Students who struggle with reading and writing have an especially difficult time in high school because there is little research about adolescent literacy. In my experience, schools turn to tired, ineffective programs that primarily target the literacy needs of much younger children. As a result, teenagers who already feel disengaged from school feel even more disengaged and frustrated because they are forced through endless hours of futile assessments and humiliating progress monitoring.
My school, which hosts primarily successful students, has also neglected to meet the needs of a small group of struggling readers and writers. Now we are motivated to remedy this issue and address the needs of those students without relying on old measures that have been proven ineffective.
Last summer I met a talented educator, Brent Peters, from Fern Creek High School in Louisville, KY who created a Food Literacy course that engages students through high-interest thematic units based around gardening, cooking, and food culture. A colleague, an administrator, and I went to observe his program and walked away with ideas for creating a model that worked for our school. Now we are developing a combination of collaborative courses to teach reading and writing to struggling learners in ways that engage, rather than frustrate and stifle them.
Our program is called Connect and currently focuses primarily on one sophomore English course modeled after the Food Literacy course at Fern Creek. The class mission is to reconnect struggling students with the school community using the principles of true learning—creativity, critical thinking, engagement, curiosity, community, empathy, purpose, passion, and play—and to guide students in building confidence to take responsibility for their own learning. In addition, we will use backwards design to create a curriculum focused on ACT literacy skills—both literal and inferential questioning, and analyzing an author’s approach, supporting details, sequential, comparative, or cause and effect relationships, meanings of words, and generalizations and conclusions. Because research regarding adolescent literacy has noted that many struggling learners have little experience with complex texts, our classroom materials will be those of literary merit, and we will scaffold our lessons to make these texts more approachable for students. Most importantly, our classroom model will employ thematic units guided by student interest and need, that engage through hands-on and project-based learning. We will build a garden together and plan classroom community meals, then use the garden and meals to create questions together that guide our units, our reading materials, and our writing tasks.
The timeline for building the program begins this spring by identifying students, interviewing and observing them, creating interdisciplinary summer literacy initiatives and meeting with parents. We will also build the garden and assign students a summer schedule for caring for the garden. This summer, we will conduct home visits in order to learn as much as we can about who our students are as individuals, rather than simply their scores on paper. We will also launch a jumpstart camp at the beginning of the school year in order to build community and work in the garden together, so that we can hit the ground running on the first day of school.
In the future, we will expand our program to include both a freshman and junior English class and other classes in various disciplines as well. Ideally, we would love to see our program grow to include other schools in our district and state as well.
This is a guest blog written by one of the teachers in our Innovative Teacher Leader cohort to share about an innovative teacher or practice from their area of the state. To learn more about the work happening in the Commonwealth from these Innovative Teacher Leaders, who are working to redefine teacher leadership in Kentucky, check back throughout the month of March. We’ll be sharing guest blogs all month long.
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