Featured Speakers:
- Menya Cole, Program Associate in Literacy, WestEd
- Laurie Erby, Senior Program Associate in Literacy, WestEd
Host:
- Danny Torres, Associate Director, Events and Digital Media at WestEd
Danny Torres:
Hello everyone and welcome to the 18th 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, the role of instructional coaches in implementing disciplinary literacy instruction. Our featured speakers today are Menya Cole, program associate for our literacy team at WestEd, and Laurie Erby, Reading Apprenticeship senior program associate with our literacy team at WestEd. 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 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 policymakers, district leaders, 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 Menya. Menya, take it away.
Menya Cole:
Thank you, Danny. And again, we welcome you all to today’s session, the Role of Instructional Coaches in Disciplinary Literacy Instruction. My name is Menya Cole, and I am so overjoyed to be with you today. I’m a program associate in literacy with WestEd. Prior to my work with WestEd, I served 17 years as an educator in K-12 spaces as both teacher and literacy coach at the elementary and secondary levels. I’ve had the joy of serving students and families in Los Angeles, Detroit, and Seattle. I’m joined by my colleague Laurie Erby, a Reading Apprenticeship senior program associate in literacy at WestEd. I will give Laurie a moment to briefly introduce herself before we hop into our agenda for today.
Laurie Erby:
Thank you, Menya. Hello everyone. Excited to be here with you this afternoon as we explore the critical topic of disciplinary literacy, as well as the role, the powerful role that you all and we all play in supporting every teacher to see themselves as contributors to this work. The goal, of course, is to help our teachers feel valued in their expertise, but also to help them feel empowered to make those small and meaningful shifts that can significantly impact their students’ literacy skills and their overall success. I’m Laurie Erby, a senior program associate with WestEd, where I focus on Reading Apprenticeship, a research-based approach to disciplinary literacy that’s been improving student learning for over 30 years.
Part of my role involves creating and facilitating professional learning around disciplinary literacy, but my favorite part of the job is that I also get an opportunity to coach teachers and engage communities to practice around this vital work. Before starting with WestEd, I was a middle school social studies teacher, and later I taught sixth graders in the self-contained classroom. And I have to say that discovering about halfway into my career that I, as a social studies teacher, could play a pivotal role in improving my students’ literacy skills, their ability to read, write, comprehend challenging text, to really think like geographers and historians, well, that was truly transformational. I jumped in with both feet and I never looked back.
So let’s take a moment now to think about what we’re talking about this afternoon. And I just wanna share with you our agenda. So in this session, we’re gonna be defining disciplinary literacy and discussing the vital role that you all play in implementing it. We’ll look at how we can support our colleagues to understand that this isn’t just one more thing on their already overfull plates, but it’s a vital component of the work that we all do. It’s really foundational. And the work is urgent. To thrive in college, careers, and in civic life, our students need to develop these skills. Without them, opportunity gaps will continue to grow. So apprenticing our students in these practices is really imperative. And in your roles, you are uniquely positioned to build those bridges between literacy and content area learning, helping teachers to connect their literacy skills with best instructional practices in ways that will stick.
At the end of today’s session, we’ll share some helpful resources that’ll support you in your important work. But let’s first talk about what it actually is. So let’s first establish that generic literacy instruction, while really important, it just isn’t enough. Disciplinary literacy is about helping students read, think, and communicate like experts in the field. Most often we talk about this in regard to math, to science and social studies, but today I’d like to challenge you to think beyond those core content areas and consider literacy across the board, across your students’ daily schedules, and include, if you will, our CTE courses.
Areas like agricultural science, automotive classes, health sciences, engineering, the arts, essentially, every course your school offers has expert readers in their field of study. And as each discipline has its own language, its tools, its ways of thinking, students must learn to engage with texts as experts would, and who would be better to help them do that than the teachers who teach those courses. So your role as an instructional coach and administrator is a pivotal one. It is or will be through your work with them, that teachers recognize how their own reading and their own thinking, often automatic, can be made visible to their students. Secrets to reading and understanding are unlocked in this process.
I currently work with a district where we’re supporting all teachers to heighten their awareness and build their confidence, to share the processes that they use, to make meaning of whatever text they’re working with, and I’m always amazed at how much I learn through these interactions, how those teachers help me to read and understand the varied text of their content or their trade. And this all takes practice. It takes a safe place in which to do the work and build relationships of mutual respect for what we each bring to the table. By slowing down and modeling their expert thinking, teachers show students what it means to read and reason like professionals in their field. As coaches, we bridge the gap between literacy and content, fostering sustainable change across districts. And I’m gonna pause now so that Menya can conduct a quick poll before sharing about how to foster that sustainable change.
Menya Cole:
Thank you, Laurie. Before we dive deeper into the content today, we invite you to take a moment to consider the opportunities you currently have to support disciplinary literacy at your school site, in your district, or whatever capacity you’re currently serving. Let’s take this poll and think about the multiple opportunities we have. It may include building shared understanding among teachers, connecting literacy to content goals, helping teachers surface their own practices, modeling strategies and tools, or other opportunities you currently have. And you can list those other opportunities in the comments please. Go ahead and take a moment to choose as many answers that resonate with you today. So taking a look at the results here, we see that it’s almost a three-way tie, I probably would say, in terms of building shared understanding among teachers, connecting literacy to content goals, and modeling strategies and tools as current opportunities.
And then we have helping teachers surface their own practices making its way up there. If you haven’t already guessed, those first four responses are all of the areas we’re gonna dive into this afternoon. And we would love to take a look at the comments as well to share ideas. We are hoping that although this is a quick short webinar, that it’s also a collaborative space. So as ideas come to your mind, as questions arise, or anything else that’s tugging at your educator heartstrings that you want to share, please use the chat as a collaborative talking space. So let’s go ahead and dive in. It’s clear that many of you already have some wonderful opportunities at your sites, and we’re gonna talk more about what that could look like specifically for instructional coaches.
To start, we’re going to talk about the instructional coach’s role in building school-wide knowledge and a shared commitment towards disciplinary literacy. We want to ensure that teachers are treated as partners in the work, and instructional coaches play a key role in developing that partnership. Coaches can serve as a bridge between administration and teachers as they cultivate a climate of inquiry. The coach has a unique capacity to take on a teacher as learner stance, so the coach can serve as both teacher of teachers and of students, as well as learner of new material and new content and new practices. They can collaborate with teachers to explore more about disciplinary literacy practices while also leveraging opportunities to provide professional learning to teachers at their site or within their district.
And because disciplinary literacy spans all learning spaces, a school-wide commitment is an effective way to ensure that students are experiencing high quality instruction across all classrooms. The instructional coach has the opportunity to support this effort due to the nature of their role. There are some campuses, and I’ve experienced this myself as a coach, where I am actually in classrooms more than the principal was even able to be in classrooms because of the unique capacity that I had to shift between those spaces. So what might cultivating a climate of inquiry look like on a site, on a campus, or within a district? It might look like a book study. It could look like the creation of disciplinary literacy-focused PLCs. It might look like a PDSA cycle that happens school-wide or PDSA cycle that happens within departments on a campus or within a district with shared celebrations of progress and growth.
The instructional coach also has the opportunity to broaden the conversation around literacy. In secondary spaces, it’s not uncommon for ELA teachers to feel the pressure of being the reading teacher, and I kind of use that in air quotes, right? Oftentimes you think of reading, it must be ELA. And in elementary spaces, it’s not uncommon for ELA and reading to be thought of as interchangeable, as opposed to ELA or English being looked at as a discipline. Coaches have the opportunity to gently steer the conversation to highlight the unique ways each discipline reads, writes, thinks, and communicates, where they’re able to look at literacy within every single classroom space where we all carry that joyful load of supporting our students with their literacy habits.
Broadening that conversation also includes emphasizing literacy as inseparable from content learning and supporting teachers and crafting goals around disciplinary literacy. Another way in which the coach supports their teachers in having the shared commitment and expanding their knowledge is through fostering teacher ownership of the work. Coaches have the unique ability to excite teachers about the work without making it feel evaluative. Sometimes when something is newer that gets introduced to a campus or a district, there’s a pressure that a teacher can carry about having to be evaluated on that new practice. But the instructional coach often carries this really beautiful, joyful opportunity to be able to disseminate this information, collaboratively engage with teachers, support them in fostering ownership without that burden of evaluation that might be on someone’s shoulders.
This could look like helping teachers identify authentic texts that matter in their discipline. So working with math teachers and thinking about what does a disciplinary text look like in math or maths or numeracy? Looking in the classrooms of history teachers, what are the different types of texts we use in history? What are the texts that are used in science? What are the texts that are used in PE or in the automotive classroom? Surfacing teachers’ own disciplinary practices, the coach has the opportunity to partner with the teacher or teachers and think through how does the teacher read, write, speak, and think as an expert in their own field? Because the expectation and the hope is that a teacher is not just an expert in teaching this content, but they’re an actual expert within the discipline. We wanna tap into that knowledge that teachers already have.
The coach can also explore how to apprentice students into these authentic ways of working and thinking, and we will get to some of that specifics later as Laurie goes into those examples of what that could look like from the coach’s end. I recently had the opportunity to co-write a blog to support principals with the steps they could take to cultivate a school climate in which disciplinary literacy thrives. It reviews some of the points we just discussed regarding building school-wide knowledge and a shared commitment for this work, and it provides some key resources to support that work. Danny will drop a link for you in the chat, and we’ll also include a link to this blog later when we give you some additional resources you can work with. Now, Laurie is going to lead you into the next part of our session today.
Laurie Erby:
So let’s talk now about transitioning, thank you, our students to disciplinary literacy and apprenticing them in that, what it means and why it matters. So to be someone’s apprentice, you are learning a trade or a profession, you’re working with a skilled professional, and you’re learning from a master for a set period of time. We use this term in Reading Apprenticeship deliberately. We need to apprentice our students into this work. As we’ve established in our classrooms, that skilled master, that expert, is the content area teacher. All teachers need to understand that the English language arts teachers, although experts in their field, they often lack the expertise to teach students how to read as scientists do, as mathematicians might, think the way engineers do.
It’s different than reading poetry or other literature, and it requires different strategies or similar strategies that are used in different ways. So we are all part of this work. There are things that real experts do so seamlessly, so automatically that they’re invisible until we make them visible to others. For instance, a history teacher is never going to read a text and neglect to source the document. They wanna consider who wrote it and for what purpose. And knowing that really is key to understanding the piece for them. It’s imperative. They’re also gonna put the information into context considering when it was written, what was going on at the time, all key pieces to building their understanding.
And our students need each of us to share those particular ways of reading and thinking in our disciplines, making them visible. In this work, all teachers play that critical role, and it’s up to us as coaches and administrators to support teachers to recognize this, to help them to slow their own thinking processes down and be more aware of what they do and how they read their source documents so that they can make those invisible processes visible to their students. Of course, we also need to consider the role that disciplinary literacy plays in helping to close opportunity gaps by giving all students access to rigorous, content-specific learning. By connecting student’s cultural knowledge and their lived experiences to disciplinary text, we engage them in meaningful academic work.
As we work to support teachers, coaches need to be intentional. We must model the processes for our teachers, and we want to help them become more comfortable doing this with their students until it becomes just a natural way of teaching for them. We’ve gotta consider that this is different, and it’s a nuanced approach to teaching for many. For instance, many non-ELA teachers may feel unsure about naming specific strategies that they use when they work to make sense of a text. Your support can build their confidence and provide resources that they’re gonna need in order to be successful.
So this slide shows some ways to get started working with them. Certainly, think alouds are a great approach, guided practice, once again, in that safe space, co-creating things together, and making sure that, you know, on both sides, you’re seen as experts, and affirming for them their role, helping teachers see how their expertise contributes to student success. A tool that we’ll be sharing with you are some bookmarks with strategies and prompts for reading and science, math and history. Some of you may wanna use those as is, and for others, this may be a starting place for the work that you do. We hope that you’ll be able to use those examples to spark some ideas and some conversations with your students.
So it’s time for our final poll, and our question is, what’s one next move you’d be most ready to take back to your site? Would you like to explore your own learning around disciplinary literacy to better support teachers? Start a conversation with teachers about disciplinary text? Model a disciplinary strategy for a teacher? Or share or co-create a tool? So take a moment and post and mark your preference. Let’s see what we have. All right, so it looks like all of these choices were good ones, and sharing or co-creating a tool seems to be the one that’s at the top there. But of course, as we know, any and all of these would be great places to start. The key is for us to really get started. So I’m gonna pass this back to Menya now for some closing thoughts.
Menya Cole:
Thank you, Laurie. Thank you all again for spending time with us this session. It’s our hope that you can use our discussion today to positively impact the students in your school community as you position instructional coaches as leaders in the work. We’d like to share additional resources to support you. This resource guide that will we dropped in the chat includes the link to the blog that was dropped earlier. It also includes additional resources like the sample tools that Laurie referenced and links to our WestEd service lines that we’ll talk a little bit more about in a moment. When you are reading some of the blog posts that are linked on the resource guide, you’ll also be able to access additional resources that WestEd provides as we are positioning ourselves as supports for you in this work.
And if you have any questions about accessing the link that Danny dropped, please let us know. We can support you as well. Just type that in the chat. Additionally, here are the WestEd Literacy services we drew from today. Reading Apprenticeship is an evidence-based framework and professional learning that helps readers by integrating metacognition, collaboration, and discipline-specific literacy practices. Writing Apprenticeship is a new professional development model and instructional approach that aligns with Reading Apprenticeship. It equips middle and high school humanities educators to support students with real-world writing practices, providing a focus on discipline-specific understanding, reflection, and authentic connection with audiences.
These links can be found on the resource page that was dropped earlier, and we’ll also drop the links in the chat for you. There is a lot more work to be done, and if you’re interested, we would love to partner with you. There are so many different resources and there’s so many different approaches that we can take to doing this work joyfully together. Now, Danny’s going to start to close us out. If you have any questions that you want to pose for us before we close out, because we do have five minutes remaining, please put those questions in the chat. Whether you put them in the Q and A or directly in the chat, we will do our best to get to a few of those questions before our time ends today.
Danny Torres:
Well, thank you, Menya. For those of you interested in watching past webinars and our literacy-focused webinar series, you can visit us online at wested.org/literacy-at-wested-webinars. Past webinars include literacy practices that support multilingual student success across content areas, reading and writing across the content areas, helping students improve comprehension in grades K through five, strengthening literacy routines in science, social studies, and language arts, and ensuring literacy success across the disciplines for students with disabilities. We’ll also have this webinar, the “Role of Instructional Coaches in Implementing Disciplinary Literacy Instruction” available in a few weeks.
We also have a series of great articles on the topic of literacy in our Impact and Insights blog at wested.org/blog. Our articles focus on building supportive school climates for disciplinary literacy, supporting multilingual learners in disciplinary literacy, why disciplinary literacy belongs in elementary classrooms, what principals can do to cultivate a school 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 also follow our literacy showcase at linkedin.com. Just search for Literacy at WestEd, and it should appear at the top of your search results. You can also scan the QR code displayed here to access the LinkedIn page.
For more information about additional professional learning opportunities and research on the topic of literacy, visit our literacy page at wested.org/literacy where you can scan the QR code on the page here. Well, thank you, Menya and Laurie, for a great session today, and thank you to all our participants for joining us. We really appreciate you being here. For those of you interested in learning more about the work that we discussed today, feel free to reach out to Menya and Laurie via email. You can reach Menya at M-C-O-L-E-2 @wested.org, and you can reach Laurie at L-E-R-B-Y @wested.org. And there’s still time to register for our upcoming Leading Together webinars. We’re covering a range of topics, including mathematics, AI, and more.
During these webinars, we’re sharing insights and evidence-based practices to improve teaching, leading, and learning. 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 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 Blue Sky. With that, thank you all very much for joining us. We’ll see you next time.