SECTION F: HOW CAN CLASSROOM PRACTICE
PROMOTE STUDENT LITERACIES?
I have already called literacy specialists the imperialists of the educational world. But they
are not the first to claim this title. When I was taking teacher education classes as an un-
dergraduate college student, instead of developing student literacies, teachers were ex-
pected to promote critical thinking skills using higher order questions. The core of this ap-
proach to teaching was Bloom’s taxonomy (explained further at the end of this section), a
system that classifies questions based on whether they encourage critical thinking by stu-
dents. The lowest level of questions ask students to recall information, whereas the high-
est level requires them to exercise judgment. Bloom’s system is useful to teachers because
it emphasizes that students should be learning to use information to formulate and sup-
port their ideas.
A problem with broadly defined literacy standards is that it is often difficult for new
teachers to imagine what they look like in ordinary classroom practice. We can always in-
clude reading and writing activities in lesson plans, but by themselves this is not enough for
students to achieve the level of literacy that is required in our society.
A crucial part of a teacher’s literacy arsenal is his or her ability to develop and ask effec-
tive higher order questions that capture the interest of students, stimulate discussions, and
challenge students to examine and understand complicated text and ideas. When I design an
activity sheet for a lesson, every reading passage, illustration, or chart is followed by three
or four questions that scaffold on each other and require increasingly complex answers. The
first question asks students to find or describe a piece of information; the second question is
more interpretative; and the final question(s) asks students to draw a conclusion, explain a
new understanding, or make a judgment based on information they have learned.
For example, an activity sheet with the edited passage on the “Molecular Structure of
D.N.A.” (from section D) would include the following questions:
- What are the authors describing in this passage?
- Why do they believe they offer a better model?
- What do we learn about the scientific method from this paper?
- In your opinion, why is their discovery a significant scientific achievement?
A middle school social studies lesson on the American Revolution might start with a pic-
ture of Washington crossing the Delaware River downloaded from the Internet with the fol-
lowing more or less generic questions.
- What scene is depicted in this picture?
- What information does this picture tell us about the “historical” period?
- In your opinion, why is this happening?
- Based on information in this picture and your other knowledge of the period, what pro-
posals would you make to address this problem? Why?
Later in class, as we go over the passage or the picture, I would ask students to discuss
their answers to the questions. Whatever their responses, I would follow up with one of
three new questions: What evidence do you have for your answer? What do you think of re-
192 CHAPTER 7