Linking Literacies

The signals are all around us: school supplies on sale at Target, commercials about having cool new school clothes are on TV and pre-school staff development has begun.  School is about to start! (It may even cool off soon)

Today, we had the second of a three day Linking Literacies conference.  It was great to walk around the halls and chat with my fellow teachers.  It felt for me the way the first day of school must feel for my students: catching up, making social plans and finally getting to the business of work. 

My piece of the presentation was on Content Area Literacy.  It was so much fun to be able to share tools and strategies to deepen understanding that I’ve used over the past years with other teachers.  There was some reciprocal sharing: teachers adding to what was presented based on their own experiences.

The presentation was framed by Thinking Processes: Summarizing, Inferring, Questioning, etc. We asked the participants to consider two questions with regards to that after we presented each strategy:

What Thinking was fostered by this strategy?  and How can you make this Thinking more transparent for your students?

While we knew that these questions were very deep, we hoped that they would settle into participant’s subconsciousness and be examined periodically throughout the year.  Not only to answer the questions, but to let the questions inform their lesson design.

I know that I will!