Standards for Middle and High School Literacy Coaches  A Call to Action: What We Know About Adolescent Literacy and Ways to Support Teachers in Meeting Students' Needs NCTE Beliefs about the Teaching of Writing Teaching Resource Collection: Literacy Coaching

Collaborating with other associations to create Standards for Middle and High School Literacy Coaches is one way that the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) is working to fulfill its mission to improve the teaching of English language arts. These standards for literacy coaches provide leadership expectations and address the literacy needs of several subject areas.   

Literacy coaches play an essential role in assisting English language arts teachers to develop the necessary strategies to ensure their students meet the goal of English language arts instruction. This goal is for students to develop into effective and efficient readers and writers who are able to adapt their reading and writing processes across a wide range of texts and genres.

Kent Williamson, NCTE executive director, reflected the partners’ common goal by noting, "As organizations serving teachers across the content areas, we have a responsibility to help school systems structure approaches to improving literacy education in every classroom. Our collaboration on standards for literacy coaches is an important step in this direction."

Data show that 25% of high school students are not able to identify the main idea of a passage. These poor readers, generally speaking, are not as flexible as skilled readers in adapting their reading processes to the demands of the task. This inhibits their ability to write clearly or to understand complex subject matter across the content areas.

Inexperienced adolescent readers need opportunities and instructional support to read many and diverse types of texts in order to gain experience, build fluency, and develop a range as readers. Through extensive reading of a range of texts, supported by strategy lessons and discussions, readers become familiar with written language structures and text features, develop their vocabularies, and read for meaning more efficiently and effectively. Conversations about their reading that focus on the strategies they use and their language knowledge help adolescents build confidence in their reading and become better readers. Middle and high school English classes are an excellent place to move students to deeper understandings of texts and increase their ability to generate ideas and knowledge for their own uses and to meet scholastic challenges across the curriculum.

The literacy coach can play an essential role in assisting English teachers as they strive to

• bridge between adolescents’ rich literate backgrounds and school literacy
  
  
• work on schoolwide teams to teach literacy in each discipline as an essential way of learning in the disciplines
  
  
• recognize when students are not making meaning with text and provide appropriate, strategic assistance to read course content effectively
  
  
• facilitate student-initiated conversations regarding texts that are authentic and relevant to real life experiences
  
  
• create environments that allow students to engage in critical examinations of texts as they dissect, deconstruct, and reconstruct in an effort to engage in meaning making and comprehension processes.