Engaging teachers' beliefs
It is very important that you engage with teachers’ existing beliefs about literacy learning and teaching:
“Teachers are likely to reject new ideas that conflict with their current ideas unless, as part of the professional learning, their existing understandings are engaged. Without such engagement, teachers are likely to dismiss new strategies as unrealistic and inappropriate for their particular contexts. Similarly, they are likely to reject new content as irrelevant. Engaging teachers’ existing ideas means discussing how those ideas differ from the ideas being promoted and assessing the impact that the new approaches might have on their students... it is particularly important to engage existing theories when challenging teachers’ beliefs about, and expectations of, those students who have traditionally underachieved” (Timperley, 2008, p. 17).
Teachers’ willingness to engage deeply in professional development will be affected by how much they believe that improving students’ literacy:
The belief that teachers can make a difference is called teacher efficacy. The belief that teachers and leaders working together can make more of a difference is known as collective efficacy. An important part of the Literacy Leader role is to consistently promote individual teacher and collective efficacy.
Some ways to build individual teacher and collective efficacy include the following:
Three important ideas that come through in the research literature are that:
1. Young people need advanced literacy to be successful citizens
“Adolescents entering the adult world in the 21st century will read and write more than at any other time in human history. They will need advanced levels of literacy to perform their jobs, run their households, act as citizens, and conduct their personal lives. They will need literacy to cope with the flood of information they will find everywhere they turn. They will need literacy to feed their imaginations so they can create the world of the future. In a complex and sometimes even dangerous world, their ability to read will be crucial”
(Moore, Bean, Birdyshaw, & Rycik, 1999, p. 3).
Consider:
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2. Literacy has a major influence on overall achievement!
It may be useful to discuss these ideas with teachers:
3. Literacy demands become more specialised at secondary school
No matter how effective their primary teachers were, your students will need ongoing literacy instruction because the literacy demands of secondary subject classrooms are so different.
Shanahan and Shanahan (2008) argue that the ‘disciplinary literacy’ skills needed in secondary school content areas are “more sophisticated but less generalizable”. They identify three stages of literacy development:
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The Literacy Learning Progressions describe the literacy-related knowledge, skills and attitudes that students need at different levels.
From the time they start high school, your students will read and write texts that:
Students will need ongoing literacy instruction from their different subject teachers to meet these challenges.
Teachers may need support to identify the particular literacy challenges of their subject. One good starting point is to have subject teachers bring examples of subject texts (for example, text books, assignments, NCEA tasks) to a staff meeting. You could then ask them to identify potential difficulties these texts might pose for students (for example, in terms of reading, writing, understanding vocabulary, and organisation).
You could then support teachers to see that many of these literacy demands could only ever be addressed in their own subject area. For example, an English teacher will probably never teach students to:
Three important concepts when using student data to engage teachers in literacy PD are the following:
Benchmarks: To make a judgment about a student’s achievement you need to have something valid with which to compare it. Useful benchmarks include curriculum expectations and national means. It is most useful to compare student achievement in your school with external benchmarks (such as national means or similar schools).
Level and Progress: It is important to analyse both students’ levels and their rate of progress. Teachers should obviously be concerned about students who have relatively low levels of literacy and are making low progress. However, they should also be concerned about students who have relatively high achievement levels but who are making low progress.
Disaggregation: It is important to look at the achievement of different groups separately. Important groups to look at include groups based on ethnicity, gender, and language background. It is particularly important that teachers understand the achievement patterns of Māori students, Pasifika students and English Language Learners (ELLs). A key focus for schools is to lift the achievement of diverse learners though effective literacy teaching and learning practices. Understanding how different groups are currently achieving is vital if teachers are to realise the potential of all learners.
At the beginning of a literacy intervention, student voice can be used to find out their knowledge and beliefs about:
Ministry of Education (2007). The New Zealand Curriculum. Wellington, New Zealand: Learning Media Limited.
Moore, D. W., Bean, T. W., Birdyshaw, D., & Rycik, J. A. (1999). Adolescent literacy: A position statement. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 43, 97-112.
Pawley, A. 1984. School English is nobody's mother tongue: reflections on vernacular and school acquired language. In A Berry (ed.) Communication. Papers from the 20th extension course lectures. Auckland: Auckland Institute and Museum.
Shanahan, T., & Shanahan, C. (2008). Teaching disciplinary literacy to adolescents: Rethinking content-area literacy. Harvard Educational Review, 78(1), 40-59.
Timperley, H. (2008). Teacher professional learning and development. Educational Practice Series – 18. Netherlands: International Academy of Education / International Bureau of Education.
Timperley, H., Wilson, A., Barrar, H., & Fung, I. (2007). Teacher professional learning and development: Best evidence synthesis iteration (BES). Wellington, New Zealand: Ministry of Education.
In order to engage teachers in rethinking their theories, Te Kotahitanga employed a Kaupapa Māori strategy of ‘collaborative storying’. Early in the professional development experience, teachers were presented with stories that had been compiled during an earlier phase of the project. These stories came from students (both engaged and non-engaged), their parents/whānau, principals, and teachers and concerned the influences on students’ educational engagement and achievement. There were marked differences between the descriptions of daily realities provided by the students themselves, those parenting them, principals, and teachers. The extremes were represented by the teachers and the students.
“Teachers attributed the difficulties experienced by Māori students to personal deficiencies. They pathologised the daily experience of Māori students—many believing that Māori learners were simply less capable of educational achievement because of limited language skills and poor home backgrounds. But the students’ powerful stories focused primarily on their classroom experiences and their relationships and interactions with teachers. They recounted the negative attitudes and beliefs they experienced, and their sense of being excluded when teachers mispronounced their names and Māori words. They were also able to identify positive relationships—with teachers who knew and trusted them and made an effort to know them as Māori. In addition, they described how their achievement could be enhanced through a range of alternative pedagogical approaches that essentially were more discursive and inclusive than the expert–novice transmission model that that was their experience in many classrooms” .
Timperley et al., 2007, p. 171
Published on: 05 Jan 2018
