Teaching Content and Supporting Reading Through ‘Disciplinary Literacy’

Reading is often taught as a generic skill that works the same in every context. But reading a poem and reading a scientific text make very different demands on the reader. Education Week’s latest special report delves into this idea of reading across disciplines.

Teachers don’t have to be experts on reading theory to support their students in this work. As researcher Tim Shanahan describes in this video, each discipline produces and communicates knowledge differently, and learning how to produce texts in those fields is part and parcel of teaching content.