability to communicate effectively in your discipline).

  8. Teach students to analyze sentence contstruction to interpret text meaning?

    This sounds repetitive of the previous items (on grammar instruction). It is not. While the explicit teaching of grammar belongs to the English teacher, each discipline has particular grammatical tendencies that should be the realm of the disciplinary teachers. For example, science text is carefully written to describe causation without attributing intention or agency (very different from history text); examining how science sentences are written to accomplish this is the responsibility of the science teacher.

  9. Guide students to compare the information in a table or chart with the information in prose?

    The way graphic information is used (and the relationship of such information to the prose) varies by discipline. This really needs to be taught by disciplinary teachers.

  10. Teach students to analyze the author’s language to determine bias in historical accounts?

    A very important critical reading skill, and it is specific to history. This one belongs to the social studies teacher. There are different critical reading issues in the other disciplines and those should be taught in those disciplines with discipline specific text.

  11. Teach students to recognize and interpret common literary devices (e.g. sarcasm, hyperbole, allusion, metaphor)?

    Again, a really important set of skills. These devices are used most often in literary texts, but they also appear in a wider range of texts. That means every teacher might need to provide guidance on this, but the responsibility mainly belongs to the English teacher.

  12. Teach students how to analyze a proof?

    Reading and writing math proofs is highly specialized... clearly should be the realm of the math teacher.

  13. Teach how to interpret “causation” in historical accounts?

    It was noted earlier that human agency (people’s goals and efforts towards their goals) is an important factor in historical causation. Teaching students how to think about this kind of causation and how it is conveyed in history text should be an emphasis of social studies teachers.

  14. Teach general academic language?

    Academic language refers to non-technical vocabulary (words like concept, evaluation, theory, assumption, validate, consistency, abstract, etc.). This language is not specialized to any discipline, but is used both for the learning and communication in all the disciplines. In this case, all teachers need to take responsibility for this as it comes up in their classes.

  15. Teach general reading strategies (e.g. SQ3R, KWL)?

    General reading comprehension strategies and study routines can be very useful, and under some circumstances they might make sense to teach in a disciplinary class. Nevertheless, such strategies tend to be mainly useful to poorer readers and as such are remedial in nature at the high school level. These would make the greatest sense as the domain of the reading teacher who is working with below grade level students.

    General criteria:
    1. Only skills, strategies, knowledge, and insights that have clear value for improving the reading and writing performance should be the focus of literacy instruction (if the value isn’t clear, it shouldn’t be taught)
    2. If the work is largely remedial in nature (teaching elementary skills that have not yet been developed), these should not be the focus of science, math, history, or English teachers. Basic skills of those types are the realm of special reading programs, remedial programs, or special education.
    3. If the benefit of these skills is largely for one discipline or one kind of text, then the teaching of these skills should mainly be the responsibility of the disciplinary teacher.
    4. If the value of these skills are not remedial, but are of importance in multiple disciplines, then all teachers should participate in their teaching.