Content area
Full Text
No Child Left Behind. Adequate Yearly Progress. High-stakes testing. Performance standards. Reading on grade level. Writing on demand. No matter where you turn in education today, language arts teachers are shouldering a lot of the responsibility for preparing students to pass state tests. How can it all get done in a 45-minute middle school period called Language Arts?
For those of us who teach this subject, we know that it can't all get done. Because of this, it is critical that we manage our middle school day in creative ways so that students are taught and practice language arts skills in all of their classes. We know the jargon all too well: reading in the content areas, interdisciplinary units, and writing across the curriculum. Our challenges are supporting the staff and finding the time in all of our classes to make it happen.
I am the literacy support teacher for nine middle schools in the Anchorage School District. We have about 7,500 students in our middle schools with 93 different languages spoken and a mobility rate close to 20%. We are an urban district with all of the problems associated with urban schools in the lower 48. We have miraculously held on to our middle school concept since its inception ten years ago even with district and state funding crises year after year after year. Most of our schools operate on a 7-period day. Students have four core classes, PE, and two electives. Staff teach four periods of core subjects and one elecrive. They have a planning period and a team planning time. It is this team planning time that raises eyebrows from those seeking educational budget cuts each year, but it is also this team planning time where critical coordination takes place to make middle schools function as they should.
I had spent two years emailing weekly literacy tips to the language arts teachers-random strategies from all of our best literacy leaders: Janet Alien, Linda Hoyt, Linda Rief, Jeff Wilhelm, and a host of others. Feedback was always positive, but I soon realized that I was going about this in the wrong way. With a plethora of strategies from which to choose, teachers were overwhelmed and inefficient, causing instruction to become hit or miss....