Ensuring Literacy Success Across the Disciplines for Students With Disabilities 

December 11, 2025

Educators no longer have to choose between providing foundational reading support and ensuring access to rigorous grade-level content for students with reading disabilities. WestEd’s recent Leading Together webinar explored how school and district leaders can ensure literacy success across content areas for all students.

Led by Elizabeth Zagata, program manager for the Special Education Policy and Practice team at WestEd, and Katie Drummond, senior research director for the Research-Practice Partnerships team at WestEd, the session provided evidence-based strategies that educators can use to support students in science, history, math, and other content area classrooms.

Students With Reading Disabilities Are Missing Out on Rich Content

Students with reading disabilities, including dyslexia, have traditionally been excluded from rigorous content learning. These students may be placed into remedial tracks while missing out on relevant discussions in science class, analyzing primary sources in history, or working through complex word problems in math.

The core issue is that educators have been presented with an impossible decision: “Do I work on foundational reading skills with this student, or do I give this student access to complex content?” Meanwhile, their classmates are diving into rich disciplinary conversations.

What Is Disciplinary Literacy?

Disciplinary literacy emphasizes the specialized ways of reading, writing, and thinking unique to each academic discipline. In science, students learn to understand scientific terms and conduct experiments. In history, they analyze primary sources and build arguments. Disciplinary literacy goes beyond general reading strategies to equip students with the skills to expressing themselves in these content area languages.

Supporting Reading Development and Content Access

The good news is that educators can absolutely support reading skill development and provide access to grade-level content at the same time. This both/and approach starts with moving beyond deficit-based thinking. Instead of seeing dyslexia or other reading disabilities as barriers to learning, educators need to see them as differences requiring innovative design.

Schools can scaffold access to grade-level texts by providing the support students need, whether that is audio versions, graphic organizers, or extra processing time, while students engage with the same complex texts as their peers. All students, regardless of their reading profile, should have access to complex disciplinary thinking.

What Are Strategies for Meaningful Participation in Content Discussions?

• Pre-teach vocabulary. Focus on a few select words that are essential to understanding and will be encountered frequently.
• Provide multiple text access points. Use audio versions, graphic organizers, or both. The goal is getting everyone to the same rich content through different doorways.
• Allow flexible response modalities. Students might draw ideas, type responses, or use assistive technology. The important thing is capturing their understanding.
• Use think-pair-share with sufficient processing time. Build in pauses, let students process with a partner first, and then bring it to the larger group.
• Include visual discussion supports. Concept maps, text evidence charts, cause-and-effect organizers, or sentence starters like “The data shows” help students contribute confidently.
• Provide question stem prompt cards. These help students generate questions and make reading more intentional.
• Use metacognitive reflection questions. For example, ask, “What did you do as you read, and how did it help?” to build awareness of reading practice.
• Teach Students to Ask and Answer Questions
  • Right-there questions: Answers found in the same sentences as the question.
  • Think-and-search questions: Information located and pieced together from different sections of the text.
  • Inferential questions: Clues from the author combined with prior knowledge.

Integrating Disciplinary Literacy Into IEPs

• Embed disciplinary context directly into goals. For example, instead of “The student will improve reading comprehension,” write, “When reading grade-level science texts about ecosystems, the student will use graphic organizers to identify cause-and-effect relationships with 80% accuracy.”
• Target discipline-specific vocabulary through actual content engagement. Have students learn historical terminology while analyzing primary sources, rather than memorizing random word lists.
• Collaborate across general and special education. Special education teachers bring expertise in accommodations, while general education teachers know content standards; together, they create the both/and approach.
• Measure progress using authentic disciplinary tasks and texts whenever possible.

Ready to Support Literacy Success for All Students? 

Learn more about WestEd’s work in special education policy and practice and research-practice partnerships. Watch the full webinar and view other webinars in the Leading Together series.