TALK: The Cornerstone of Literacy—#SOL22, Day 2

Below you will find the three lenses I’ve chosen to filter my world through during the March Slice of Life Challenge. 

Literacy As Liberation	Constrained Vs. Unconstrained Skills	Text Structure Matters

This morning I woke up around 4:45 a.m. to prepare for my first mini-labsite experience as a Keller ISD literacy coach. I’ve been on the job for almost two years now, but thanks to stupid Covid, access to my colleagues has remained a huge obstacle. I feel both giddy and terrified about today’s professional learning opportunity, and if I’m honest, I’m a bit intimidated because the assistant principal who invited me to partner with her teachers is a former literacy coach herself. In order to move forward in the work, I’m gently reminding myself that we will all be in the learning zone together, and this work is not about me or the teachers. It’s about increased learning outcomes for kids. Centering students helps ease unwanted pressure often created by a culture that values performance over practice. 

After learning alongside an incredibly gifted TC staff developer earlier this week, I popped out of bed feeling inspired to plan for today’s half-day PD session. While working with our instructional coaching team, Jepilyn Matthis effortlessly broke down the content into bite size chunks using colorful sticky notes. As I explored the professional text she’d studied to prepare for our PD, I thought about how sticky notes are a form of backwards design. Although I love my collection of neon pink, green, and yellow Post-it notes, I am also a fan of digital slides as well. I had to decide today if I was going to go analogue or digital, and I opted for a Sharpie marker this time. It was a decision I got to make, and next time I might choose slides. Apparently bite-size mini-lectures have a text structure as well!

The topic of today’s labsite is Book Clubs. After digging a little deeper into the campus’s request, I discovered the teachers really wanted to raise the students' level of thinking through powerful talk work. For years I have held tightly to the mantra that the kids with the most words have the most power. I believe with my whole being that listening and speaking are the cornerstone of all literacy—yet explicit instruction in talk is one of the most neglected aspects of the language arts. Tracking the movement of our minds and finding just the right words to express our thoughts is tricky work. I find it interesting that oral language development is considered an unconstrained skill that can take a lifetime to acquire and master. I’m hopeful the time we spend exploring these ideas and practicing a few strategies together will be beneficial to both students and teachers. 

When I consider the lens of liberation and how it intersects with nurturing high quality talk in a classroom, I realize we must grapple with what kind of language is prized in schools. Clearly, in academic settings, our institutions value formal register over casual register. We push kids to use more sophisticated language as early as possible, and it quickly becomes apparent which students read voraciously and widely because they have a richer, broader bank of words to pull from when conversing with their peers. 

Growing up in a working class family, formal register was rarely used. I vividly remember my grandmother commenting on how inferior she felt when more educated adults used “highfalutin words” in  her presence. Access to cultivated language felt like something reserved for the rich, and it wasn’t until I started graduate school that I began to understand how language is often used to exclude and limit folks, rather than expand and enlarge opportunities. As I work alongside teachers today, I hope we can find a way to empower the next generation of children to use language in inclusive, compassionate ways.