Like many high school chemistry teachers, Angie Hackman instructs students on atoms, matter and, she says, how they “influence the world around us.” But Hackman also has another responsibility in class: developing students’ reading skills through literacy instruction. For about 20 of the 80 minutes of almost every class, she engages her chemistry students in literacy skills, she said: closely reading passages from their textbooks, “breaking apart” prefixes and suffixes for relevant vocabulary and identifying root words. During a recent lesson, she discussed the word “intermolecular,” dissecting its prefix, “inter,” and connecting it to other words with that same prefix.

Every teacher at her school, the Health Sciences High and Middle College, in San Diego, shares in the responsibility of teaching students literacy skills, regardless of the subject they teach. That’s because so many students, even incoming ninth graders, arrive at the school without basic reading skills, according to Douglas Fisher, an administrator at the school. While some students also receive one-on-one remediation, Fisher said that research shows those interventions aren’t enough to close the gap.

“We have kids that on our benchmark knowledge assessments are scoring what is the equivalent of second grade, first grade, fourth grade,” said Fisher, who is also a professor and chair of educational leadership at San Diego State University. Yet, by the time students graduate, he said, the goal at the secondary school is that they have “reading levels ready for college.”

The San Diego charter school, known as HSHMC, has expected content teachers to integrate literacy into their lessons since its 2007 founding. To help them succeed, the school — which last year served just over 500 high schoolers, roughly 80 percent of whom qualified for free or reduced priced lunch — provides its teachers with daily professional development and coaching on literacy instruction and other topics.

HSHMC’s approach of integrating literacy into content classes is something that researchers are calling for. Jade Wexler, a professor of special education with a focus on secondary literacy at the University of Maryland, said her research suggests that while some students are able to catch up to their peers after interventions — or pull-out sessions in the special education setting — others merely “trudge along and maintain status relative to their typically developing peers.” According to Wexler, a bigger impact may come from embedding reading instruction into other classes, “where these kids spend a majority of their day.”

Read the full article about literacy instruction by Julian Roberts-Grmela at The Hechinger Report.