Exploring Disciplinary Literacy

  By Dana VanderLugt, Ottawa ISD Literacy Consultant and Disciplinary Literacy Task Force Member I remember the staff meeting well. I was early in my career as a middle school English teacher when my principal made a flippant comment, something like, “We’re not here for our content, but for kids. We love our students more than what we teach.” I instantly felt a pang of guilt. I did care about my students. I loved reading with and beside students, helping them to think deeper about texts, pushing their writing skills beyond what they believed was possible. I secretly even loved when they rolled their eyes about my passion around morphology or when I introduced the magic of the dash—my favorite punctuation mark.  When it comes to teaching, I can’t separate kids and content: what I love is teaching students English.  I, like possibly many other secondary teachers, have woken up more than once in a cold sweat from a nightmare: it’s the beginning of the school year and I have ...

Charting a New Course: Supporting Student Engagement within the ELA DLEs By Victoria Les, St. Clair County RESA; Liz Lietz, Macomb ISD and Mary-Lu Strimbel, Wayne RESA Educators have spent the last school year painstakingly navigating through the storm of pandemic learning. Just as a storm at sea is brought on by the dynamic relationship of the ocean surface, wind, and atmospheric pressure, the 2020-2021 school year created conditions which upset the balance between school safety and educating our students. Teachers and administrators have been in survival mode doing their best to build virtual relationships with students, find access to high-quality texts, and create opportunities for collaboration. As ISD/RESA professionals who support educators, we have been riding this wave of uncertainty and doing our best to be a life-boat during these stormy seas. We fished through our resources to provide professional learning opportunities teachers would find timely, and help teachers chart th...