CASE FILE
School: Ithaca City School District
Grade: All grades
Topic: Literacy, Any topic
Thinking skills explicitly taught: DSRP
Students: All grades
Executive Summary: The 21st Century Integrative Literacy Curriculum was developed at ThinkWorks by Drs. Derek Cabrera and Laura Colosi and literacy educator, Greg Wheeler. The goals of the curriculum are to:
- develop meta-cognitive literacy skills that increase comprehension and deep understanding
- develop literacy skills that apply across disciplines (ie, art, history, science, semiotics, media) and developmental stages (ie, K-12 and beyond) so that students learn essential literacy patterns from repeated exposure and use
- infuse essential, timeless, and universal thinking skills into the literacy curriculum
- incorporate innovative educational tools (ie, ThinkBlocks) to enhance literacy through haptic and visual processing
Project Vision
The Vision (read more about Visions here) of the project is " Literacy Integrated Across Developmental Stage and Discipline" and is illustrated by its logo which contains numerous meaningful parts. The "L" signifies Literacy--an ability with letters, but also images, like the logo itself. The L also symbolizes a book and the XY coordinate graph in which developmental stage and various disciplines are plotted. The strong arrow jutting upward shows progress but is also the "line of integration" between disciplines and development. The arc represents the essentially important perspectives that make up what we call the "Reading Circle" which is an "imagined circle of perspectives" that students will draw around whatever they are reading. In the curriculum diagram below, the arc encompasses the content and the blocks indicate the 5 Reading Circle perspectives.
Project Mission
The Mission of the project is quite simple (read more about Missions here): "Readers read in the reading circle." This mission, repeated over time with stage-appropriate content from a diversity of disciplines will not only lead to the general goals of literacy but also to the vision of " Literacy Integrated Across Developmental Stage and Discipline". The Mission is signified in the above curriculum model by the repeating circles along the diagonal.
The Reading Circle
The Reading Circle is first developed as a circle of perspective-taking blocks where each block represents an essentially important skill in literacy that is also applicable across any type of reading or content. Because the blocks help students to take conceptual perspective through haptic and visual channels, they enhance literacy by building the capacity for increased meta-cognitive activity during reading. At first, the Reading Circle is anything but imaginary. It is a physical circle of large ThinkBlocks labeled with the essential literacy skills. Overtime, as the student develops their metacognitive literacy the Reading Circle becomes implicit and imaginary, although as reading gets more complex, and cognitive capacity and comprehension are challenged, the student will return to the physical Reading Circle to structure literacy development and deep understanding.
The Reading Circle is remarkably simple which is why it is also powerful. First, students are introduced to the ideas in the circle. These ideas will become the perspectives on anything that is being read: Set goals, Identify text structure (meta-structure), Connect to prior knowledge, Monitor my reading, Identify vocabulary. These ideas envelope any text, images, or art in a circle of perspectives on the text itself:
The Parts and Relations of Perspective
Each of the perspective blocks in the Reading Circle is made up of sub-ideas which will increase with the student's developmental stage or additional sub-ideas (smaller blocks) may be added that are specific to the type of reading material presented. For example, the first perspective of the Reading Circle is to "Set Goals". For a small child this might be all they learn, "My goal is to say each word." Older children may have more complex goals such as, "to find the answer" or "to find out what happens to Sally" or "to learn how dinosaurs lived". Older students will have complex goals structures made up of many parts, "To understand the content, key points, and factual details, summarize the reading, and make it relevant to me". Notice that the metacognitive act of setting a goal for the specific reading task does not change over time. The student is developing an evolving metacognitive framework through which they read and will therefore get more out of their reading. Each of the perspective blocks in the Reading Circle are comprised of various parts that increase in their number and complexity with developmental stage or are adapted for different disciplinary contexts. In addition, new perspective blocks can always be added to the Reading Circle. The ones presented here are suggestions.
The illustrations below show some of the possible parts that each of the perspectives of the Reading Circle might contain. Each can be thought of in terms of developmental stage and added as the student is ready (like collecting merit badges or stamps). In addition, some parts will be emphasized in certain disciplines. For example, "bias" as a part of "Connect to Prior Knowledge " is particularly relevant to the scientific and historical methods.
Across Disciplines, Across Developmental Stages
Notice that the same circle, with varying subparts for developmental stage can be used for any number of reading types, grade level, or topics:
Primary grades - ESL
Science, middle school
Science, late elementary school
History/Science, late elementary school
Science, late elementary
(map-reading is an another literacy skill)
History, early middle school
Photographic literacy
Health, late elementary
Vocab is technical.
Pre-school
Although this book is written for young children, it requires knowledge of morphology ('-s' ending indicates plural) and genre (It's a Dr. Seuss rhyming book; therefore, rhyme of SNUVS and gloves).
High School, quite advanced.
Any text, art, image, symbol, media, or combination....
A Dynamic Circle of Questions
Once the Reading Circle is basically understood, more complex activities can be developed. For example, a student may set goals before they begin reading a piece, but those goals change as they are reading it--some thing is added to their goals or their goals change or adapt. Likewise, the other perspective blocks might change through the course of the reading. Prior knowledge is being elicited at each step in time. New vocabulary is popping up. New textual meta-structures and even new internal dialogue occurs, "I have no idea what I am reading?" (ie, Monitoring reading). One important activity to practice adaptive Reading Circle behavior is to suggest that the student asks some number of questions during the reading. For example, each student can be given 2 small blocks. Each block represents a question. The student can ask their question (to themselves) at any point during the reading of the piece. When they do, they should take the small block and set it down at the point in the reading where their question popped up...
At the point of the question, encourage the student to think about how the question changes (interacts with) the perspectives in the Reading Circle. For example, how might it change the goals that were set at the beginning of the reading? Can I find the answer to my question in existing meta-structures? Is my question because I don't understand a word? Is there anything I know already that might help answer my question? By doing this kind of activity, you are having your students experience firsthand the adaptive nature of metacognitive processes as they relate to literacy. There are many many more variations on the themes presented herein.
Infusing Timeless, Universal, Thinking Skills
An additional benefit of the Integrative Literacy model is that, by using ThinkBlocks, you have infused essentially important, timeless, and universal thinking skills into the literacy curriculum. Your students will be learning about perspective taking (a critical skill for all creativity and pro-social behavior), part-whole thinking, relational thinking and distinction making. Your students are learning skills that will be essential in their future long after the details of what they read have been lost.
Reading transfers to Writing
Literacy with the written word or symbols is the sister act to writing. Many of the same processes of reading comprehension are essential in developing communication and writing skills. Try some of these same activities as analogs in the writing arena.
What is the 21st Century Integrative Literacy Curriculum?
