We Cant Afford to Wait - A Review of and Reflection on

Real-World Literacies
Joslyn Hunscher-Young
July 2016
When I was writing my first book and obsessing over the structure of a chapter or the wording of a paragraph, a good
friend and fellow teacher looked me in the eye and told me, It doesnt have to be perfect to be effective. It applies to
teaching as well as to writing. So often we get hung up on all the reasons why we cant do something But teaching
doesnt have to be perfect to be effective. If we wait to have more time, resources, or abilities, we may never get started.
We cant afford to wait (Lattimer, 2014, p. 139-140).
Heather Lattimer (2014) ends her book,
Real-World Literacies: Disciplinary Teaching in the High School
Classroom
with the anecdote above, which reiterated one of the most important lessons for
educators: that we must act now and do so conscientiously and with the knowledge that we are also
continuing works in progress. With that in mind, I hope to use ideas and specific strategies found in
Lattimers book in my own practice going forward. However, I will also continue to question a piece
of her structural argument and search for other ways to justify the mission she has set forth in this
book because it is an important one, but one that deserves more authentic measures to warrant its
exploration.
Although Lattimer (2014) splits her book into separate chapters about reading, writing, listening and
speaking, and assessment and critique, many of the essential ideas and implications for practice were
similar across all of those areas. She emphasizes the following throughout all areas of effective
disciplinary literacy teaching:
Instruction should be
discipline specific
, meaning that it reflects the disciplines norms and
expectations for reading, writing, speaking, listening, and thinking. These norms must be
modeled by the teacher for students, and students must further have learning opportunities
that involve them in authentic, disciplinary questions. The idea that classrooms should be
giving students the questions that scientists, mathematicians, historians, and others grapple
with (or have grappled with in the past) so that the students can practice the skills needed to
participate in that discipline. For example, Lattimer (2014) notes:
those who work in the discipline of history are expected to revisit historical
documents and interpretations with new questions to generate new learnings
that have relevance to our understanding of both past and present. If we
teach history from a disciplinary perspective, students are not expected to
memorize information so much as they are expected to learn to question,
read critically, suspend judgment, consider and effectively communicate new
interpretations, and cultivate puzzlement (Wineburg, 2001)a set of
expectations that mirrors professional, academic, and civic demands of
literacy in the twenty-first century. (p. 3-4)

 Learning opportunities should utilize

authentic tasks and audiences
. This means that
students should be producing or creating work with the intention of reaching the real world.
Their work should be shareable with others, just as we would expect it to be in the authentic
work of the discipline. Lattimer (2014) provides examples of classroom activities where
students research various health problems and diseases in their community to create public
service announcements that will be shown at local health care offices, where students
interview people at a senior living community and then write and publish a collection of
their historical accounts while also including and sometimes questioning the accounts of the
historical events in their textbooks, and where students present proposals of where to start a
new factory (based on research) to a panel of local experts. The authentic task helps students
find a purpose for continuing to research and find information, while the authentic audience
helps motivate them to deeply understand the information so that they can clearly and
effectively communicate it to others.
Disciplinary literacy learning must involve opportunities to
reflect and think
metacognitively about the learning process.
This reflection should be for both teachers
and students (and probably for other stakeholders like parents as well). It allows students to
become better advocates for themselves, and it supports teachers in targeting instruction to
fit students needs. Feedback from each other is helpful, but feedback from ourselves also
help us answer questions that Lattimer (2014) explains as originally coming from McManus
(2008), [We] must be able to answer three questions: (1) Where am I going? (2) Where am I
now? (3) How do I close the gap? (p. 112).
Teachers should use a sort of
apprenticeship model of teaching.
This mode of teaching
provides clear expectations for students and examples of quality work. It offers explicit
instruction, especially at the start of learning a new task, and models the thinking and other
skills necessary to complete the task at hand. However, that instruction and direction fades
away a bit as the learner becomes more skilled and proficient in the trade or discipline. This
transition is a good sign because it indicates that the student is becoming skilled enough to
be an independent learner.
Learning environments need to include
tons of opportunities for practice
. These
opportunities must be regular (in frequency), diverse (in nature), and during dedicated class
time. The students should be guided by the teacher, and the practice should be followed with
some sort of feedback, but the students need lots of practice. They need time to try things
out, make mistakes, and learn by doing. Whether in reading, writing, speaking, listening, or
giving and receiving feedback, students needed this guided practice to help them learn, and
the opportunities should be such that they allow students to practice with a variety of
purposes and audiences in mind.
These ideas and practices should be implemented throughout the disciplines to ensure that students
are receiving the support and opportunities they need to become effective learners, thinkers, and
active citizens.

However, the main point of critique of the book is one that my colleague, Gayle Brooks, brought up
on our book blog and in our group discussions. On the
blog
, she wrote, this text talks about how
teachers feel pressured because of standardized tests and that shouldn't be the focus, yet the authors
use standardized test scores to show how students are lacking in their writing skills (Brooks, 2016).
It does seem hypocritical to say that the standardized tests do not accurately measure literacy skills as
they would be used in real life, but then use those same measures to explain why further literacy
instruction is needed in schools. I do think that we need improved literacy instruction, but there
should be a better way to demonstrate this need than with standardized test scores. I think the
feedback from college professors and employers that says that our students are not prepared for
them may be more genuine feedback, and Lattimer (2014) does include some of that in her book.
Yet, we still need more - more teacher research and other real-life examples to prove that we need
improved literacy instruction in our classes and what that instruction might look like or how to get
there. I hope that my own continued research can help contribute to the growing list of examples
and ideas for how to incorporate and teach literacies in a social studies classroom.
With all of that in mind, I will work to make my teaching practice more like this as I continue as an
educator. I already have ideas for how to make my unit assessments more authentic and provide real
audiences for my students. Im getting better at providing in-time class for practice, but need to
implement more targeted and specific mini-lessons based on students needs. I incorporate some
reflection, but should do more modeling of what it looks like and have students do it more
consistently to help facilitate their independence and metacognition as a learner. Most importantly, I
need to do some of these things now because there isnt time to wait and I dont have to be perfect
to be effective.