Featured Speakers:
- Elizabeth Zagata, Program Manager, Special Education Policy and Practice Team at WestEd
- Katie Drummond, Senior Research Director, Research-Practice Partnerships Team at WestEd
Host:
- Danny Torres, Associate Director, Events and Digital Media at WestEd
Danny Torres:
Well, hello, everyone, and welcome to the 17th 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, Ensuring Literacy Success Across the Disciplines for Students with Disabilities. Our featured speakers today are Elizabeth Zagata, program manager for our special education policy and practice team at WestEd, and Katie Drummond, senior research director for our research-practice partnerships team at WestEd. Unfortunately, Misty Sailors, our interim director for our literacy team at WestEd, can’t join us today. Thank you all very much for spending time with us today. My name is Danny Torres. I’m associate director of events & 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 non-partisan research, development, and service agency, WestEd works to promote excellence, improve learning, and increase opportunity for children, youth, and adults. Our staff partner with state, district, and school leaders 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. Now, I’d like to pass the mic over to Katie. Katie, take it away.
Katie Drummond:
Thanks, Danny. We’re so glad to be here with you and our audience participants. Again, we’re sorry that our colleague Misty could not join us today. Both Elizabeth and I are jumping in in her place, so you’ll forgive us if there’s any little snafus as we jump in on transitions that we might not have planned. So I’m here with my colleague, Elizabeth Zagata. She’s passionate about bridging research and practice to improve outcomes for students with disabilities. She has extensive teaching experience in both general and special education, and she currently co-leads the effective instructional priority area for the National Center for Systemic Improvement. Her research sits at the intersection of literacy, assessment, and policy, and she supports states and districts in assessing and improving their special education systems.
As for myself, I’m Katie Drummond, and for multiple decades I’ve led projects implementing and evaluating evidence-based literacy practices across the developmental spectrum. My work has covered an array of literacy topics, interventions, and policies. I began my career teaching special education. As for our agenda today, here’s how our time is gonna run. We’re going to begin with some background information on disciplinary literacy and reading disabilities, and then we’ll move into some moderated questions. We’re hoping that you will contribute to the Q&A portion by posing your questions in the Q&A function of Zoom. We’ll then offer some closing thoughts. So really the big question that’s gonna drive our discussion today is how can we ensure that students with reading disabilities thrive in content area classrooms? So we’ll explore how to support students in content area classes as they read, write, and build other literacy skills.
With that, let me provide an overview of disciplinary literacy. Disciplinary literacy really emphasizes the specialized ways of reading, writing, and thinking unique to each academic discipline. So this involves understanding each discipline’s norms and its conventions that then help someone develop specific construct knowledge. In other words, these are the reading and writing approaches that experts in a discipline use. So disciplinary literacy goes beyond general reading strategies to include the specific ways of thinking and communicating in each content area. So imagine you’re trying to master cooking and you have never before entered a kitchen. You would have to learn the terms, tools, and techniques that are unique to things like ingredients, measurement, and food preparation.
To draw the link to academic subjects, like science or history, the content areas also have their own terminology and ways of solving problems. So in science, students learn to understand scientific terms and conduct experiments. In history, they analyze primary sources and build arguments. Disciplinary literacy really equips students with the skills to speak these content area languages. So for additional background, I’ll go ahead and hand off to Elizabeth.
Elizabeth Zagata:
Thanks, Katie. Let’s talk a little bit about how reading disabilities, including dyslexia, have traditionally impacted students’ access to that content learning Katie was just describing. So for too long, we’ve seen a pattern of exclusion from rigorous content for some students. Students with reading disabilities may be put into remedial tracks, away from the rich, challenging material that their peers get to explore in science, history, math, and other disciplinary subjects. And here’s the thing that’s really problematic. We’ve created these false either/or choices for educators. So teachers feel like they have to pick. “Do I work on foundational reading skills with this student, or do I give this student access to complex content?” It’s like we’ve set up this impossible decision where you can’t do both.
So then what happens? Students may get stuck in only foundational skills remediation while then missing out on the fascinating discussions about chemical reactions in science class, or analyzing primary sources in history, or wrestling with complex word problems in math. They’re not there when classmates are reading Shakespeare, or exploring scientific articles about climate change, or examining historical documents from the civil rights movement. Meanwhile, their classmates are diving deep into all these rich disciplinary conversations, and the result is there’s a huge gap in access to that complex content that just keeps widening over time. But the good news is what we’re gonna talk about today is that does not have to be the case. We can absolutely support reading skill development and provide access to grade-level content at the same time.
So how do we bridge that gap? Well, we need a both/and approach, and that starts with fundamentally shifting how we think about students with reading disabilities. So first, we have to move beyond deficit-based thinking. So instead of seeing dyslexia or other reading disabilities as barriers to learning, we need to see them as differences requiring innovative design. We can absolutely scaffold access to grade-level texts. We don’t have to choose between teaching reading skills and giving students access to challenging content. We can do both. We can provide the support students need, whether that’s audio versions, graphic organizers, or extra processing time, while they’re engaging with the same complex texts as their peers. So that means accessing the same scientific articles about genetics, the same historical primary sources from the Revolutionary War, the same literary works, like “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” or the same complex math problems involving algebraic thinking.
And this is really the heart of it all. All students, regardless of their reading profile, should have access to complex disciplinary thinking. A student with dyslexia deserves to wrestle with the same fascinating scientific concepts about photosynthesis, analyze the same thought-provoking historical documents from the Great Depression, engage in the same rich mathematical reasoning about statistical data, and explore the same compelling literature that develops critical thinking skills as any other student. So this both/and approach says, “Yes, we will support your reading development and we’ll make sure you’re part of these meaningful content conversations,” and that’s how we create truly inclusive classrooms. So now that we’ve sort of set the stage for the rest of our time together, Katie and I are gonna pose a few questions to each other, questions that we find are often asked by content area teachers about how to support students with reading disabilities in their classrooms.
And just as a reminder to all of you, we are collecting questions that you might have. So please submit any questions you have via the Q&A function, and then we’ll get to as many of them as we can later in the webinar. So our first question is, “What are some ways to ensure students with reading disabilities can interact meaningfully with complex texts in the content areas?” And Katie, we’d love to hear how you’re thinking about this.
Katie Drummond:
Sure, so this is a commonly asked question. For some reason, my slide doesn’t wanna go just one. There we go. This is a commonly asked question, and I’m gonna point to a couple examples from one of the Institute of Education Sciences’ Practice Guides. Practice Guides review a large number of studies from the literature base, and distill the research down to key recommendations that are supported by evidence. I like to share these Practice Guides just in case anyone is not familiar with them. They provide a wealth of information, and there are a number of Practice Guides that focus on reading and writing topics. But as this screenshot shows, this particular guide focuses on reading interventions for adolescents. There’s a QR code, as you can see here on the screen, and we’re gonna put the link in chat for you as well.
The next slide gives a glimpse of the practice recommendations, and to answer the question about how all students can meaningfully interact with texts, I’m gonna focus us in on recommendation three here, the suggestion to build student routines around comprehension building practices. Two specific routines include, one, teaching students to monitor their own comprehension while they read, and two, teaching students to determine the gist of sections of texts. So what does this look like? Well, first, in terms of teaching students to monitor their own comprehension, they can be taught to mark up texts. So in the top image, which is a science text, you can see that students have marked frequently occurring words as they determine what this paragraph is about, and they also highlighted statements with important information. This kind of markup could also be done digitally.
The bottom picture is an example of WestEd’s Reading Apprenticeship program in which we model the idea of students talking to the text. With talking to the text, students are documenting their thinking on paper, again, marking up important information, writing the questions they have about the text, and in Reading Apprenticeship, we provide ample time for students to then share their annotations with a partner or a group, and hear what sense others are making of the text, and what they did to make that meaning. Another recommended routine for students is to develop gist or summary statements about segments of text. So the example shown in the top image, this one from social studies content, teachers can model how to develop summary statements. So they can talk about how to determine the focus of a passage, how they extract important information from the passage, and how they then synthesize the information in order to get to the main gist statement.
In the first image, you can see that students were given a graphic organizer to help them do this. And as you look at the second image, again, coming from our Reading Apprenticeship program, I’ll just emphasize how important it is for educators to provide students time to share. And this actually connects, Elizabeth, with a question I want to ask you, which is what are some ways to ensure students with reading disabilities can participate fully and meaningfully in discussions about complex content area texts?
Elizabeth Zagata:
Yeah, thanks, Katie. That is a great question. How do we make sure that students with disabilities can really participate meaningfully in those rich discussions about complex texts? So whether we’re talking about scientific articles, or historical primary sources, or autobiographies, let me share a few strategies that work. First, pre-teach vocabulary. Don’t wait to introduce key terms until you’re in the middle of discussing a complex science article about cellular respiration, or a historical document about the Constitution. Give students that vocabulary ahead of time in context, so then they can focus on the big ideas during discussion instead of getting stuck on unfamiliar words, like mitochondria or ratification. Next, provide multiple text access points. So again, some students might need the audio version of that Shakespeare soliloquy or scientific research study. Others might benefit from graphic organizers that preview the main concepts in a primary source document, and some students need both.
The goal is getting everyone to the same rich content just through different doorways. Another strategy is to allow flexible response modalities for students to show their thinking. So some might draw their ideas about character development. Others might type responses to communicate their mathematical reasoning, or use assistive technology to explain about historical cause and effect. The important thing is capturing their understanding, not necessarily how they exactly express it. I’m a big fan of think-pair-share, but there is a key with students with disabilities. We need to make sure that we give sufficient processing time. Students with disabilities often need extra time to organize their thoughts about complex literary themes, or scientific processes, or historical connections. So make sure you build in those pauses, let them process with a partner first, and then bring it to the larger group.
And finally, include visual discussion supports. So think about, for example, concept maps for scientific processes, or text evidence charts for literature analysis, or cause and effect organizers for history, or even simple sentence starters, like, “The data shows,” or, “This reminds me of.” These tools help all students organize their thinking and contribute more confidently to the discussion. The bottom line is that it’s about removing barriers to participation while keeping the intellectual challenge intact. I’m gonna ask Katie another question, which is what advice do you have if students have trouble generating questions as they read or justifying answers to questions they have been asked?
Katie Drummond:
So going back to the Practice Guide I showed earlier, one recommendation was to provide students ample opportunity to ask and answer questions as they read. We know this is really important as a way to process text. For students with disabilities, helping them build routines and having tools and techniques to rely on for those questions is especially important. So I’ll share a couple ideas. First, students can be explicitly taught on how to find and justify answers for different question types. So the image on the screen taken from that Practice Guide describes common question types. Beginning with right-there questions, students can be taught that often words from the questions can be found in the same sentences as the answer and its justification. Teachers can move on to modeling think-and-search and search type questions, the second row of this table, by showing students that they might need to locate and piece together information from across sections of texts.
So for instance, a teacher might say, “The question says to find three examples, but I haven’t come across the third example yet. I’m gonna keep searching and scanning the text.” So in other words, they’re making their own techniques explicit, so students can also access them. Finally, teachers can model how to answer the more challenging inferential question type by showing ways to use clues from the author and combining that with what readers already know or have learned. Another idea is to provide questions stems for students to have at hand while they read. So on the screen, you see a prompt card with a set of questions. This comes from that same Practice Guide. Providing students with such prompts can help them generate various questions for passages and really make their reading more intentional.
So let’s say a group of students is gonna work together to read a chapter from a history book. They might use these question prompts and decide, “Okay, as we read, we’re gonna answer what is the war on poverty, and what can you say about war on poverty programs?” So they’re kind of pre-loading their thinking before they read using these kind of questions. One last comment on this. I mentioned WestEd’s Reading Apprenticeship program earlier. One other question type that we use in that program builds student awareness of their own reading practice. So this includes prompts, like, “What did you do as you read, and how did it help?” So this kind of metacognitive reflection discussion can be done with the teacher or in a group of peers. Elizabeth, moving on, can you tell us what are some effective strategies for integrating disciplinary literacy into IEP goals?
Elizabeth Zagata:
Yeah, sure. So just for in case anyone’s not familiar, IEP is an acronym that stands for Individualized Education Program, and it is the individualized plan for any student who receives special education services. Part of that plan is a section of goals and objectives that the student is going to work on in the next year. So when we’re writing IEP goals, we wanna think way beyond just checking compliance boxes. We wanna create goals that give students authentic access to meaningful content, not just meet legal requirements. So one key strategy is to embed disciplinary context directly into the goals and objectives themselves. So instead of writing generic reading goals, like, “The student will improve reading comprehension,” we can write goals and objectives that target reading skills within the specific content areas. So for example, “When reading grade-level science texts about ecosystems, the student will use graphic organizers to identify cause and effect relationships with 80% accuracy.” So hopefully, you can see the difference there.
Now, the student is working on reading skills while actually learning about science content. It’s the same thing with vocabulary. We don’t wanna isolate word study from real learning. So we wanna target discipline-specific vocabulary acquisition through actual content engagement. So instead of having students memorize random word lists, we wanna have them learn historical terminology while they’re actually analyzing primary sources or studying the causes of World War I. Now, here’s what makes this work, and this question kind of came up in the Q&A. You absolutely have to collaborate across general and special education. So the special education teacher brings expertise in accommodations and specially design instruction while the general education teacher knows the content standards and the disciplinary thinking, and that when they work together, that’s where you get that both/and approach in action, individualized support and access to rigorous content.
And then finally, let’s just briefly touch on assessment. Whenever possible, we wanna measure progress using authentic disciplinary tasks and texts. So if a student is learning to analyze historical documents, try to assess their growth using actual primary sources alongside other measures. This gives you a much clearer picture of how they’re developing as a learner in that content area. The goal is creating IEP goals and objectives that open doors to rich content learning along with necessary skill building. And speaking of Q&A, Katie, I’m gonna turn it back to you and see if we have any that we want to address. I know we only have a couple minutes left. Oops.
Katie Drummond:
Yes, we’ve had couple great questions come in. One of them is very logistics and very real in terms of how tight time often is in our teaching and learning world. So Elizabeth, I’m wondering if you have any input on the idea of, if you think about limited time, especially a K-6 instructional day, how can special education resource teachers, general education teachers schedule time together to support students with disabilities?
Elizabeth Zagata:
Yeah, I mean, the schedule is, it can be a barrier itself to enacting some of the strategies that we’ve talked about. I think one thing that comes to mind, again, I know we only have a couple minutes here, but is to use offline tools. So for example, share documents for planning between general education and special education, so that each teacher can preview what a lesson is gonna be, and then think about individualized supports, including some of the strategies that we talked about today, how they might be embedded for those students that need them. So if you don’t have common planning time, you know, think about using some shared electronic resources that people can ask or can access when they do have time to sort of embed, again, some of these strategies that we’ve talked about today. That’s one thought that comes to mind. But would love if others have other ideas to put them in the chat. That’d be great.
I think we probably have time for one more question here, and Katie, I’m gonna ask it to you. Do you only pre-teach vocabulary to students with disabilities or to all students at grade level? So thinking about that pre-teaching.
Katie Drummond:
Yeah, when it comes to vocabulary, I definitely urge teaching to all students, because we know that there’s plenty of unknown words when we look at content area disciplinary texts, but it can also be hard to get bogged down by teaching, pre-teaching every unknown word. So I say focus on pre-teaching a few select words that are essential to understanding and that you know will be encountered frequently, and also remember the utility of dictionaries and thesauruses. There’s so many online versions of these tools now. So those can be really helpful for words that you have not pre-taught. And with that, I know our time goes so quickly, but Danny, I’m gonna hand back over to you for some wrap up information.
Danny Torres:
Thank you, and for those of you interested in watching past webinars in our literacy focused webinar series, or if you wanna register for next week’s webinar on the Role of Instructional Coaches in Implementing Disciplinary Literacy Instruction, you can visit us online at WestEd.org/literacy-at-WestEd-webinars. We also have a great series of articles on the topic of literacy in our Insights & Impact blog at WestEd.org/blog. Our articles focus on supporting multilingual learners in disciplinary literacy why disciplinary literacy belongs in elementary classrooms, what principals can do to cultivate a climate where disciplinary literacy thrives, the science of reading and why disciplinary literacy matters for college and workforce readiness, and reading, writing, and communicating in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine. And you can follow our literacy showcase LinkedIn.com. Just search for literacy at WestEd and it should pop up at the top of your search results. And you can also scan the QR code that we’re displaying on the screen here.
And for more information about our services on the topic of literacy and quality teaching for students with reading disabilities, including dyslexia, visit our Reading Apprenticeship website at readingapprenticeship.org, or you can visit us at our Writing Apprenticeship webpage at WestEd.org/support/writing-apprenticeship. And you can visit our Multi-Tiered System of Supports webpage at WestEd.org/mtss. For more information about additional professional learning opportunities and research on the topic of literacy, visit our literacy page at WestEd.org/literacy. Well, thank you, Katie and Elizabeth, for a great session today and for stepping in for Misty, and thank you to all our participants for joining us. I really appreciate you being here.
Please feel free to reach out to Katie and/or Elizabeth via email if you have questions about the work we discussed today. You can reach Katie at [email protected] or you can reach Elizabeth at [email protected]. And there’s still time to register for our upcoming Leading Together webinars. We’re covering a range of topics, including literacy, supporting multilingual learners in mathematics, AI, and STEM, and more For more information about our Leading Together webinar series, visit us online at WestEd.org/leading-together-2025. And finally, you can also sign up for WestEd’s email newsletters to receive updates about our work. Subscribe online at WestEd.org/subscribe or you can scan the QR code displayed on the screen. You can also follow us on LinkedIn and BlueSky. With that, thank you all very much. We’ll see you next time.