Instructional Coaches Are Key to Making Disciplinary Literacy Stick 

March 16, 2026

Disciplinary literacy—the ability to read, write, and think like an expert in a given field—is foundational to student success in college, careers, and civic life, and helping every teacher in every classroom embrace this work requires intentional support. WestEd’s recent Leading Together webinar explores the critical role that instructional coaches and administrators play in implementing disciplinary literacy instruction across a school or district. 

Led by Menya Cole, a program associate in literacy at WestEd, and Laurie Erby, a Reading Apprenticeship senior program associate in literacy at WestEd, the session offered practical strategies for coaches looking to broaden the ongoing conversations around literacy. 

Beyond Core Content: Rethinking Where Disciplinary Literacy Lives 

Generic literacy instruction is important, but students benefit more when exposed to both generic and disciplinary literacy. Disciplinary literacy helps students read, think, and communicate like experts in a field do. Each discipline has its own language, tools, and ways of thinking, and students must learn to engage with texts in a deeper way. Instructional coaches are uniquely positioned to assist teachers, regardless of subject area, in recognizing and sharing that expertise with students. 

Four Ways Instructional Coaches Can Advance Disciplinary Literacy  

Participants learned four practical moves instructional coaches can use right now to help teachers make expert reading and thinking visible in every subject. 

1. Build Schoolwide Knowledge and Shared Commitment 
Instructional coaches serve as a bridge between administration and teachers, offering opportunities to inquire more deeply in a way that makes disciplinary literacy a collective priority rather than an individual classroom effort. This might look like facilitating a book study, launching disciplinary literacy–focused professional learning communities, or organizing plan-do-study-act cycles within departments or across a school site. Because coaches are often present in classrooms more frequently than administrators, they are well positioned to assist students receiving high-quality disciplinary literacy instruction in all learning spaces. 

2. Literacy Belongs to Every Teacher 
In secondary schools, English and language arts (ELA) teachers are often viewed as “the reading teacher.” In elementary schools, ELA and reading are often viewed as interchangeable. Instructional coaches can reframe this thinking by highlighting the distinctive ways each discipline reads, writes, thinks, and communicates. In doing so, they can make clear that literacy is inseparable from content learning and that every teacher shares the responsibility of building students’ literacy habits. 

3. Foster Teacher Ownership of the Work 
One of the instructional coach’s most powerful advantages is the ability to introduce new practices outside of a formal teacher evaluation. This gives teachers the space to engage authentically with disciplinary literacy. Coaches can help teachers identify essential texts from their own disciplines and surface the expert reading and thinking practices that teachers already use but may not have made explicit. The goal is to tap into the expertise teachers possess and help them share it with students. 

4. Apprentice Students Into Disciplinary Ways of Thinking 
Every teacher performs certain thinking processes so automatically that they become invisible. Instructional coaches can help make these processes visible. A history teacher, for example, instinctively considers who wrote a text and for what purpose before drawing any conclusions. Helping students access that inner thinking is at the heart of disciplinary literacy. Coaches can support teachers in slowing down their own thinking, modeling it explicitly, and building the confidence to do this consistently in their classrooms. Tools like think-alouds, guided practice, and cocreated strategy bookmarks for science, math, and history can help teachers get started. 

Bring Disciplinary Literacy to Life in Your School or District 

Explore WestEd’s Reading Apprenticeship and Writing Apprenticeship services. Watch the full webinar, and view other webinars in the Leading Together series.