Focus on Literacy What is essential for schools

Focus on Literacy • “What is ‘essential’ for schools? Three simple things: reasonably coherent curriculum (what we teach); sound lessons (how we teach); and far more purposeful reading and writing in every discipline, or authentic literacy (integral to both what and how we teach. )” Mike Schmoker (2011) Focus: Elevating the Essentials, p. 2

Literacy to Learn Content • Higher cognitive functions, such as analysis and synthesis, seem to develop most fully only with the support system of verbal language— particularly, it seems, of written language. • …writing, through its cycle involving hand, eye, and brain, marks a uniquely powerful multirepresentational mode for learning. Janet Emig “Writing as a Mode of Learning”

Writing Is… • • • Generative Thought made visible A record of experience Varied in form Active, engaging, personal

Writing ~ Thinking ~ Learning • “…as a writer I had made clear to myself some subject I had previously known nothing about by just putting one sentence after another—by reasoning my way in sequential steps to its meaning. I thought of how often the act of writing even the simplest document – a letter, for instance – had clarified my half-formed ideas. Writing and thinking and learning were the same process. ” William Zinsser (1988) Writing to Learn, p. viii