What Are the “Look-Fors” in Secondary Literacy Programs?

Tim Shanahan

Teacher question:

There are lots of “lists” of evidence-based elementary core curricula, but not so much for core ELA programs aimed at adolescents.  Our district is exploring a textbook adoption and is getting pushback from some teachers who just want to teach novels. What are the “look fors” we should consider as we review middle school and high school curricula?

Shanahan responds:

I don’t know of any lists that describe criteria for a sound ELA program for middle and high schools. Perhaps a reader will respond to this entry with one.

Over the past couple of decades, there have been standards and advisory pieces developed by the Carnegie Corporation, Common Core, College Board, and other agencies and individual scholars (many of these are included in the reference list below). These suggest features that a sound secondary English Language Arts program would be expected to include.

None of these guides focuses on teaching with novels, per se, and even a cursory examination of those would make it clear that novel reading alone would be insufficient. That doesn’t mean novel reading could not or should not have a place in these upper grade programs – just that many learning requirements would not be addressable through novel study alone.

The following list includes 8 “look fors” abstracted from these authoritative sources. The items are not in any kind of prioritized order. Perhaps some are more important than others, but they all matter. As you’ll see, several of the items focus more on the texts to be read than on the teaching that is to be provided. That makes sense. Reading comprehension is not a skill per se. Proficient comprehension depends upon understanding how different texts work, knowledge of the world, competence with language, and so on. As such, the texts that we ask kids to read are central to reading comprehension development – it is those texts that expose kids to genre features, information about our world, and language demands.

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