Literacy Strategies

Association Triangle

An association triangle is a diagram wherein students take three disciplinary vocabulary words and contextualize them with each other. This helps students develop disciplinary literacy and invokes higher-order Bloom functions like analysis and synthesis while using a compact, accessible visual.

Book Club

Book clubs are a format of book study that are becoming increasingly popular because they prioritize something in reading that has become lost: student choice. In book clubs, student engagement is heightened because they select what they read and are responsible for presenting their books to a group of peers in multi-modal, creative ways.

Color-coding

Admittedly, color-coding is not new, but it is terribly underused and remains an effective method of scaffolding. It can be used to clarify emphasis on assignments or in feedback, make delineations between evidence and analysis, revise essays, teach parts of speech, and virtually endless other uses. As a class-wide practice, color-coding also provides a particularly helpful visual support for language learners.

Do/What Chart

The "Do/What Chart" is very simply named and gives a very simple way for students to dissect prompts. Having similar organizational benefits as color-coding, the Do/What Chart is a simple t-chart that tasks students with skimming prompts and taking all the direct expectations out of it, by writing the action verb on the left side, and the specific expectation/parameters on the right. This simplifies tasks and puts the focus on execution and mastery, not prompt-parsing.

Exploding a Moment

"Exploding a moment" is a simple writing exercise that asks student to take a personal memory and write a short, colorful narrative that extracts every bit of detail possible from it. The benefits of this exercise are numerous: it is easy to access, centralizes student experience in writing, and lets student practice narrative writing and imagery simultaneously.

Fishbowl

Fishbowl helps develop literacy by allowing students to "spy" on their peers' conversations by setting up outer and inner circles during Socratic seminars or other textual discussions. Discourse is something very difficult to revise and improve in, since it all happens in the moment, but fishbowl offers a rare chance for students to reflect on oral and disciplinary literacy by engaging in note-taking and observations in a forum-type setup.

Jigsaw

Of all the entries on this list, jigsaw is the student's favorite. It takes course readings and splits them up to different students in a group, making each member responsible for one reading or piece of a reading. During the next class periods, group members will fill each other in on their reading. This strategy allows students to become disciplinary experts while decreasing workload.

Kernel Essay

The kernel essay takes a traditional, five-paragraph paper and breaks it down for students, providing boxes with step-wise prompts for developing thoughts on an overarching question. An inversion of this activity is to ask students to provide the kernel structure for a reading they've done, prompting abstract consideration of text structures.

Quick Write

The quick write is a simple, time-tested, and effective strategy for student engagement, asking students to spend anywhere from one to 10 minutes responding to a question in an ungraded, low-pressure environment. This activity has the clear advantage of teaching students that writing is about genuine expression and not a letter grade. One caution, however, is that the effectiveness of the quick write depends greatly on the prompt: the most helpful will be those are student-centered, open-ended, and thought-provoking.

Saturation Research Paper

This final literacy strategy is certainly the most involved on the list, and it's more of an essay type than short exercise or tactic. However, as a general essay archetype, the saturation research paper helps develop student literacy because it asks students to combine research and disciplinary literacy with narrative writing. As they research a historical figure and write a piece from their perspective, students learn that academic inquiry and personal expression are by no means mutually exclusive, but belong together.

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