Team Teaching Tech Tools for Literacy
- Colleen Farris
- Jul 12, 2024
- 5 min read
Updated: Oct 13
12 July 2024
Recently, I had the opportunity to plan and execute a team teaching lesson for teachers. Our objective was to introduce teachers to a technology tool that enables teachers to create lessons based on best practices of pedagogy and knowledge creation. In particular, we wanted our lesson to be an expression of the teacher knowledge framework of TPACK, Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (Mishra, n.d.). This framework acts as a guide in technology tool selection, as it helps define the kinds of technology tools that will support and enhance teachers’ pedagogical and content knowledge.
To begin, we asked ourselves what pedagogical knowledge is shared by our diverse audience of teachers, who teach different curricula to students from widely varied demographics, at different grade levels, and with different learning needs. We looked at digital literacy, (Buckley-Marudas, 2016), and accessibility of texts for content area literacy (International Literacy Association, 2017). We posed a problem-based learning question: When teaching literacy skills across content areas, how do we create equitable access to texts?
We selected the Newsela tool and a lesson topic that tied to our context in Ireland, Irish Immigration to the United States in the 1800s. In addition, we selected the pedagogical tools of the Right Question Institute (2022) to create our lesson. We connected our topic and tool to relevant education research. My partner, an English teacher expert in literacy content pedagogical knowledge, focused on digital literacy theory. I looked at the ways our tool supported equitable access to texts (Hernandez, 2023) and supported or employed the knowledge creation pedagogy methods presented in the TPACK framework, and How People Learn : Brain, Mind, Experience, and School : Expanded Edition (Bransford et al., 2000).
Newsela affords teachers the ability to adjust curriculum-related readings to match the Lexile reading levels of their curriculum and grade level, as well as, differentiate readings for individual students according to 504 or IEP accommodations. In our lesson, we gave our audience both the student and teacher view of the website. We employed text leveling to make the experience of the Newsela tool more relevant to the teachers in our audience by assigning them to interact with the text at the approximately Lexile level of the students they teach. We received positive feedback for tailoring our lesson to the needs of our audience.
We split the presentation between us based on our levels of expertise. I led the introduction to the selected reading by modeling the Right Question Institute Question Formulation Technique (QFT). The goal was to engage our audience with the selected reading by having them view an image and formulate questions about it. These were refined and then provided a guiding question to increase engagement with the reading.
Feedback from this exercise was generally positive; although, I could have done a better job introducing the technique and the image. I think I missed an opportunity by not having Lexile-level partners sit together, share their questions with each other, and discuss which questions they had as they began reading the text. We did come back to the questions at the end; however, I think a tool, such as a Padlet, might have made responses to the initial questions easily shareable with the group. If we had more time, it might have generated an interesting conversation about the reading itself, and perhaps some ideas about how students might find it motivating to approach readings using QFT.
My teaching partner did a great job demonstrating the Newsela tool. As an expert in the content and the tool, she explained Lexile levels, demonstrated text leveling through examples generated by the tool, and walked our audience through the teacher and student facing aspects of the Newsela site. She also reviewed the pedagogical theoretical underpinnings of the site’s functions, especially its support of metacognition in literacy learning. The guided notes provided the ability to record feedback on the experience of using the site.
The last part of our lesson was a discussion of the affordances and constraints of the Newsela tool. Writing the responses on the board was not the most effective way to process audience feedback due to the difficulty of reading the board and the time needed to write down the responses. A Padlet, or similar digital tool, would have worked better to acknowledge everyone’s feedback in this case as well.
Feedback from participants was relatively positive regarding how well Newsela would serve the pedagogical needs of teachers who trying to scaffold and create equitable access to texts; however, in the example text vocabulary supports were rated poorly. We used a Google Form to collect these responses. We also provided options for similar tools, so that teachers who do not have access to Newsela could use what they learned to create text leveled readings.
The other considerations of this lesson were that this was my first experience team teaching. On the other hand, my partner team is experienced at teaching in this way. The dual focus of this project made it possible for us each to contribute, even though I was not an expert in the content or the tool. I was glad for the opportunity because one of my goals is to hone my collaboration skills.
As part of the preparation for this team teaching lesson, we also discussed context. My final observation is that teaching out of my usual context resulted in some missteps that would not have occurred in my own classroom. I forgot to charge my watch, so the timer that I depend on for pacing student responses was not at my disposal. This threw me at the beginning of the presentation.
Reflecting on the artifacts from this lesson, I also realize that I need to work on my stance. At the very beginning of the lesson I moved around too much. It distracted from what I was trying to explain about the lesson steps. Finally, we did not tell our audience to bring their computers. We also did not have our same Lexile-level readers sit together. I think that would have made the reading part of the lesson more interactive and fun rather than having everyone work on their own.
References
Punya Mishra. (n.d.). Research: TPACK. Punya Mishras Web. https://punyamishra.com/research/tpack/
International Literacy Association. (2017). Content area and disciplinary literacy: Strategies and frameworks [Literacy leadership brief]. Newark, DE: Author.
Buckley-Marudas, M. F. (2016). Literacy Learning in a Digitally Rich Humanities Classroom: Embracing Multiple, Collaborative, and Simultaneous Texts. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 59(5), 551-561. https://doi.org/10.1002/jaal.470.
Hernandez, M. (2023, August 1). Accessible literacy: How access to texts is a matter of equity for all learners. Readability Matters. https://readabilitymatters.org/articles/accessible-literacy-how-access-to-texts-is-a-matter-of-equity-for-all-learners
Right Question Institute. (2022, May 6). What is the QFT?. Right Question Institute. https://rightquestion.org/what-is-the-qft/
