Voice, Choice & Explicit Literacy Instruction in the Secondary English Classroom
Chart paper is tacked onto the walls with words dissected into parts; books are everywhere: in shelves (some labelled by category — books for video-game lovers, BIPOC & LatinX authors, LGBTQ+, horror — others not, “I haven’t figured out where this one belongs yet.”) Some are scattered on tables & chairs, freshly plucked for a tasting. The desks have been rearranged since my last visit. “A student was struggling with the previous set up. This seems to be working better.”
I sit down at a desk, pen in hand, and watch with admiration at the responsiveness and intentionality of this teacher. Amanda Potts projects a timeline of Black athletes in Canada and reads aloud the accompanying text while students follow along.
“Are there any words you don’t recognize — Yes. what does this word mean?”
Amanda circles the /ad/ in “adversity” then moves on to /vers/ then /ity/, breaking down the word into its morphemes, explaining the meaning of each part as she goes.
“Any other words?” The class unpacks all unknown words before reflecting on what they notice and wonder via a turn-and-talk.
I look up the etymology of adversity using etymonline:
“Do you think students might want to chase down a word family?”
“Oh! Let’s do it!”
We engage students in a brainstorm to find related words. We pause at “vertex” and think about the similarities and differences of adversity and vertex, a word they see in math class (from latin vertere = highest point; literally the turning point).
The first ten minutes of class goes by quickly, and I pause to jot down all of the learning so far:
Guided critical reading of Black Canadian history (let’s read this together…), inferencing (what do you notice? what do you wonder?), building of world and word knowledge through conversation (turn and talk about what you notice and wonder), orthographically mapping a word’s meaning by exploring a word family (Let’s look at this word adversity. What other words do you know that are related to this word?).
I reflect on many conversations with English teachers this year who have openly shared that they don’t know how to teach students to read and write — how it was not part of their training and how they are seeing more and more students struggling but don’t know how to help them.
I ask Amanda if I can share a video of her teaching on Twitter, and within the hour, there are hundreds of views. Within days, thousands.
Teachers want to support students with reading, but many are struggling with the ‘how.’
One prickly question that is surfacing (and poking educators right in that tender place of core teaching beliefs) is whether it is possible to merge voice & choice with explicit literacy in the destreamed English classroom. Can they co-exist? Will one cancel out the other?
These are murky waters. And we tend to hold strong to about our core beliefs when we are in swimming in the great unknown. But I would argue, yes, yes we can, as evidenced by Amanda in the example above, and it is incumbent upon us to do so.
Here’s why:
- Voice and choice are only empowering if students can read the texts they choose, and if they are able to voice their identity through their writing.
- The Ontario Human Rights’ Commission on the Right To Read declared reading a basic and essential human right (Right to Read, 2022) and that explicit literacy instruction is the most effective way to teach students how to read. We have a responsibility to follow its recommendations as educators in Ontario.
- Students are often exposed to small t trauma daily when asked to read independently when they cannot access the text (even texts they have chosen) without explicit reading instruction.
I’ve seen this many times. They hide at the back of the classroom, book open to a page, eyes staring blankly, wishing the 10 minutes of independent reading over, or they don’t open the book and instead scroll Instagram, or display “disruptive” behaviours, or leave the classroom, and often stop coming to class.
Don’t get me wrong — I don’t think we should do away with time for reading in classrooms (students need time to read!), but we can not altogether replace explicit reading instruction with inquiry-based reading.
This instructional decision has deeply negative impacts for students who have not received adequate literacy instruction prior to entering the grade 9 classroom.
Learning how to incorporate explicit literacy instruction into the secondary classroom is our responsibility, even if we feel apprehensive to do so.
Merging Kittle & Gallagher w/ Explicit Reading Instruction
In 180 Days of Teaching, Kittle and Gallagher suggest that the best approach to teaching reading and writing is to set an expectation that students “read like vampires” (as much as possible including diverse genres and texts that support reading identity) and “write like Frankenstein” (daily using mentor texts as models to stitch together a unique creation).
Kittle and Gallagher promote voice, choice, time for reading, the importance of spiralling or lapping skills to master them, modelling and annotation, and daily routines to support student success.
While this model is highly effective and empowering for students who have mastered basic reading and writing skills, it requires supplementation of direct, explicit instruction to support all students with literacy.
It is critical that we embed explicit literacy instruction into the secondary classroom for voice and choice.
Start with Assessments
Assessing students is the first step to empowering students as readers and writers because it informs teachers about student needs and provides opportunities for responsive instructional practice (and referrals to additional tiered support if needed).
Start with low-stakes assessment to build connection and provide a quick overview of students’ writing (see Amanda’s Letter of Introduction). Based on this, use screening tools that can be administered with the whole class at once, such as CORE Assessing Reading: Multiple Measure’s cloze MAZE Comprehension Assessment and Vocabulary Assessment. The vocabulary assessment provides quick overview of student vocabulary knowledge & how much whole-group instruction is needed.
The data from these assessments will inform whether additional assessments should be conducted. Additional assessments include assessing fluency (rate, prosody, accuracy), which can impact comprehension, and phonics (sound-to-letter correspondence & decoding text on the page).
Assessments should be responsive and empowering:
Responsive Teaching
Assessments should also guide responsive whole-class tier 1 literacy instruction. Once you have completed assessments, think about how you might incorporate responsive explicit literacy instruction into your daily routine.
Here is an example of how you might incorporate some explicit literacy instruction into your Kittle & Gallagher routine:
- Read (build reading knowledge and stamina by using guided reading and fluency practice (echo & choral reading) in addition to independent reading. OR, begin your semester with guided reading and move towards independent reading. Pull out words from the guided reading text to explore as a class — discuss morphology. Model the exploration of a word’s morphology, etymology, and word family after a guided reading.
- Write (scaffold this process and hone in on vocabulary and syntactic patterns you have been incorporating/observing in the reading time. Provide students with sentence stems — it can be disempowering to be be asked to write something on a blank piece of paper when you struggle to write. Gradually increase the complexity of the sentence stems or frames you provide (see The Writing Revolution’s sentence frames to scaffold writing and to prompt critical thinking i.e. because, but, so). Write alongside students! And make mistakes! And scratch them out! Model mistakes & be vulnerable to support students to do the same. Oh, and make sure students do their writing in a notebook by hand. Studies show that writing by hand supports conceptual understanding and orthographic mapping!)
- Study (always read the text aloud before asking students to study it independently & pull out any vocab students do not know. Consider engaging students in choral or echo reading before asking them to annotate the text to support fluency and automaticity of new words. Consider asking students to study same text multiple times but with a different purpose each time (look at structure, notice tone, look at syntax). Repeated reading deepens comprehension, vocabulary knowledge and knowledge of syntactic patterns. Consider asking students to use one of the syntactic patterns, words, ideas in conversation with their partners (turn-and-talk) to support collaborative meaning-making and knowledge building.
- Create (provide students with an opportunity to go back to what they wrote during their writing time— what can they add/use from what they studied? — model this process first & make sure they document the changes they make and reflect on those changes.
- Share — begin asking students to submit one sentence or more by hand a day to share what they learned.
The above is just a first attempt at merging some research-based tier 1 literacy instruction with Kittle & Gallagher.
Have you been exploring how to merge the two?
What is your YES/AND?
