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The Conference on English Leadership (CEL) of the National Council of Teachers of English is an organization dedicated to bring-ing together English language arts leaders to further their continuing efforts to study and improve the teaching of English language arts. The CEL reaches out to department chairs, teachers, specialists, supervisors, coordinators, and others who are responsible for shaping effective English instruction. The CEL strives to respond to the needs and interests germane to effective English instruction from kinder-garten through college, within the local school, the central administration, the state, and the national level.

It is the policy of NCTE in its journals and other publications to provide a forum for the open discussion of ideas concerning the content and the teaching of English and the language arts. Publicity accorded to any particular point of view does not imply endorsement by the Executive Committee, the Board of Directors,or the membership at large, except in announce- ments of policy where such endorsement is clearly specified.

English Leadership Quarterly (ISSN 1054-1578 [print]; 1943-3050 [online]) is published four times a year in August, October, February, and April for the Conference on English Lead-ership by the National Council of Teachers of

Working in isolation, without time or meaningful support for their profes-sional development, most teachers will produce ordinary results. But if schools become places of professional learning and practice for teachers, then teachers, collectively, can enable students to thrive.

—Ken Doane (2013)

PLCs establish relationships of trust and comfort, making members feel free to share information across PLCs, to talk honestly about student needs, and to offer critical suggestions for better practice that will support all students.

—Sandra Hughes-Hassell, Amanda Brasfield, and Debbie Dupree (2012)

When a dozen dedicated English, social studies, and science teachers from Uni-

Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration with Informational Text Susan Chenelle, University Academy Charter High School, Jersey City, New Jersey, and Audrey A. Fisch, New Jersey City University

versity Academy Charter High School in Jersey City gave up the last day of their spring break for professional development on the Common Core, PARCC, and informational text, little did they know that they would be forming a teacher-led professional learning community focused on har-nessing the power of cross-disciplinary collaboration to prepare for PARCC, enhance their students’ literacy, and support the success of their own teach-ing. We were inspired by the varied insights the teachers brought to this lively and productive session.

Since our goal was to promote cross-disciplinary collaboration, we began the workshop with assigned seats: teachers were seated by grade level, and each table had at least one language arts teacher and at least one science or social studies teacher. We rarely find time for these kinds of

cross-disciplinary conversations, so it was important to be deliberate in seating the teachers together in this way.

Learning to Work with Students

We began with an ice-breaker activity borrowed and adapted from Jill Jor-dan and Rebecca Kaplan in English Journal (2014). We gave the teach-ers an organizer in which to record inferences and the evidence for those inferences about the love story of Carl and Ellie, an intriguing and lively dialogue-free excerpt from Disney’s Up. The exercise introduced two of our key themes: using our different disciplinary and personal perspec-tives to draw meaningful inferences from a common text and using tex-tual evidence to support them. We then explained that this is what the CCSS and the assessments aligned with them are asking our students to do. (This exercise would make a terrific low-stress activity to use with students to introduce PARCC and to help ease anxieties about it and other CCSS-aligned assessments.)

To make the challenges presented by the CCSS and PARCC explicit, we reviewed some of the sample tasks released by PARCC (parcconline .org) and discussed the importance of offering students explicit instruction and practice in the kinds of reading, writing, and critical thinking these tasks require, as well as with the formats of the questions themselves. While the teachers were quite taken aback by the rigor of the assessments, they recognized that the questions are effective in requiring students to demonstrate their thinking and engagement with the test material and that they target skills that we want our students to have. The non-language arts teachers were particu-larly engaged by the text selections: a

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We emphasized how important it is to work through these texts slowly with students, identifying reading strategies that will help them decode and make sense of unfamiliar textual forms.

scientific discussion of DNA and crop variety and a collection of primary (letters) and secondary (a biography) sources about John and Abigail Adams.

With this motivation, we asked the teachers to reflect on the discipline-specific literacy expectations and challenges their students face (Zy-gouris-Coe, 2012). What are the read-ing challenges in science? What are the writing expectations and conven-tions in social studies? While we had thought the discussion would help highlight the distinctions between disciplines, the expectations the teach-ers articulated were largely the same, whether they taught English, social studies, or science. They want their students to be able to comprehend key concepts and vocabulary; to analyze the articulation of main ideas and themes; to identify an author’s pur-pose, perspective, and audience; and to make connections between key ideas and understand their implications.

At this point, we had created a sense of community in which we recognized our shared goals, expecta-tions, and challenges. We were no longer just a group of teachers from different disciplines. We were a com-munity of grade-level-specific profes-sional learning teams, recognizing common values and goals and eager to think about how we could work together to meet the shared needs of all our students.

Our task, then, was to articulate how our cross-disciplinary groups could capitalize on the prescription for more informational text to meet our students’ needs. While success-ful integration of informational text into all of our disciplines will support our students’ success on standardized tests, our proposition is that effective work with informational text will also work more broadly to enhance stu-dent engagement with and interest in our existing curricula.

We continued the workshop, then, by modeling our approach using a text pairing we had developed that combined an excerpt from William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1959)

with a New York Times science ar-ticle called “To Study Aggression: A Fight Club for Flies” (Gorman, 2014). We used some pre-reading activities that consisted of a variety of student-friendly, authentic vocabulary exer-cises (including vocabulary skits) that also front-load background informa-tion related to the informational text. Our vocabulary skit, for example, asked the students to:

Create a skit in which a group of scientists discuss the relationship between gender and aggression. Are men naturally more aggressive than women? Are women less likely to get into tussles than men? (Feel free to have the scientists get into a verbal— but not physical—tussle during their conversation.)

This fun, interactive exercise allowed the participants (in this case, our teachers posing as students) to get up and move, work with their peers, and use the new word: tussle. It also prepared them to think about the idea of scientists studying aggression and the possible scientific relationship between aggression and gender.

Next, we used an engaging video clip (available on the Times website along with the original article) to appeal to our visual and auditory learners. If our pre-reading activities had not already caught their interest, the catchy clip picturing and nam-ing the different “fight moves” of the flies surely would. The clip, of course, also reinforced some of the key ideas in the text, so that the students were again primed to succeed at reading

what might otherwise be a challeng-ing piece of scientific journalism.

Turning to the article, then, we read together, stopping to note, dis-cuss, and emphasize 1) key textual features—including the place of publi-cation and purpose of the text, 2) key ideas, and 3) key vocabulary (for which the students had been pre-pared). Even with all the set-up work, we emphasized how important it is to work through these texts slowly with students, identifying reading strategies that will help them decode and make sense of unfamiliar textual forms that might seem intimidating and unwelcoming.

The follow-up to this pre-reading and reading work is assessment. We asked our teacher participants to complete a sample of “check for un-derstanding” questions that could be used to assess students’ success with the piece and to model the PARRC tasks. We also offered some writing activities that, like the PARRC, ask students to synthesize the material but also put the reading into conver-sation.

The climax of our model lesson was our second writing activity. Here, students were asked to use the informational text on fruit flies and aggression to think about Golding’s Lord of the Flies:

Use what you’ve learned about male aggression in James Gorman’s article to consider the excerpt from William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.

• Does the scene from Lord of the Flies reflect the concerns about aggression in Gorman’s article? Why or why not?

• How would the scientists Gorman discusses analyze the behavior of the boys in the scene? If they could study the boys, what might they be interested in learning more about?

This is the curricular connection that we really care about. For those stu-dents who could care less about Gold-ing’s somewhat dated novel (let’s be honest), the issue of male aggression is suddenly made relevant and fresh by the fruit fly study. Meanwhile, all

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If we collaborate to break down the institutional walls between our class-rooms and disciplines, we can support both our com-mon and discipline-specific literacy goals.

the students have had the opportunity to practice and refine their cross-dis-ciplinary literacy skills, reading texts that matter about topical, engaging content in a way that connects with and enhances the existing curriculum.

At this point in our workshop, the teachers were hooked on information-al text and its possibilities for cross-disciplinary collaboration. The science teacher at one table, for example, spoke about how he was thinking about what kinds of contemporary pieces he could teach in connection with his social studies colleagues’ curriculum and in connection with the topics in his own curriculum. How could a piece like “To Study Aggres-sion” excite his students about the sometimes dry and compartmental-ized units in his science textbook?

Informational texts, then, are not one more chore to add to the already heavy workload of teachers and students. They can be, to change the metaphor, the spice and seasoning that, though needing care and atten-tion before adding to the mix, make everything better. As we stressed with our colleagues, we need to think about using informational texts:

• when our students seem dis-engaged from the textbook and can’t see how the concepts con-nect to the world they live in;

• when there’s a broader context to the topic that our students can’t grasp;

• when we feel the urge to lecture but know we shouldn’t;

• when there’s something particularly pertinent in the news related to the content we’re teaching.

With our teachers ready to break down the disciplinary boundaries in order to make students want to read and think, our final tasks were twofold: we needed to help our col-leagues find, prepare, and teach great informational texts, and we needed to set up some kind of structure to facilitate ongoing collaboration across the disciplines.

We reviewed our approach for find-

ing and preparing engaging informa-tional texts, emphasizing several key points:

1) Excerpt—Students don’t need to read every word; use what works and cut what doesn’t.

2) Identify key vocabulary— High-light words that are essential to understanding the informa-tional text.

3) Prepare your students—Ar-range for pre-reading activities that front-load key concepts in the informational text while allowing students to engage in authentic and fun ways with the vocabulary.

4) Encourage conversation—Pre-pare and use discussion ques-tions that highlight key concepts and textual features.

5) Assess understanding—Follow up with PARCC-style assess-ments (when desired) and high-level writing activities that ask students to demonstrate their comprehension of key ideas from the informational text using textual evidence. Some of these questions can address just the informational text itself; others should put the informational text in dialogue with another text (a literary text or another informational text).

Learning to Work with Each Other

At this point, we turned to the most rewarding section of our workshop: building a place for ongoing collabo-

ration and mutual support between departments in these fledgling grade-level professional learning commu-nities. We harnessed the potential for networked collaboration through social media (Lightle, 2010) by cre-ating a Google Drive spreadsheet where teachers could enter in titles, concepts, and issues that they would be addressing in their classes through the remainder of the school year and beyond. Susan primed the pump by entering in her information ahead of time.

Of course, it took a few minutes to get everyone into the system. And of course our workshop ran long (as these things always do), so we had less time than we wanted for this most important final step: the collab-orative work. However, the potential of “networking through collaborative technology” like our Google Drive spreadsheet, as Eric Sheninger stresses (2014), means that collabo-ration doesn’t have to begin and end when all the teachers are sitting in a room together. Our workshop built a will to collaborate, and we could rely, to a certain extent, on technology to allow that will to grow; we were im-mensely encouraged, meanwhile, by the teachers’ eagerness to enter some texts and topics into the system.

More broadly, it was inspiring to hear—through the comments and ideas from the teachers—the com-mon understanding that this work is shared by all of us. Regardless of the demands of the CCSS and PARCC, there was recognition of the need to support and develop our students’ literacy and engagement across all content areas. This is a responsibil-ity we share, and our efforts in this regard will benefit both our students and each other, and could make a transformative impact in our school. If we collaborate to break down the institutional walls between our class-rooms and disciplines, we can support both our common and discipline-spe-cific literacy goals and help our stu-dents become individuals who think broadly and deeply and who are ready to engage with the world.

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Clearly, one workshop is not suf-ficient to establish a professional learning community empowered to make real change (Williams, 2013). But we are confident that our work-shop made clear the potential for cross-disciplinary collaboration using informational text. And with some nurturing, rewarding collaboration is beginning to take root. With this buy-in, what teachers need, as always, is more working time together.

Whether working together across a spreadsheet shared in the cloud or sit-ting at one grade-level table, pooling resources and making time for mean-ingful collaboration are key (Lightle, 2010; Sheninger, 2014). Indeed, as a 2014 survey conducted by the Na-tional Center on Literacy Education (Nelson, 2014) shows, successful collaboration in transitioning to the CCSS features several hallmarks:

• a focus on “real instructional tasks”;

• the practice of bringing educa-tors “in all disciplines together” to address student needs and the instructional changes neces-sary to address “shifting literacy practices”; and

• the creation of “teacher owner-ship” by “providing space and support for [teachers] to inno-vate and design the lessons and materials that are right for their students.”

Understanding that, the teachers at University Academy Charter High School have asked the administration for more time together in the form of professional development work dur-ing the summer. Their interest in capitalizing on the opportunities for cross-disciplinary collaboration is a testament to their dedication and pro-fessionalism and to the possibilities for meaningful professional learning communities. ●

Join the conversation: @srcnwk

References

Doane, K. (2013). Foreword. In J. L. David & J. E. Talbert, Turning around a high-poverty district: Learning from Sanger (pp. v–vi). San Francisco, CA: S. H. Cowell Foundation.

Golding, W. (1959). Lord of the flies. New York, NY: Perigee.

Gorman, J. (2014, February 3). To study aggression, a fight club for flies. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/04/science/to-study-aggression-a-fight-club-for-flies.html?_r=0.

Hughes-Hassell, S., Brasfield, A., & Dupree, D. (2012). Making the most of professional learning communities. Knowledge Quest, 41(2), 30–37.

Jordan, J., & Kaplan, R. (2014). Intending to meet: The truth about collaboration. English Journal, 103(3), 28–33.

Lightle, K. (2010). Using social media to build an online professional learning network of middle level educators. Knowledge Quest, 39(2), 48–53.

Nelson, C. (2014, March 13). Teacher collaboration: Keys to common core success. Literacy in Learning Ex-change. Retrieved from http://www.literacyinlearningexchange.org/blog/teacher-collaboration-keys-common-core-success.

Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers. (2013). Grade 9 Sample Items. Grade 9 - ELA/Lit-eracy. Retrieved from http://www.parc-conline.org/sites/parcc/files/Grade9 SampleItemSet.pdf

Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers. (2013). Grade 11 Sample Items. Grade 11 - ELA/Lit-eracy. Retrieved from http://www .parcconline.org/sites/parcc/files/Grade11SampleItems.pdf

Sheninger, E. (2014). Digital leadership: Changing paradigms for changing times. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.

Williams, D. J. (2013). Urban education and professional learning communi-ties. Delta Kappa Gamma Bulletin, 79(2), 31–19.

Zygouris-Coe, V. (2012). Disciplinary literacy and the common core state standards. Top Lang Disorders, 32(1), 35–50.

2014 Call for CEL Award for Exemplary LeadershipPlease nominate an exceptional leader who has had an impact on the profession through one or more of the following: 1) work that has focused on exceptional teaching and/or leadership practices (e.g., building an effective department, grade level, or building team; developing curricula or processes for practicing English language arts educators; or mentoring); 2) contributions to the profession through involvement at both the local and national levels; 3) publica-tions that have had a major impact. This award is given annually to an NCTE member who is an outstanding English language arts educator and leader. Your award nominee submission must include a nomination letter, the nominee’s curriculum vita, and no more than three additional letters of support from various colleagues. Send by February 1, 2015, to: Rebecca Sipe, 8140 Huron River Drive, Dexter, MI 48130. Or email submission to Rebecca .sipe@emich.edu (Subject: CEL Exemplary Leader).

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