In this reader submission, Dr Sonja Gedde – Vice Principal and director of professional learning at Fossil Ridge High School in Colorado – shares a strategy of creating ‘RAD’ tasks to help educators in their planning and collaboration for disciplinary literacy instruction.
Research has shown secondary students can benefit from literacy instruction that helps learners understand the specialised ways literacy functions in various disciplines. This movement toward disciplinary literacy is changing the way teachers conceptualise their instructional practices, demanding higher levels of text and task complexity (Shanahan & Shanahan, 2008 & 2012).
What is disciplinary literacy?
Disciplinary literacy is a pedagogical framework supporting the idea that knowledge construction is unique in every discipline, therefore, the literacies accompanying knowledge construction (reading, writing, viewing, thinking, and communicating) must be adapted accordingly (Lent & Voigt, 2019).
For example, the way a historian reads, writes, or inquires differs from the way a scientist or artist might. As a result, a disciplinary approach confirms that different skills and habits of thinking are necessary when engaging the literacies of each discipline.
In this framework, the concept of ‘text’ is not confined to traditional iterations, and the nature of academic tasks should be modelled after authentic disciplinary tasks.
Utilising disciplinary literacy to support learning
Disciplinary literacy issues an exciting invitation for students to serve in an intellectual apprenticeship with classmates and teachers, capable of engaging content the way experts in the field might. Teachers who utilise a disciplinary approach emerge as disciplinary role models, participating in the learning themselves as experts engineering opportunities for students to engage authentically in the discipline.
This happens because a disciplinary approach does not prioritise teaching discrete, de-contextualised reading skills and strategies. Rather, this approach encourages students to understand that knowledge construction varies from discipline to discipline. The skills needed for navigating texts and tasks should replicate the skills necessitated by the discipline.
As such, students learn how to do the reading, writing, thinking, and communicating of a content area like mathematics as a mathematician would, understanding mathematical texts as unique from the texts of another content area, requiring different approaches and habits of thinking.
For example, incorporating a disciplinary literacy approach into calculus instruction at Fossil Ridge High requires students to move beyond merely performing calculations and rather, reckon with mathematics as a discipline by considering the language of calculus, explaining and justifying reasoning through speaking and writing, and making connections between abstract concepts and real-world applications.
Students could be tasked to apply calculus to real world optimisation problems about manufacturing and cost function, or modelling and then explaining population growth through differential equations. By applying these specific examples within a disciplinary literacy framework, calculus students gain a deeper understanding of the content area, moving beyond rote memorisation of formulas to engaging with the discipline as a form of communication, reasoning, and real-world problem-solving.
Complex disciplinary tasks engage students in a learning-by-doing mentality, as intentional, active producers of knowledge – participants versus passive recipients.
Using RAD tasks in developing disciplinary literacy
Student engagement is best maintained when an academic task mimics disciplinary practice. However, in our experience, a lack of metrics to help define what may constitute a task as ‘complex’ makes this pursuit challenging for teachers. Due to the tyranny of urgency that governs the daily reality of the secondary classroom, I wanted to create a simple, memorable tool to help educators gauge instructional tasks for disciplinary complexity.
This tool answered a call issued by our school district’s vested interest in auditing the calibre of our post-pandemic literacy instruction. Disciplinary literacy emerged as a relevant framework through which to address variable needs of readers, particularly when applied at the secondary level. While it was clear our teachers agreed with the need to address learning loss and create meaningful literary experiences in high schools, knowing how to do this across content areas was challenging.
Analysis of the current research relative to disciplinary literacy revealed 3 thematic areas as paramount to the development of complex disciplinary instructional tasks: Relevant inquiry, Authenticity, and Disciplinary literacy entrance points.
We adopted the acronym ‘RAD’ to create a quick and memorable framework for educators. RAD is a construct presented through our professional learning framework that has become a staple tool utilised by our teachers in their short- and long-term instructional planning and collaborative processes. They implement the components of ‘RAD’ by using the following descriptors to measure the complexity of their instructional task design.
(R) Relevant inquiry: asks educators to ensure tasks help students engage with meaningful disciplinary questions. Disciplinary literacy encourages the development of questions that pose personal dilemmas of consequence and questions that prepare learners to enter the real world of problem identification and solution relative to a discipline (Ippolito et al., 2019). Relevant, thoughtful questioning enables students to explore complex ideas, uncover assumptions, expose deeply held beliefs, and recognise hidden contradictions. In an environment of relevant inquiry, teachers and students move dialogue forward together, giving learners the opportunity to operate from an investigative position.
(A) Authenticity: requires educators to interrogate which classroom tasks closely mirror the work of professionals in the discipline. In short, do tasks frame important problems to provide authentic purposes for students to read, write, and communicate? Complex authentic tasks help learners see the ‘life worthiness’ of their work, translating the activities of the classroom into activities located in the world.
(D) Disciplinary literacy entrance points: involves questioning how tasks allow students to interact with course content in discipline-specific ways. Are students asking unanswered questions, engaging in meaningful research, studying complex texts, or writing, thinking, viewing, or collaborating through a means that honours a discipline-specific approach?
Keeping tasks ‘RAD’
Tasks that deliberately engage students through relevant inquiry, with authenticity, and provide entrance points into discipline-specific approaches, rekindle teachers’ and students’ curiosity about the world and empower them to collaboratively explore real questions about their own lives and environment.
By taking this approach at Fossil Ridge High, students are benefitting from understanding the specialised ways literacy functions in various disciplines; and by using the metric ‘RAD’, we are helping educators to negotiate the busy demands of instructional design. In this case, the simplest of tools can help generate an incredibly complex outcome.
References
Ippolito, J., Wilder, P., & Condie, C. (2017, June 14). The Key to Effective Disciplinary Literacy Instruction. Inquiries, tasks, and texts that matter to students in K-12. edCircuit. https://edcircuit.com/the-key-to-effective-disciplinary-literacy-instruction/
Lent, R. C., & Voigt, M. M. (2019). Lent, R. C., & Voigt, M. M. (2018). Disciplinary Literacy in Action: How to create and sustain a school-wide culture of deep reading, writing, and thinking. Corwin Press.
Shanahan, T., & Shanahan, C. (2008). Teaching disciplinary literacy to adolescents: Rethinking content-area literacy. Harvard Educational Review, 78(1), 40-59. https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.78.1.v62444321p602101
Shanahan, T., & Shanahan, C. (2012). What is disciplinary literacy and why does it matter? Topics in Language Disorders, 32(1), 7-18. https://doi.org/10.1097/TLD.0b013e318244557a
In this article, Dr Sonja Gedde shares a tool created to help teachers in their planning and collaboration for classroom instruction.
As a school leader, what are the supports required by your own teachers in planning for lessons? Is this something that already exists as a resource or professional learning program? Is it something that needs to be developed specifically for your own context?
