Featured Speakers:
- Alicia Ross, Program Associate, Reading Apprenticeship at WestEd
- Jenell Krishnan, Senior Program Associate, Writing Apprenticeship at WestED
- Karen Lionberger, Associate Director, Making Sense of SCIENCE at WestEd
Host:
- Danny Torres, Associate Director, Events and Digital Media at WestEd
Danny Torres:
Hello everyone and welcome to the fifth session of our Leading Together series. In these 30-minute learning webinars, WestEd experts are sharing research and evidence-based practices that help bridge opportunity gaps, support positive outcomes for children and adults, and help build thriving communities. Today’s topic, Strengthening Literacy Routines in Science, Social Studies, and Language Arts. Our featured speakers today are Alicia Ross, Program Associate with our Reading Apprenticeship Team, Jenell Krishnan, Senior Program Associate with our Writing Apprenticeship Team, and Karen Lionberger, Associate Director of our Making Sense of SCIENCE Team. Thank you all very much for joining us. My name is Danny Torres. I’m Associate Director of Events and Digital Media for WestEd. I’ll be your host.
Now, before we move into the contents of today’s webinar, I’d like to take a brief moment to introduce WestEd. As a nonpartisan research, development, and service agency, WestEd works to promote excellence, improve learning, and increase opportunity for children, youth, and adults. Our staff partner with policymakers, district leaders, school leaders, communities, and others, providing a broad range of tailored services, including research and evaluation, professional learning, technical assistance, and policy guidance. We work to generate knowledge and apply evidence and expertise to improve policies, systems, and practices. And now, I’d like to pass the mic over to Jenell. Jenell, take it away.
Janell Krishnan:
Fantastic. Alright, let me go ahead and do some extended introductions. I am here with my colleagues Alicia Ross and Karen Lionberger. Alicia Ross is a Senior Program Associate in Literacy at WestEd, where she collaborates with school districts to lead Reading Apprenticeship Essentials I and II courses and provides sustained coaching and disciplinary literacy for grades 4-12 teachers across ELA, Social Studies, Science, and Math. Now, Karen Lionberger is the Associate Director of Making Sense of SCIENCE at WestEd. She brings with her a deep passion and wealth of experience for developing equity-driven curriculum, assessments, and professional learning that promote deeper teacher and student engagement and self-confidence in STEM. And I’m Jenell Krishnan. I’m a Senior Program Associate in Literacy at WestEd.
I’m also one of the developers of Writing Apprenticeship, and I get to collaborate with school districts to lead Writing Apprenticeship teacher professional learning and promote coaching to deepen educators’ writing instructional practice. So, we will begin first by defining disciplinary literacy and metacognitive routines. And next, Alicia, Karen, and I will take you through some routines that can be used right in the classroom. And we’ll conclude with a summary of those routines, as well as a description of Reading Apprenticeship, Writing Apprenticeship, and Making Sense of SCIENCE, which are three WestEd literacy programs. Alright, Alicia is going to ground us in the concept of disciplinary literacy now.
Alicia Ross:
Okay, great. So, welcome, everybody. I’m coming to you from rainy Scranton, Pennsylvania, where it’s been raining, I believe, for months now, but maybe just feels that way. So, yeah, let’s get into it. What is disciplinary literacy? So, for our purposes, we’re really focusing on how disciplinary literacy, how we define it, is how we can support our students to read, write, think, and communicate engage in discourse practices that are valued by our communities, our professions or those content areas. You’ll notice that in each of the bubbles on your screen, there are examples from science, social studies, and language arts. So, different kinds of texts we can encounter, different ways of reasoning and making sense of text, and the different kinds of products that we use to communicate knowledge. Okay. And now, let’s talk about metacognition’s role in advancing disciplinary literacy.
So, I just want you to take a moment to think about the following. In what ways do you leverage metacognition for your students or for yourself? Or if you’re here in a leadership role or a support role for teachers, how do you leverage metacognition in your work with teachers? So, I want you to kind of think about that. If you wanna make that public in chat, please feel free to share your thinking about our prompt. What we want you to do so important to surface your prior knowledge, your schema about metacognition, because as we move through today’s really brisk webinar, we want you to think about what you’re hearing and seeing that is affirming to what you already do, and what is new, right? What are you going to take away? We know, and you can see on the screen, the ways that metacognition is really powerful for students, right?
Their ability to monitor their comprehension and regulate their own thinking, to be able to plan and to sort of problem solve is enhanced when we center that metacognitive conversation. So, again, feel free to share your prior knowledge, how you’re using metacognition, but I’m gonna roll right into, my role here is to share an example or some ideas about metacognitive routines in social studies. Before I do that, and I’ve noticed I’ve got some friends in attendance who have experienced the Reading Apprenticeship learning, so this may be a familiar framework for you, just want you to notice quickly, the four dimensions of a Reading Apprenticeship classroom that have the metacognitive conversation at the center.
So, they both serve the metacognitive conversation and are served by our support of the metacognitive conversation, and in our learning, and our professional learning and in our classrooms, we provide opportunities for extensive academic reading, and that is not just extending reading in terms of time, but across the different kinds of texts in our different disciplines. I’m here to talk about social studies, but we certainly do work across the disciplines. So, I just wanted you to notice that metacognitive conversation is at the center of our work. So, here are some core routines. So, how do we support the metacognitive conversation in a Reading Apprenticeship classroom? Some of these core routines you may be familiar with, either because you’ve engaged in a reading apprenticeship before, but, or from other sources, right?
Think aloud, talking to the text, which is just kind of thinking aloud on paper, and reading strategies list. These are some of the core routines, and ways that we can scaffold kids making their thinking visible to themselves and others is also through the use of metacognitive bookmarks, sentence frames, and talk stems. In chat, I think Danny is providing some slides I created to flesh out these routines, so if you’re not terribly familiar with them, there’s some support there. So, I wanna give an example from social studies, and actually there’s another link that’s coming your way. If you’re interested, if you’re a social studies person, or history enthusiast, this is a text set, part of a text set about the Boston Massacre. In the folder that I’ve shared, you’ll see that there are some other texts that would build student schema before they get to these complex texts, right?
So, here there’s John Adams’ excerpts of his arguments for the defense. So, this text is a trial transcript, really complex primary source text, and then here we’ve got on the right-hand side of your screen, you’ll see Paul Revere’s engraving depicting the events. So, how would I support my students in making sense of this? I would say I might first start with the engraving if I’m, because that would be a more accessible piece, but I certainly would first start in modeling my own thinking. How do I, as a disciplinary expert, make sense of this? So, I need to unpack what I do, and sort of kick things off with a teacher model, centering maybe a strategy that I think my students might need to see and hear. Then I might then invite students in after a minute or two into a reciprocal think-aloud. I’m guiding that. I’m soliciting their contributions, asking them what they’re thinking, then release that support and sort of have us go into maybe paired and small group think-alouds.
Students would be then supported here with perhaps metacognitive bookmarks. They could be supported with talk stems so that they can articulate what it is that’s going on in their minds as they’re trying to make sense of this text. Those metacognitive prompts are always displayed in my room to support kids to be sure to probe each other’s thinking. Then what we would do is in our debriefing, our debriefing of what we’ve done to make sense of text, I’d have students maybe either debrief in their groups and then share whole group or go to whole group and share either what they did or they heard their partner do to make sense of these texts. What I’ve done here is just kind of mocked up some reading strategies list. I’ve done this text set when I had the honor of teaching ninth grade social studies, and these are some of the things that were elicited.
These are living documents so that the next time we encounter a text that is from the same sort of genre, or similar to, this list can support kids. If I get stuck, let me take a peek. Is there something I can use to help make sense? You’ll notice in both lists, there are both sort of those general reading strategies, but also disciplinary specific. Don’t have time to go through the list, but just wanted to give you that kind of example. I just sort of want to put a bow on all of this by just saying, listen, metacognition, it’s not extra. It is essential. If I want students to do the work of historians, and you can see that to be able to source, contextualize, read critically, consider multiple perspectives, consider whether or not they should corroborate a source, having questions, then metacognition is the key to all of that.
Unpacking what I do and then supporting them in sharing their own thinking, making their thinking visible to themselves and others. And I think one of my favorite words is demystifies, right? Or demystify. By naming strategies, by making our thinking visible to ourselves and others, students can transfer those strategies across text and perhaps across the disciplines. So I’m gonna turn it over now. So thanks for your attention. And I’m gonna turn it over now to Jenell, who’s going to share her piece on language arts.
Janell Krishnan:
Thanks, Alicia, so much for kicking us off with an explanation of disciplinary literacy and such a strong description of the supports for metacognition and social studies. I’ll be building off what Alicia offered to us today by explaining how educators can strengthen their literacy routines and language arts, specifically around the metacognitive conversation in both reading and writing. So here what we have on the screen is the writing apprenticeship instructional framework. And you might see some similarities between that and the Reading Apprenticeship Framework. So Writing Apprenticeship is a new professional learning that supports humanities educators in deepening their writing instructional practice for discipline-specific writing for authentic audiences. And here you see those four dimensions of classroom life, building a collaborative environment, building on learner strengths, building writing knowledge, and building writing skills.
And just like the Reading Apprenticeship, at the center of this framework is the metacognitive conversation, those internal and external conversations that teachers and students have about their writing processes and motivations and interests related to writing. So one way we can help students become more confident and skilled readers, writers, and speakers of the discipline is to promote metacognitive conversations based on common features of discipline-specific texts. So how do literary critics communicate? Well, often they use long argumentative or interpretive texts like this book review we have on the right. They use complex discipline-specific vocabulary, and they analyze language and the text structures, the symbolism in text, and they often do so using a theoretical framework to do all of this work.
And in the chat pretty soon, you’ll have access to this triple entry journal, which is a metacognitive routine to unpack a literally text with students. So this can support students to read like writers in the discipline. This can help students to build their reading, excuse me, their writing repertoire over time. And in this routine, students can record lines or passages from a text that really stand out to them based on a specific purpose for their reading. And in the middle column, students reflect on the author’s choices and the impact those choices had on the reader or audience. And now on the right-hand column, this is where the student is starting to think about their own thinking and whether or not those specific craft moves, that vocabulary, those language structures might be something that they want to adopt into their own toolbox.
This is how they might want to know whether or not they want to emulate those craft moves in their own writing or not. So they’re thinking about their own developing style and voice in this column. Now in this slide here, we’re seeing a… this is something that educators can do that’s kind of the opposite side of the coin. This is when educators can make their thinking visible to students while they’re drafting a discipline-specific text. So this is called the writing think aloud routine, which is core to Writing Apprenticeship. And this is when educators pause and think aloud along the way as they’re drafting. So they, again, I’ll use that word that Alicia used earlier, they demystify the writing process. They show their struggles. They show the questions that pop up into their mind that they’re asking themselves along the way. They show the strategic moves that they use as writers in their field.
And here we have the beginning of a literary criticism on Amy Tan’s “Fish Cheeks.” And in the left and right green call-out boxes, we have examples of what an educator might be thinking aloud. And this would be shared verbally in the classroom as an educator pauses and considers what they have written, how it might be meeting the needs of the reader or not, and how it might align with their purpose for writing. And also what might they need to write next. Now, this next piece, we have a little bit more of drafting, but we want educators to invite students into this process, right? We want it to be a reciprocal process where both educators and students are making their thinking visible to themselves and others. So this is where the educator invites students into the process and they begin to draft the text together.
And so this is really putting metacognition at the center of the writing experience in the Writing Apprenticeship classroom. So I invite us all to consider the idea of metacognition is not extra, but essential. And we really want students to build their confidence and their skills as powerful discipline-specific writers. And we can do this by helping them notice and name those authors’ craft moves, to read with criticality, and use those discipline-specific craft moves in their own texts. And these practices all depend on metacognition, like when students are monitoring their own understanding of a text, using those fixed-up strategies when they need, and when they’re writing for a real audience and really having to grapple with what are my audiences and readers’ needs, and am I meeting those needs in the text that I’m drafting? Okay, I’m now going to turn it over to Karen. We’ll be discussing metacognition routines in science.
Karen Lionberger:
Thanks, Jenell. So I’m really gonna take the opportunity to build on what Alicia and Jenell have already shared with you. And I think we’re seeing some comments in the chat of, you know, can I use this in math? Can I use this in other disciplines? I hope what you’re gonna see is this theme running through all of our slides that we’re taking these routines and we’re customizing it for our disciplines. Okay, so let’s take a look a little bit first. How do scientists communicate? I think a great way to think about this is exploring a scientific journal article. And one of the very first things that we notice is that scientists communicate through very long informational texts, and these texts just require an understanding of complex scientific words. I’m not sure, but my guess is that ecological tuning of aneurin biofluorescent signals is not necessarily walk-around vocabulary for everyone.
And in reality, what this simply means is how, when, and why do frogs re-emit light, right? So it is possible to unpack this type of complex vocabulary with our students. So let’s take a little bit deeper dig into this article to see what else we can find. So the next thing that we see, and this is probably what we think of when we think of science, right? We see many, many different types of diverse data displays, wonderful data displays of graphs and maps. And one of the reasons why I chose this article in particular is because data is exploding right now. Open data, big data, we’re finding really unique ways to communicate data in new ways. And this is a really wonderful, unique dot plot of the type of light and frequencies that frog families emit. So data is becoming even more complex to read and develop for students.
Okay, so now that we’ve level set just a little bit on what type of reading and writing and discourse students need to have opportunities to explore in science, I wanna upfront something that we’re all trying to communicate, which is that a focus on disciplinary literacy is not in competition with building disciplinary content knowledge. In fact, they’re very synergistic with one another. I know, especially sometimes in our science disciplines, we really want to make sure that students walk away with this deep disciplinary content knowledge. But what I hope that you see today is that these metacognitive routines actually help create accessible entry points for students to be able to do that type of reading and writing and speaking and listening that actually fuels their ability to engage in those science practices.
So in this way, our science practices we know are catalysts for developing that content knowledge. Okay, so let’s take a few examples and looks at what this might look like, similar to what we’ve done with social studies and English language arts. First, one thing that I think is really helpful, especially for some of the science practices that engage students in this longer reading of informational text or having to write informational texts or complex models and especially opportunities for discourse engaging and argumentation, find it really helpful to provide some metacognitive sentence frames. These frames are a great way to encourage students just to pause, reflect as they start engaging in that scientific inquiry process. They help students more effectively engage in text and more effectively unpacked complex vocabulary.
One great thing about this, while I’ve shown two examples around models and argumentation, these can be customized to all the practices, right? So this is really a routine that you could use for any of the eight science practices. But one thing I wanted to call out here with some of the examples that I’ve shared is you still want to be encouraging those reading strategies that Alicia mentioned, right? So this is a great opportunity to customize them to make sure that they identify what questions they have, where do they have some confusion, where can they make predictions? This is a big routine in science for us. Where can they make connections and help call out their thinking about those connections and predictions? Okay, so let’s look at another one. One of the things we just saw in the article that could be extremely challenging is reading data.
And so one of the things that has already been shared with you around think alouds, we wanna think about what this looks like in science. Sometimes we miss that when we’re engaging in data, we are reading data. That is what it is. When we’re sense making with data, we are reading data. And there’s a beautiful opportunity here to use think alouds to help students slow down, engaging with graphs, tables, maps. Sometimes we see students just jump to the end, start trying to draw big inferences and patterns. Instead, what we want them to do is take the time, find the details, and use those details to draw and create those trends and patterns. So we’re gonna look at an example. This is from the Making Sense of SCIENCE Force in Motion professional learning course.
This type of content might be higher than middle school perhaps, but this type you’ll hopefully you’ll notice that using this with any type of data display is accessible really all the way through K-12. So think more about the routine and less about the content. Alright, so what are students asked to do? Well, they are given a data display of the Apollo launch, Apollo 8, 1968. And they’re asked to look at acceleration data. They will be taking turns reading and making sense of the data in their graph. And they are encouraged to not only observe, but also listen carefully and take detailed notes about their partners thinking as they move through and make sense of the data. As mentioned before, they need to be pausing along the way and surface their reading strategy.
So what are these things that might emerge? What does this look like? And again, this can be modeled by the teacher first as well, but these are some examples of the reading strategies that might emerge. You’re gonna see them ask questions. I wonder what’s happening. What does this mean? I’m not sure. There could be some clarifying of some of the points that might still be confusing, but we do want them to be predicting. We should see them starting to push for visualization, those mental models that that data is creating for them, but certainly summarizing the trends, the relationships, and then making connections to those scientific principles. Okay, so let’s take a look at a quick snapshot. So this is what this looks like for us. What we do is we surface student thinking for teachers to examine this think aloud.
This is something that would emerge from a thinking lab. So this is notes that another partner has taken that they’re recording as they hear that partner start to read the graph. I think one of the beautiful things that you see from this student’s work is they actually do chunk this graph into the details, which is wonderful to see. But you can see that they also have questions. What’s happening here? What’s happening in this third chunk? Are they like separating payloads? We don’t know, right? So those questions are equally important. One thing that should be popping out is making students thinking visible to themselves is critical, but it also offers this wonderful opportunity to make student thinking visible to educators so that educators can more importantly provide those just-in-time supports.
Sometimes we front load supports, and I call those just-in-case, but they’re most powerful when they’re just-in-time, and these think aloud protocols allow that. Okay, so I’m gonna turn it back over to Jenell, and she’s gonna start closing us out with some summary thoughts.
Janell Krishnan:
Fantastic. Thank you so much. As I was listening to both Alicia and Karen talk, one thing that really stuck out to me is the absolute possibility for educators across the departments, across the hall to be able to come together and collaborate around metacognition. That is absolutely one thing that I’m taking away from our time together. So on the screen, we see the metacognitive routines that are effective ways of engaging students in disciplinary reading, writing, and speaking. So today, just to summarize, we talked about talking to the text, reading strategies list, the triple entry journal, the think aloud as well as the reciprocal think aloud, and the writing think aloud as well as the metacognitive frames. And here are the WestEd literacy services we drew on today. Reading Apprenticeship is an evidence-based framework in professional learning that helps readers integrate metacognition, discipline-specific literacy practices, and collaboration.
And so in the chat, we’ll have a link if you want to learn more. Writing Apprenticeship is a companion program to Reading Apprenticeship, and it is a professional learning model and instructional framework that equips middle and high school humanities educators to support students with real-world writing practices and providing a focus on discipline-specific understanding, reflection, and authentic connection with audiences. And we’ll also drop a link in the chat for you if you wanna learn more there. And during Making Sense of SCIENCE professional learning teachers engage and reflect on literacy investigations that model these explicit metacognitive routines.
And the Reading Apprenticeship Framework has been integral in the way that Making Sense of SCIENCE projects think about literacy in science. And you’ll be able to learn more about Karen and her team and that work by connecting with the link in the chat. And we invite all of you to explore the professional learning opportunities that are available this summer by clicking on the link. There is absolutely still time to register for that. And with that, I will turn it over to Danny.
Danny Torres:
Thank you, Alicia, Jenell, and Karen for a great session today, and thank you to all our participants for joining us. We really appreciate you being here. You all can feel free to reach out to Alicia, Jenell, and Karen via email to discuss this work or if you’d like support in this area, you can reach Alicia at [email protected], and Janelle at [email protected]. And you can reach Karen at K-A-R-E-N.L-I-O-N-B-E-R-G-E @WestEd.org. And finally, you can also sign up for WestEd’s email newsletter to receive updates, subscribe online at WestEd.org/subscribe, or you can scan the QR code displayed on the screen here. You can also follow us on LinkedIn and on Blue Sky. With that, thank you all very much. See you next time.