I’m often asked to present on instructional strategies that support literacy in the content areas, and as you might imagine, I find this somewhat perplexing. Literacy is such a massive domain that it quickly overwhelms the boundaries provided by tidy definitions and concrete strategies. Yet, if we’re to help students become increasingly literate, we need to begin wrapping our minds around what that might really mean.
Recently, I was working with a small group of teachers who were eager to know where they might begin the process of supporting literacy in content area courses such as Social Studies, Math, or Science. Such planning begs the question:
What is literacy, really?
What does that mean, after all? Is it simply about reading? Writing? Listening? Speaking? Can one be athletically literate? Does parenting require a unique brand of literacy? What about gaming? How do we define cultural literacy? Consider this: can one be literate if they do NOT know how to read? Is it possible to have strengths in certain literacies and weaknesses in others?
How do we measure literacy?
I think that as educators, this is where we may need to begin. If our task is to support literacy and to help students grow as learners, I think it makes sense to define what this might mean first. Determining exactly where our students struggle in their journey toward different literacies is an essential part of becoming ready to help them. Again, literacy is a massive concept. If we’re to do good work, prioritizing what our students’ greatest needs are may be step one. Without this foundational evidence, how will we ever measure the effect of our efforts?
When teachers ask me where to begin, I take them back to various sources of evidence that might help them to define exactly which elements of literacy they would like to improve upon first. From there, we work together to create instructional targets that will be assessed formatively, over time. If we discover that our students are struggling to make meaning from informational text, for example, it might make sense to train students about text structures and to provide them, through think-aloud and other instructional strategies, solid models for how to make meaning. Jeff Wilhelm’s practice of slowly releasing responsibility to students allows teachers to instruct formatively as well, determining with better precision when students are really able to own the strategies that allow them to make meaning.
Using numerous, varied measures of formative assessment provides us with better information about where meaning is being made and where it might be escaping our students. When we identify skills that we would like to study formatively, teachers begin selecting or constructing assessments that measure these skills and provide evidence for decision-making. Sometimes, this is where we begin to struggle as a group. The fact is, certain assessment types provide solid information about certain types of skills at certain levels of thinking. Would we use a selected response item to measure whether or not a student can write a fluent paragraph? Obviously, we wouldn’t. But sometimes, the inconsistencies between the targets we are assessing and the types of assessments we are giving are less blatant. Aligning the type of assessment we are using with the targets that we are measuring is an important part of creating a formative assessment process that will work.
The work of Rick Stiggins has been an invaluable part of my growing understandings concerning the construction and use of formative assessment, particularly when the whole issue of alignment comes up. As we move forward with the Deep Curriculum Alignment project in Erie County, I’m predicting that teachers will need solid information and processes for selecting valid instructional targets and building assessments that will provide them with accurate information regarding student performance.
As the project moves forward, we will be considering the role that digital literacy might assume in our evolving definitions of what literacy is. I’m interested to see how teachers might begin aligning assessments that are technology-infused. How do we use tech tools to support literacy in our classrooms? Which tools might be used best as formative assessments? How do we begin aligning the tools to the skills that we’ve identified as areas of need through our regional work? I’m thinking that a blog can be used as a formative assessment that might provide data to guide our instruction. I’m excited to see how the educators in our region might make that happen.
This post is the third in a series relevant to formative assessment. The first post can be found here. The second post is right here.