What Blank Smiles Taught Me About Literacy

During my first year of teaching, I handed my 6th grade math class a word problem. One student read it aloud, every single word crisp, clear, and correct. He even paused appropriately at the punctuation. And then he looked up at me and smiled. A big, blank smile. He was proud, but he was completely lost! He could read the words, but he had no idea what to do with them.

That moment stuck with me, and it came up again recently when I sat down with Jeff Bradbury on the Digital Learning Today podcast from TeacherCast. We talked about something I’m passionate about: how literacy and knowledge building are far more tangled together than we tend to admit.

Literacy Is the Vehicle, and Sometimes the Gate

Here’s how I’ve come to think about it over the years. Literacy is the vehicle to knowledge-building. Almost everything we ask students to learn arrives through text, so reading is how they get where they’re going.

But that same vehicle can become a gate. When a student’s literacy isn’t strong enough, their mental energy is poured into decoding and just trying to make it through a text. There’s not much left over to think deeply about the concepts. As I told Jeff, we have plenty of “word callers” who read fluently out loud but struggle to make meaning of those words. My blank-smile student got stuck at the gate. He couldn’t even get to the math.

The Practice Gap Nobody Planned For

We tend to assume this is the ELA or literacy specialist’s responsibility to fix. After all, those educators do essential work providing students explicit literacy instruction. But think about how anyone learns a skill: you get taught it, you practice it, and then you use it for real. In too many middle schools, students get the instruction in ELA and then are expected to apply it everywhere else with no practice in between. That’s the practice gap we need to address.

Content area classrooms are exactly where that practice should happen. A social studies, art, or health class is a natural, low-stakes place for students to practice reading with real content. These teachers don’t need to become literacy specialists. They just need to provide opportunities for applied practice, and the good news is that that practice can build content knowledge at the same time.

Three Small Moves You Can Try Tomorrow

None of this requires a full overhaul. You just have to start somewhere. Here are three of my favorite simple starts to support literacy in the content areas:

• Bring text in and talk about it. Put a strong text in front of students and discuss it together. Ask what they noticed, what they’re wondering, or where in the text a certain idea came from. The goal isn’t the right answer. It’s getting students to explain their thinking out loud. The conversation is the point.
• Model your thinking. Reading aloud only shows students how to say the words. Instead, narrate what’s happening in your head: the questions you ask, the connections you make, the inferences you draw. Let them hear real reading in action.
• Use turn and talks. Give students a quick moment to turn to a partner and put an idea into their own words. It’s low stakes because it gives students a chance to test their thinking with a partner before sharing it with the whole class. And it means every student is doing the thinking and talking, not just the one kid whose hand went up first.

If I could offer one piece of advice, it’s to start small, but start somewhere. It doesn’t really matter where, honestly—just pick one thing, get good at it, and grow from there.

Listen to the Full Conversation

Jeff and I got into a lot more than I can fit here, from how literacy and content knowledge support one another to practical ways to build a schoolwide culture of literacy. I hope you find it valuable, especially if you teach, lead, or coach at the middle school level. 

Give it a listen! I’d love to hear about the small steps you take with your own students.