Suggested Strategies and Resources
For a discussion of strategies, roles of teachers and students in the collaborative classroom, and explanations for why a collaborative classroom is an effective component of literacy support, see
http://www.ncrel.org/sdrs/areas/rpl_esys/collab.htm. Examples across the curriculum are also provided.
For a description of research-based strategies that high school teachers can use to stimulate student interaction with texts, see http://cela.albany.edu/newslet/spring97/miller.html.
For a very interesting description of the use of a critical literacy framework to get students to interact with one another and the material at hand,
see http://www.readingonline.org/articles/willis/
For some excellent suggestions of a variety of ways to have students interact with text, see http://www.criticalreading.com/waystoreadtoc.htm
For a description of the process of collaborative strategic reading, a
collection of strategies that supports struggling readers to interact
with each other and improve reading comprehension, see
http://www.dldcec.org/pdf/teaching_how-tos/using_collaborative.pdf.
This strategy has been particularly helpful and successful with ELLs.
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Questions to Think About
Before you can implement this Key Component, your stakeholders will need to consider some or all of these questions. The questions could be used in group discussions, needs sensing activities, and informal small-group conversations.
- How does our current school culture explicitly and implicitly promote literacy development as a meaningful and worthwhile activity? How does our current school culture explicitly and implicitly undermine literacy development as a meaningful and
worthwhile activity?
- What kinds of literacy identities do our students develop? What can we do to support more students in developing more positive
literacy identities? What kinds of attitude shifts on the part of students, teachers, administrators, and parents would that
involve? What kinds of structural changes might that involve?
- How well do classrooms across the content areas meet the criteria for connections, interaction, and responsiveness--and,
therefore, set the context for optimal literacy development for diverse learners?
- What are the challenges in creating more classroom experiences that meet the criteria of connections, interaction, and
responsiveness? How can these challenges be met?
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