5 Tips for Tackling the Challenges of Teaching Literacy
Literacy consultants share the top five tactics teachers use to engage students and accommodate a range of abilities in the classroom.
Wendy McMahon - January 19, 2018
We recently met with a group of Canadian literacy consultants who work with thousands of teachers across the country, and asked them to share the common challenges facing literacy teachers.
You won’t be surprised to hear that student engagement and the diverse range of student abilities topped the list of their daily struggles.
But along with the challenges, these consultants also see teachers finding effective ways to overcome these obstacles. Here they share the top five tactics literacy teachers use to engage students and accommodate a range of literacy levels and abilities.
Include digital and visual content
The literacy consultants we spoke with were passionate about the importance of adding digital and visual content as a way of engaging students and supporting instruction. They explained that teachers found using images, online tools, videos and even music can help them meet students where they are and expand student thinking.
If you’re reading a poem, students can also watch a related TEDTalk, read an aligned blog post or study a related painting.
Employ oral language strategies
Focusing on speaking helps create better writers. This is why a strong oral component can enrich your literacy program in many ways. You can start by providing all (even the most reluctant) students with speaking and presentation opportunities.
Students can practice and then deliver a PowerPoint presentation or spend five minutes teaching the class about a personal hobby or interest.
You could assign ten minutes per week and employ the oral storytelling strategy outlined by Connie Dierking and Sherra Jones in their book, Oral Mentor Texts. With a relatively small time commitment this strategy engages students while building confidence and comprehension skills.
Here’s an outline of how it works;
Identify a shared experience.
Build the story. Compose the experience into an oral story, keeping in mind your students’ needs as well as literacy goals and guidelines identified by your school or district. (This is done by the teacher, in preparation for literacy instruction with students. In this way, you decide what skills are to be taught and which craft moves the mentor story will help your students practice. [In other words the teacher determines which skills to teach and which strategies to practice])
Practice the story. Using predictable structures of gestures and symbols, students learn the story and are able to recite it from memory.
Perform the story. Presenting the story to an audience is the publication.
Use the story as a scaffold for comprehension during reading and writing.1
Use provocation and inquiry
One literacy consultant commented that literacy lessons, “need to trigger students to think--‘I need to know more about this.’”
Many teachers use provocations and inquiry-based projects to differentiate instruction for students while encouraging them to think creatively and explore a topic more deeply. Start with one essential question and let students explore the topic through a variety of sources – books, websites, videos etc.
Karyn Callaghan, president of the Ontario Reggio Association, gives a wonderful description in this video of how provocation works and how it can help students explore and teachers encourage deeper thinking.
Stock up on high-interest, low-vocabulary books
Big kids don’t want to read “little kid” books–-it can be embarrassing and they usually aren’t interested in the subject. That makes finding engaging books for struggling readers difficult. But the effort is worth the outcome. The literacy consultants we spoke with found high-interest, low-vocabulary books were essential to engaging struggling readers.
If you’re struggling to find high-interest, low-vocabulary texts, here are a few suggestions to help you find texts that grab student interest at an appropriate reading level.
Arm yourself with support
The amount of free resources, examples and information available to teachers online is staggering, but the sheer volume makes finding the best of that content difficult and time-consuming. To help, here are a couple of our favourite resources for educators looking to overcome some of the challenges of literacy instruction.
- Richard Byrne’s website Free Technology for Teachers is chock-full of resources and tips on using technology for literacy (and other areas) in your classroom.
- Edutopia, has a great page filled with links to examples of how schools are using inquiry based learning as well as samples and resources to guide you.