Launching the Education 4500 Scholarship Series - Featuring, "Teaching Disciplinary Literacy to Adolescents"

Learning from Scholarship, Connecting to Practice

August, 2025

New for the 2025-2026 school year: Education 4500’s scholarship series. Every few weeks, I will feature a piece of literacy scholarship and a series of questions to help bridge that scholarship to literacy work in middle and high schools. The series will reflect what middle and high school educators I work with are currently using to frame and focus their literacy work. Scholarship will include research articles, podcasts, videos, book excerpts, etc. Each post in the series will feature a link to the resource, a summary, and guiding questions for understanding (to process learning) and for discussion (to deepen understanding). I hope you find the resources helpful for yourself and your colleagues. And if you use the resources, find them insightful, or want to give feedback on them please email info@education4500.com.

Shanahan, Cynthia, and Shanahan, Timothy. “Teaching Disciplinary Literacy to Adolescents: Rethinking Content Area Literacy.” Harvard Educational Review, vol. 78, no. 1, 19 June 2009, pp. 40–60.

Link to full text 

• https://www.shanahanonliteracy.com/publications/teaching-disciplinary-literacy-to-adolescents-rethinking-content-area-literacy

Summary 

In this article, Cynthia and Timothy Shanahan argue that "disciplinary literacy", defined as advanced literacy instruction within specific subjects like math, science, and social studies, should be prioritized in middle and high schools. In this paper, Shanahan & Shanahan show that different content area texts require different reading and comprehension approaches. As a result, they recommend unique reading and comprehension strategies for teaching students within various disciplines. This approach may help better prepare students for the reading, writing, and thinking needed in advanced coursework.

Read This If 

You want to better understand what differentiates reading in middle and high school from reading in younger grades

Guiding Questions

Guiding Questions for Understanding: Use to process learning individually or in small groups. 

• According to Shanahan and Shanahan:

  • Why are foundational skills necessary but not sufficient for learning in later grades?

  • How do literacy skills change as students move from middle to high school?

• Find three quotes from the text that support the claim: The work of literacy in content areas is in service of understanding the content and disciplinary habits of the subject. 

• What were the two most important lessons learned from the first year of the study? How did these lessons inform the second year of the study?

• What were the two most important lessons learned from the second year of the study?

Guiding Questions for Discussion: Use to deepen learning with colleagues.  

• As a group, determine what you consider to be the most 2 important findings of this Shanahan and Shanahan study. What are the implications of these findings for your role (classroom teacher, instructional coach, building leader)?

• What literacy work that is happening in your classroom/school/district is affirmed by this research?

• What literacy work that is happening in your classroom/school/district is challenged by this research?

• What are 1-2 changes you’d like to make to your literacy teaching/coaching/leadership because of what you’ve learned from this research? 

  • What are the short term changes? What are the long term changes? 

If you would like a PDF copy of this resource, you can find that here.