Featured Speakers:
- Kathryn Grogan, Director, Literacy Research and Evaluation Team at WestEd
- Robin Sayers, Research Associate, Literacy Research and Evaluation Team at WestEd
Host:
- Danny Torres, Associate Director, Events and Digital Media at WestEd
Danny Torres:
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the 11th session of our Leading Together series. In these 30-minute learning webinars, WestEd experts are sharing research and evidence-based practices that help bridge opportunity gaps, support positive outcomes for children and adults, and help build thriving communities. Today’s topic, Reading and Writing Across the Content Areas: Helping Students Improve Comprehension in Grades K-5. Our featured speakers today are Robin Sayers, research associate for our literacy team at WestEd, and Kathryn Grogan, senior research associate for our literacy team at WestEd. Thank you all very much for joining us. My name is Danny Torres. I’m associate director of events and digital media for WestEd. I’ll be your host.
Now, before we move into the contents of today’s webinar, I’d like to take a brief moment to introduce WestEd. As a non-partisan research, development, and service agency, WestEd works to promote excellence, improve learning, and increase opportunity for children, youth, and adults. Our staff partner with state, district, school leaders, and others providing a broad range of tailored services, including research and evaluation, professional learning, technical assistance, and policy guidance. We work to generate knowledge and apply evidence and expertise to improve policies, systems, and practices. Now I’d like to pass the mic over to Kathryn. Kathryn, take it away.
Kathryn Grogan:
Thanks so much. So I’d like to introduce myself. I’m Katie Grogan. I direct the WestEd’s Literacy Research and Evaluation team. And I work with a great group of researchers that work with state and local agencies to inform the development and implementation of literacy policy. And I’ve been at WestEd over 13 years. And I’m joined today by my wonderful colleague Robin Sayers. She is a research associate in literacy. She’s also a former elementary teacher turned researcher, and she’s really passionate about translating research into practice. So here’s a little overview of what we’ll be talking about today. First of all, we’re just so excited to have all of you guys joining us to discuss this topic. We’re going to talk about disciplinary literacy, we’ll define what it is, and discuss its importance for building reading comprehension in elementary school classrooms.
Then next, Robin’s gonna walk us through some examples of disciplinary literacy in elementary classrooms in several different content areas. Then we’ll conclude and give a brief overview of some WestEd services that are related to this topic. So first I’d like to just start with a poll and get a sense of where you guys are with this topic. So how familiar are you with the concept of disciplinary literacy? And I’ll give everybody just a little bit of time. All right, so we kind of have a range of people here, which is really excellent. So we have some people that are kind of at the expert level, which is fantastic. Some people who know something about disciplinary literacy but maybe are joining to hear about it in an elementary context. And then some others that have some room to grow.
So again, this is really exciting. Today is really an overview. This is a series of webinars, and so we’ll be continuing to dive into this topic and excited to continue this conversation after today. So first I’ll just talk a little bit about disciplinary literacy. When a lot of educators or researchers hear that, they might immediately think of middle school or high school students in a history class analyzing primary sources, or in a science class writing complex texts, or doing observations during a lab. But really what we’re gonna talk about today is that teaching disciplinary literacy can be done at any class at any age level. So this approach really mirrors what WestEd’s Reading Apprenticeship service line does at the middle and high school levels. And that’s really modeling discipline-specific ways of reading while building student metacognition around those discipline-specific cultures.
So again, when we’re talking about disciplinary literacy, we’re talking about the specialized ways that reading, writing, and oral language are employed in different disciplines. And so unlike general literacy instruction that treats reading and writing as universal skills, disciplinary literacy recognizes that a scientist might read differently than a historian, and that maybe an artist might communicate differently than a mathematician. So they aren’t just different content areas, they’re different ways of thinking, reasoning, and communicating, and those skills that students need to read and write like experts in the field must be taught. So this is kind of an example to drill down on what we’re talking about here. It’s important to recognize that some of the challenges that students might face when engaging with complex discipline specific texts are kind of structural.
So for example, this science journal aimed at fifth grade students shows an example of the unique features of a scientific text, in this case, a journal article that’s gonna include things like diagrams, pictures, and complex vocabulary. And again, these are all things that students need to be exposed to and explicitly taught how to access so that they can really comprehend and make meaning of texts like this. So today we’ll also be talking about the connection between disciplinary literacy and reading comprehension. So we know that background knowledge is crucial for reading comprehension. Research consistently shows that students need both decoding skills and rich content knowledge to truly understand what they read. But it’s not just facts and vocabulary when we’re talking about content knowledge.
It’s also understanding how knowledge is constructed and communicated within different fields. So when we teach disciplinary literacy in elementary grades, we’re building both content knowledge and the metacognitive awareness of how different disciplines approach learning. The same ways of making thinking visible and apprenticing students into disciplinary ways of reading, writing, and thinking apply powerfully to elementary learners.
Robin Sayers:
Awesome, thank you so much, Katie, for that introduction. Now, as Katie mentioned, we’re gonna spend some time reviewing what disciplinary literacy can look like in elementary classrooms. I will provide some high-level examples designed to model that elementary teachers can engage in disciplinary literacy in their classrooms. Unfortunately, with the time we have here today, we will not be able to attend to the varied needs of all learners within a lesson. Future webinars in this series will address literacy for multilingual learners and literacy for students with disabilities. And so Danny will go ahead and drop the link for those in the chat if you’re interested in exploring those topics more. Today we’re hoping to just provide an overview and demonstrate that you can and should engage in disciplinary literacy practices in elementary classrooms.
So with that said, I wanna talk a little bit more about why disciplinary literacy belongs in elementary classrooms. And as Katie mentioned, when we think about middle school texts like the one that’s on the right-hand side of this screen, you might think about complex terminology, unfamiliar organization, and even text density. The text shown here is from some legal proceedings, and the text is tightly packed together. There’s potentially challenging words in there like deliverance and arraignment, and it’s maybe in an organization that students aren’t used to. And so knowing that students will need to read these kinds of texts when they get to middle school, bringing disciplinary literacy into elementary classrooms prepares students to understand and apply strategies across different text types and content areas.
It also introduces them to the concept that different disciplines have different ways of reading, writing, thinking, and knowing. If you are interested in learning more about this topic and why disciplinary literacy belongs in elementary classrooms, there’s a really great blog by our colleague Rachel that Danny will, once again, drop in the chat. That blog has some really great information and also some references if you wanna learn more about the research behind what we’re talking about here today. And so with that said, I also wanna do another poll here. I know we just did one, but I wanna do another one to get a sense of what reading comprehension strategies you all use or encourage others to use in reading instruction.
Awesome, so it looks like we’ve got a number of responses in. And what I see here is that there’s a lot of different strategies that you all use or encourage others to use. There’s a number of things represented here, and it seems like a lot of people selected multiple options. So what I’m hoping you can see with the examples we’re gonna go through today is that many of the reading comprehension strategies you already use or encourage others to use can be applied in discipline-specific ways with elementary students. So with that in mind, our first example today is gonna look at what disciplinary literacy could look like in an English language arts lesson in fourth and fifth grades. This example lesson involves teaching students to identify the theme in a poem. However, it centers around the idea of reading like a literary critic.
There’s some example poems listed on the slide: “City Autumn,” “September,” “Bird’s Nests,” that you could use to do this work. But in reality, you could use any poem. To introduce students to this lesson, it would be framed around what literary criticism is and what literary critics do. So literary criticism is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. And literary critics analyze, interpret, and evaluate literary works. They pay close attention to author word choice and the feelings evoked to understand themes or messages within texts. This example lesson uses a framework that aligns with the reciprocal think-aloud strategy from WestEd’s Reading Apprenticeship program that Katie mentioned earlier.
The reciprocal think-aloud strategy includes teacher modeling to make their thinking explicit, and then student practice with modeling their thinking and applying the strategies. The reciprocal think-aloud strategy used in WestEd’s Reading Apprenticeship program has been shown to work well in supporting students’ comprehension. So using that strategy as a framework, the lesson would start with teacher modeling for students how a literary critic might engage with a poem, modeling for students how do identify keywords, visualize what those keywords bring up, and evaluate author’s voice to better understand their intended message or theme. On the slide, you can see some example phrases that a teacher could use to do this, talking about what literary critics do, right?
So saying, “I know literary critics pay close attention to word choice. I’m seeing this word and this is what it makes me think.” Also thinking about author intentionality, right? So saying, “I think the author was with this word choice, trying to evoke these feelings.” And also thinking about understanding an author’s intended message, right? So as a literary critic, it’s important to analyze these messages and this is what’s coming up from those feelings. To continue the lesson, students would work in small group or partner work practicing those skills that they had just seen modeled. They can practice sharing their thinking aloud and listening to their peers thinking. As needed, students can be reminded of how literary critics attend to texts and the importance of using text-based evidence to back up their thinking.
It might also be useful to share with students the importance of literary critic work and word choice in poems, because, as we can see from the excerpt of “Bird’s Nests” that’s here on the screen, poems often have fewer words than other texts. And so those words were selected really intentionally. So paying close attention to them is a key part of being a literary critic. Students can then conduct the same work independently, keeping in mind that critical work of evaluating author’s choices and using evidence to support their thinking. Even though it’s not what we’re really getting into today, as a reminder, different types of scaffolding can be provided to students as needed, including graphic organizers, sentence frames, and other scaffolds.
So hopefully from that example, it demonstrated how you might modify some existing comprehension strategies in discipline-specific ways. Now we’re gonna look at another example of what disciplinary literacy could look like in a social studies second or third grade classroom. This is an example lesson that follows the same framework that we modeled last time with the teacher modeling and then student small group or partner work, as well as independent work. For this example, students would use images and captions to understand text. However, once again, we would be applying this in a discipline-specific way. In this case, students would be asked to think like a historian.
There are two texts listed on the slide, “Life in the West” and “Settling the West,” that you could use to talk about understanding community needs and doing this work. But once again, this can be done with any text that has images and captions tied together and connects to a social studies construct. Once again, we would introduce the work tying it to a discipline, in this case, who historians are and what historians do. So historians are people who study the past to understand how and why things happened and how they change over time. Part of a historian’s job is to review information from sources like documents, images, maps, and artifacts to understand what life was like in the past. They may to piece together information from different sources or look closely at the details and captions on images to understand texts.
On the right-hand side of the screen, you can see here an image with a caption that might come up if a historian was studying early Western settlements. Following our earlier example, this lesson would start with teacher modeling to make thinking explicit on how a historian would make connections between images and captions and think about that information, as well as study details within images to understand what those communities needed. On the slide, there’s some example phrases. Once again, we could say things like, “I know historians use pictures and captions,” right? “I see this caption and this is what it makes me think.” We also might talk about attending closely to information and saying, “I can see these details,” right? “I know that historians use details and images, and I can see they had stores and horse-drawn wagons.”
You also might model for students thinking about the implications of what you see and read, right? “The caption tells me towns grew around railroads, thinking like a historian, these details are telling me…” And so modeling that explicit thinking for how historians engaged in texts. And again, we can see an example on the screen of an image and a caption that could be used for doing this work. To continue the lessons, students would practice during small group or partner work, pairing up with images and doing that same work. Not all of those sources would need to be images. They could also be maps with captions like the one shown on the slide. But students would do that same work of thinking like a historian and using those details to understand the information.
Once again, students could then have independent practice time using images and captions to understand their texts and learn about the past. As with the previous lesson, you can provide any scaffolds that are needed for your students. So hopefully you can once again see in that example that we can support reading comprehension through teaching students to engage with all parts of texts, including images and captions, while also supporting disciplinary literacy. This final example that we are gonna look at is a kindergarten and first grade science lesson example. The hope here is to show you that disciplinary literacy strategies can be used with even our youngest elementary learners.
This example comes from some research being conducted at the Baylor College of Medicine that WestEd is also a part of. The research explores the use of an authentic language and literacy science curriculum that supports integrating science-specific disciplinary literacies into elementary classrooms. Danny will go ahead and drop a research article from that work into the chat if you’re interested in exploring more. And also the image on this slide and the next two slides comes from their research. This lesson would build upon the connection between reading and writing, asking students to take notes during observations, since, as we know, those early writing skills can support comprehension. However, as with all of our examples, we’re doing this in a discipline-specific way, in this case, teaching students to write like a scientist.
Once again, there’s some examples of some animals and habitat elements, snails, caterpillars, leaves that you might use for your observations, but this could be done to any scientific lesson. To introduce the work, once again, it would be framed around who scientists are and what they do. So scientists are people who work to understand the world around them by conducting observations, right? Part of their job is to use their senses like sight, touch, or smell to gather evidence to understand the world. On the right-hand side, you can see a drawing of a pill bug that a student observed, munch, munch, munching on some lettuce, and they wrote and drew their observations. Following the earlier examples, the lesson would start with modeling, showing students how to write and to conduct observations like a scientist.
We can, once again, see some examples. They’re really the same as before. It’s just using those clues of, “I know scientists closely observe, scientists use their senses. I see a snail has two tentacles,” right? “That’s what I’m gonna go draw.” And you can see the student that’s work is pictured here did draw a snail with two tentacles and also took some notes on their observations. Once again, students would practice during small group and independent time working together to conduct observations and practice recording those observations. Then students can also have independent practice time, perhaps on a nature walk, perhaps at home, and they can do the work of writing down and drawing their observations and engaging in the work of a scientist.
In this case, this little girl did an observation at home where she observed some ladybugs while she was at her house, and she both drew her observation of her ladybugs and she wrote down her observation. So I hope these examples have demonstrated that bringing disciplinary literacy into elementary classrooms does not involve reinventing the wheel. Rather, with intentionality and discipline-specific framing, we can support student knowledge of discipline-specific ways of thinking and sharing information while also supporting student comprehension. And this work can be done with even our youngest elementary learners. And so with that said, I’m gonna pass it back to Katie to close us out.
Kathryn Grogan:
Thanks so much, Robin. So just a couple of concluding thoughts. I think Robin did a nice job of summarizing, but we hope what you took away from this is that there are some specific things you might consider integrating into your classroom, or if you’re at a higher level, thinking about integrating into your district or state. So specifically, we emphasize the importance of how to integrate discipline-specific strategies in K-5 classrooms. This really helps to introduce students to the specialized ways of reading, writing, and thinking about work within different knowledge domains and disciplines. And importantly, this really supports reading comprehension by helping to build background knowledge for approaches to understanding information in addition to the content itself.
So here are some of the services that we drew from today that we’d like to make note of. So as we talked about, Reading Apprenticeship is an evidence-based framework and professional learning program that helps readers by integrating metacognition, collaboration, and discipline-specific literacy practices. And you’ll see there, if you visit readingapprenticeship.org, you can get a lot more information about our fantastic teammates. Writing Apprenticeship is also a new professional development model, an instructional approach that aligns with Reading Apprenticeship but is more geared towards middle and high school humanities educators to support students with real world writing practices. And again, there is a link to that up here, and we’ll put that in the chat as well if you’re interested.
And then lastly, another service that we have here at WestEd is Making Sense of Science. During that professional learning, teachers engage in and reflect on these same metacognitive reviews. And Reading Apprenticeship has also been integral to the way that Making Sense of Science thinks about literacy and science. So those are really kind of connected across, which is the other point here. And again, we’ve got the URL there that you could go to if you wanna learn more about that service area. There’s a lot more work to be done in this area. As Robin noted, that blog that she linked to has some great research. But we’d love to partner. In the future, if this is something that you’re interested in bringing into elementary classrooms in your district or school, we’d love to chat. And now we’ll turn it back over to Danny.
Danny Torres:
Yeah, thank you Katie and Robin for a great session today, and thank you to all our participants for joining us. We really appreciate you being here. For more information about the Reading Apprenticeship services, visit us online at readingapprenticeship.org. For more information about our writing apprenticeship services, visit us online at wested.org/support/writing-apprenticeship. And you can learn more about our Making Sense of Science services at mss.wested.org. Please feel free to reach out to Katie and Robin via email if you have any questions about the work we discussed today. You can reach Katie at [email protected]. And you can reach Robin at [email protected].
And there’s still time to register for our upcoming Leading Together webinars. We’re covering a range of topics including literacy, mathematics, assessment, artificial intelligence, and more. During these webinars, we’re sharing insights and evidence-based practices to improve teaching, leading, and learning. For more information about our Leading Together webinars, visit us online at wested.org/leading-together-2025. And finally, you can also sign up for WestEd’s email newsletter to receive updates. Subscribe online at wested.org/subscribe, or you can scan the QR code displayed on the screen here. You can also follow us on LinkedIn and Bluesky. With that, thank you all very much. We’ll see you next time.