Task, text, and talk: Literacy for all subjects

Disciplinary literacy builds secondary students ' academic content knowledge and their reading, writing, and thinking skills at the same time. An important and difficult challenge facing education today is raising the literacy achievement of secondary school students. Some schools tackle this challenge by training whole faculties in generic reading and writing strategies to implement across the curriculum. But many content-area teachers quite reasonably resist this solution because they are already expected to teach more biology, history, or algebra content than time permits. And they have a point: Setting literacy instruction and content instruction side by side in competition for time and attention may dilute disciplinary rigor. Bucking the trend of using generic approaches across all content areas to improve students ' literacy, some teacher leaders1 working in mathematics, science, history, and English language arts have studied and implemented a new approach to middle and high school literacy instruction. Disciplinary literacy is based on the premise that students can develop deep conceptual knowledge in a discipline only by using the habits of reading, writing, talking, and thinking which that discipline values and uses. The disciplinary literacy framework, introduced in 2002 by the Institute for Learning at the University of Pittsburgh, is grounded in five principles for designing rigorous, inquiry-based instruction that integrates academic content and discipline-appropriate habits of thinking. The following stories show how teachers are bringing disciplinary literacy principles to life. Principle 1: Knowledge and thinking must go hand in hand. To develop complex knowledge in any discipline, students need opportunities to read, reason, investigate, speak, and write about the overarching concepts within that discipline. Because of time constraints and coverage concerns, many teachers understandably choose to teach either content or process instead of marrying the two. But to build students ' literacy in a specific discipline, instruction must do both at once