Literacy Starts with
Effective professional
development must
be at the heart of
efforts to nurture
adolescents’ content-
area reading skills.
William G. Brozo
and Douglas Fisher
Studies of effective secondary school reading programs demonstrate one thing clearly: We cannot significantly improve the
literacy skills of adolescents without
comprehensive staff development
(Sturtevant et al., 2006). Many middle
and high school teachers have not been
trained in current theories of content
literacy. Without additional support,
these teachers often lack the skills to
make disciplinary knowledge accessible
to all students—especially struggling
readers and learners (Brozo & Simpson,
2007).
Our experience working with school-based adolescent literacy projects
confirms the need to put professional
development at the heart of such efforts.
Here, we present five principles to guide
such professional development, drawing
on our work with Hoover High School
in southern California and Foothills
High School in eastern Tennessee.
Hoover is an inner-city school that
enrolls more than 2,000 students, 99
© SUSIE FITZHUGH
percent of whom qualify for free or
reduced-price lunch and 70 percent of
whom speak a home language other
than English. In contrast, Foothills,
located at the base of the Great Smoky
Mountains, is the only high school in a
small working-class community of
about 7,000 residents; it enrolls about
500 students, 25 percent of whom are
ethnic minorities.
Principle 1: Offer teachers a manage-
able number of new strategies.
Like students, teachers need scaffolding
for change. If overwhelmed by having to
teach too many new strategies to build
adolescent literacy, teachers may find it
easier to stick with the status quo.
At Foothills High, for example, the
teachers agreed to embrace just three
initiatives that would provide consis-
tency for students and a common set of
schoolwide teaching experiences for
themselves: ( 1) sustained silent reading
to increase time spent with print and to
develop the reading habit, ( 2) use of
multiple books and sources to give
students experiences with a variety of
engaging print genres, and ( 3) use of
lesson impressions (Brozo & Simpson,
2007) to generate interest in class topics
and create regular opportunities for
content-focused writing. (The lesson
impression involves presenting students
with several words and phrases to
enable them to form an impression of
the topic to be studied. Using these
words and phrases, students write brief
essays or stories, which are then
compared with the actual content.)
