Blog Post

To Plan Together or Not to Plan Together: Why is That a Question?

Teaching for biliteracy is different than teaching for monoliteracy…but in a typical school they may coexist under one roof or across one grade level. There are valuable benefits to collaborating with same-grade partner teachers, but it is also crucial to maintain a multilingual perspective and honor the differences inherent in literacy instruction for each context. So how do educators who teach for biliteracy collaborate with their peers who teach for monoliteracy?

It is possible! The key to this collaboration is starting at the core of teaching children how to read and write—the meaning. Whether you are nurturing literacy in one language or two, you need to have a topic to read and write (and talk!) about. Teachers can work together to establish a meaningful context for literacy instruction by developing shared units that can be applied (with some adaptations) across programs. Their collaboration can begin with consideration of three aspects of a unit.

 

Developing the Content of the Unit

The content of the unit stems from the standards for science, social studies, and language arts. Teachers in both contexts can collaborate to develop and enhance the content of an integrated unit by discussing the following questions:

♦ What big ideas and enduring understandings do we want students to develop?

♦ What essential questions will we propose to students to nurture  those      understandings?

♦ What kind of reading and writing will students need to do during their investigations?

♦ What science or social studies standards will this unit address?

♦ What language arts standards will this unit address?

Unpacking the Standards the Unit Addresses

The discussion around the questions above helps teachers define the content foci of the unit (social studies/science and language arts), after which they can collaborate to unpack the related standards. The process of unpacking the standards equips teachers with the requisite knowledge to write clear and focused objectives, and to sequence them logically. It also informs the development of assessment tasks and related checklists/rubrics, which can be created together and then adapted to meet the needs of each context.

Selecting Key Language Students Will Need During the Unit

Once teachers are clear on the content foci of a unit, they can turn their attention to the language foci. Teachers can collaborate to select key language related to the content and to the literacy-related demands of the unit. The Speaking and Listening standards that play such a prominent role in the Common Core State Standards for every student are useful in this step. Both teachers can discuss the following questions:

♦ What language will students encounter during the unit and what language is essential for students to comprehend the content?

• What is they key vocabulary in this unit? (word level)

• What sentence structures will students need to understand or use when they read and write during this unit? (sentence level)

• Are there unique discourse patterns that are common to this discipline that students will need to understand or apply in their reading and writing? (discourse level)

♦ What language do students need to communicate with each other during the unit?

• What key phrases and sentence frames can we introduce to facilitate student interaction?

♦ What language will students need to demonstrate their knowledge and mastery of the content?

Each teacher can then select and use the language that makes sense for his or her respective context. A teacher of language learners may choose key words that are essential to comprehension of a concept, while a teacher of monolingual students might select rarer words that will enrich students’ existing vocabularies. Both teachers can consider what language at the sentence and discourse levels will support students’ communication with each other during the unit. The thinking and discussion that teachers do together can then be applied uniquely to their respective contexts in ways that preserve the needs of each context.

 

These three areas of collaboration (developing content, unpacking standards, and selecting key language) are all part of the first phase of planning a biliteracy unit. This first phase, where the collaboration is based on sharing and exploring ideas, builds common ground between those who teach for biliteracy and those who teach for monoliteracy.

The next post in this series will elaborate on how this foundation supports continued collaboration based on sharing instructional strategies and resources as teachers consider the activities they will engage in during the unit.