MPCSD takes literacy outside of the English department

BY KARYN SPORY

Mt. Pleasant News

How can building a birdhouse be an example of literacy? Well, for the Mt. Pleasant Community School District, it?s just one example of a shift in instructional practices.

With changes in Iowa Core Standards, Mt. Pleasant?s Interim Director of Instruction Pat Shire says there will also have to be shifts in instructional practices.

?Because the Iowa Core Standards changes the conversation, that means instruction is going to have to change, too,? said Shire during the school board meeting Monday night.

Marilyn Thornburg, elementary literacy instructional coach, said there are three shifts for literacy in language arts. The first shift is building knowledge through content of informational text. ?Basically, we want the students to use the text as a source of knowledge, not just a reference or relying on the teacher to provide information, but to have students pull information and knowledge from that text,? explained Thornburg.

The second shift is reading and writing provided from evidence in the text. The third shift would be regular practice with complex topics and having a conceptual understanding and procedural skill with the topic.

?By the time they leave our system in the 12th grade, they are ready to read the kinds of things they would read in college or for their careers,? said Thornburg.

Now, what does all of this have to do with a birdhouse? Nathan Lang, secondary literacy instructional coach, said the thing about literacy is it?s not just important in an English or language arts class; literacy is something that can and should be applied in every subject.

?What a kindergarten teacher does with text complexity, will help with second grade and third grade. Everyone plays a key piece in that puzzle,? said Lang. ?When we?re talking about the Common Core and shifts, no one teacher can pull it off; no group of teachers could pull it off. It is going to take every single teacher. To a certain extent, we have to redefine what it means to be literate,? he said.

Lang?s example was students building a birdhouse in shop class. ?We?re always focusing on the math, the science, the history, I wanted to get away from the core because it?s going to take everyone,? he said.

Lang said the difference between a traditional instruction and a shift instruction would be having the teacher lay out the dimensions of the birdhouse to the class, what tools and materials to use and telling the students the progression of how to build the birdhouse.

With shift instruction, the students would decide what type of birdhouse to build by researching what type of bird they?d want to live in the house. Then, the teacher would prompt the student to figure out what dimensions were needed for the house based upon what bird would live there. Once the type of house was selected and the dimensions solidified, the student would decide out what type of material and tools would be needed for the project and then justify their reasoning to the teacher.

?Instead of the teacher laying everything out, we?ve changed the framework,? he said.

Besides the change in Iowa Core Standards, why does there need to be a shift in instruction. Lang says that?s because access to information has transformed so much in the last decade.

?The things we, as educators, use to spend our time on inside the classroom, just presenting knowledge, information, dates and events, those kids have all of that information at their fingertips now. It?s causing us to change,? he explained.

So what does that mean exactly? As Lang explained, it means as educators, instead of using their time to find the information, they get to decide what students do with the information at their fingertips. ?That?s where the instructional shifts come into place,? he said.

Lang said by using these shifts and allowing students to have more autonomy and use critical thinking to make decisions, they are preparing students way beyond standardized tests. ?Students will be able to know what to do when they don?t know what to do.?

Over the next couple of months, Shire said educators would be presenting to the school board about how they are implementing shift instructional practices into their classrooms.

The next regular meeting of the Mt. Pleasant School Board will be held on Monday, March 14, 2016, at 6 p.m., at the High School media center.