The document describes three initiatives that used content area literacy methods to improve failing schools: (1) Herbert Hoover High School implemented the Seven Defensible Strategies for reading and writing across subjects, (2) New Dorp High School focused on explicit instruction in analytical writing, (3) Thurgood Marshall Academic High School required all ninth graders to take an Academic Literacy course. The Academic Literacy course aimed to prepare students for reading complex texts in different disciplines by teaching cognitive and comprehension strategies. It addressed dimensions of classroom life like the social environment and students' reading identities.

1. Literacy as a
Vehicle for
School
Reform

2. Literacy as Educational Reform in
Secondary Settings
Consider three initiatives that used content area literacy
methods to “turn around” failing schools in dire need of
reform:
(1) Herbert Hoover High School which enacted the Seven
Defensible Strategies
(2) New Dorp High School which enacted explicit instruction
in analytical writing
(3) Thurgood Marshall Academic High School which
enacted the Academic Literacy required elective course for
all ninth grade students

3. Herbert Hoover High School and San Diego State
University Participatory Action Research Project
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“Content area classrooms should be organized around themes, big
ideas, or essential questions” (p. 24).
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“Students are expected to read and write in every class”
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The general focus was on strategies for helping students read and
write increasingly complex text.
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Use better, readable texts to motivate students to read
–
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“Using one grade-level textbook often ensures that students who struggle will
have to rely on just listening to learn the required information” (p. 52).
Seven Defensible Strategies for Reading and Writing in All Content
Areas
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Transportable Literacy Strategies:
•
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“Students use the strategies they learn in one class to comprehend in another” (p.
22).
Transparent Literacy Strategies:
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“Strategies become part of the students’ thinking and students automatically apply
the strategies ‘on the run’” (p. 22).

4. New Dorp’s Writing Intervention
1.
This school placed an intense focus, across nearly
every academic subject, on teaching the skills that
underlie good analytical writing.
2. Students were taught explicitly how to turn ideas into
simple sentences and how to construct complex
sentences from simple ones by supplying the answer to
three prompts—but, because, and so (a complex
sentence has an independent clause joined by one or
more dependent clauses).

5. continued
3. Students were taught to use appositive clauses to vary the way
their sentences began (an appositive is a word or group of words
that identifies or renames another word in a sentence).
4. Students were taught how to recognize sentence fragments
5. Students were taught how to pull the main idea from a
paragraph.
6. Students were taught how to form a main idea on their own.

6. continued
7. Students were taught to use specific phrases to add detail to a
paragraph (e.g., specifically, for instance, for example)
8. Teachers stopped giving “fluffy” assignments such as “write a
postcard to a friend describing life in the trenches of World War I
and instead demanded that students fashion an expository essay
describing three major causes of the conflict.”

7. Academic Literacy
At Thurgood Marshall High School, all students took a class in
ninth grade called “academic literacy.”
“The goal of academic literacy was to prepare our
students to become more confident and competent in
reading the kinds of texts they would be assigned in
different disciplines throughout the rest of their high school
classes and beyond” (Schoenbach, Greenleaf, Cziko &
Hurwitz, 1999, p. 47).

8. Academic Literacy was Predicated on a Goal of Reading for
Understanding
Academic Literacy Addressed The “Quiet Crisis”
“Students’ limited reading proficiency keeps them from accomplishing
the challenging work necessary to meet high academic standards” (p.
4).
And, entailed the following perspectives/methods:
•Teaching
•
•
with Multiple Texts
Offers many points of entry into learning (please remember the multiple
texts power point from the previous learning module)
Protects students from boredom
•Reading
•Fluent
is Problem Solving
Reading
Prosody
• Automaticity
“Fluency grows as [students] have opportunities, support, and
encouragement to read a wide range of text types about a wide
range of topics” (p. 19).
•

9. Theories of Reading for Understanding
present in the Academic Literacies course
continued
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Proficient Readers Share some Key Characteristics
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Mentally engaged
Motivated to read and to learn
Socially active around reading tasks
Strategic in Monitoring the interactive processes that assist comprehension
Setting goals
• Monitoring their emerging understanding of a text
• Coordinating a variety of comprehension strategies to control the reading
process
•
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Dimensions of Classroom Life
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•
•
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Social Dimension (classroom environment)
Personal Dimension (developing students’ identities and goals for reading)
Cognitive Dimension (developing students’ mental processes)
Knowledge Dimension (developing the kind of knowledge readers bring to a
text)

10. The Cognitive Dimension of Reading
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Getting the Big Picture
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Breaking text down
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Close reading (linking interpretations to specific textual evidence)
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Monitoring comprehension
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Using problem solving strategies to assist and restore
comprehension (summarize, retell, visualize, intertextual
connections, create graphic representations, create
metaphors, reread confusing sections)
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Setting reading purposes and adjusting reading processes

11. The Knowledge Building Dimension
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Activate and building prior topical knowledge
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Develop knowledge of text structures
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Identify ways texts are structured
Notice patterns in structure across texts of similar kinds
Identify the particular kinds of language used in particular kinds of
texts
Identify roots, prefixes, and suffixes of Latin and Greek derived words
Create word families associated with particular ideas or subject areas
Use text organization and structure to assist in comprehension
Preview text and notice structural markers such as headings,
illustrations etc.
Notice particular words or phrases that indicate a shift in meaning
(e.g., however, in spite of, yet, in contrast to)

12. Academic Literacy
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Academic language
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Disciplinary and discourse-specific knowledge (communicative
competence)
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Portray of different views of the role of reading in people’s lives
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Give students practice with a variety of disciplinary readings in all content
areas
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Select appropriately challenging texts such that students have to use
strategies to comprehend
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Teach students reading pedagogy terminology (e.g., metacognition,
schema, engagement, fluency, strategy etc.)
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Confusion is ok
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Build concentration, stamina, and fluency (even if the book is boring and
even if you don’t want to read, you can)
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Critical literacy (reading as power and fuel for life goals)