Oakland Schools: Building our Interdisciplinary ISD Team


Oakland Schools: Building our Interdisciplinary ISD Team

By Andrea Zellner, Literacy Consultant; Jenelle Williams, Literacy Consultant; Geraldine (Gerri) Devine, Mathematics Consultant; Stacie Woodward, Social Studies/Disciplinary Literacy Consultant; and James Emmerling, Science Consultant

It was finally here: the document that we, as secondary and disciplinary literacy consultants, had all been waiting for. We’d watched with envy as the K-5 Literacy Essentials had transformed teaching in the elementary grades with a focus on inquiry, student engagement, choice reading, and authentic writing. But how would these principles translate into the 6-12 grades? Would it have the same impact given the distinct and unique the demands of teaching in the content areas?


We had watched with dismay as year after year, our focus on “Writing Across the Curriculum” and “Reading Across the Curriculum” devolved into rote use of Cornell notes and other listless worksheets that did little to further our students’ love for learning, let alone improve their literacy. 


But finally, our document had arrived. And now it was time to figure out what we were going to do with it.


It began with our first meeting around the document. A few members of our team spent a day with Drs. Elizabeth Moje and Darin Stockdill (along with consultants from ISDs around the state) in two days of learning. They invited us to first explore and define what was meant by Disciplinary Literacy. This was something new for some of us. We had spent our whole careers thinking of content areas, but the notion of disciplinary literacy invited us to move away from “covering content” and into the ways of thinking, speaking, listening, reading, and writing in our discipline.


We knew, however, that supporting this work would take more than two secondary literacy consultants and one social studies/disciplinary literacy consultant. We needed mathematics and science colleagues to join our Disciplinary Literacy Team. We knew just who to invite--Gerri Devine (Mathematics) and James Emmerling (Science). After all, Gerri hadn’t majored in mathematics in college only to cover “content standards.” She had fallen in love with the ways that math helped her make sense of the world. James was on fire for science, and the problem-based approaches of the NGSS standards truly reflected the reason he became a scientist in the first place. None of us became teachers of “content”-- we were lovers of writing, of investigation, of questions, of ways of knowing that we found in our learning within our disciplines. Teaching “content” was never the solitary goal. It was to light the match so our students could feel the same joyful fire that made us love our disciplines in the first place.


So we set about understanding what ways of meaning-making each discipline held in common or in difference. We read books. We read articles. We came together week after week in discussion, and sometimes argument, around and through these texts. We made connections and through lines. We asked questions that produced more questions. And then we went back to the Essentials themselves and thought about how to guide others through this same journey. Once we ourselves had understood the nature of the essentials--why they worked, how they worked, and the underlying concepts that support them--we were able to plan and develop high-quality learning experiences for our teachers who also wanted to put these pedagogical moves into practice.


Here are some of the team’s Essentials for the Essentials:

  • Make time for individual reading, learning, sensemaking, and reflection

  • Accept that consultants from various disciplines may have their own timeline for learning about and participating in disciplinary literacy events.

  • Make time for conversations around the big ideas in Disciplinary Literacy: the role of questions, the modes of discourse, the way evidence is understood are just a few examples.

  • Use resources beyond the 6-12 Essentials document. We have a list of our favorite resources at the end of this post.

  • Offer interdisciplinary and discipline-specific supports for teachers and leaders. For us, this took the form of four half-day Disciplinary Literacy Network meetings. We made sure to have consultants from each of the disciplines attend these meetings.

  • Try out disciplinary literacy pedagogical practices with learners, look at learner artifacts, reflect on the process, and improve them for next time. 


A Few of Our Favorite Resources:

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