Content Area Literacy vs. Disciplinary Literacy – The distinction between content area literacy and disciplinary literacy is one that teacher participants were still grappling with. Additionally, the teachers were not fully ascribing to the notion that literacy and reading strategies are flexible and can be applied to each discipline.

Who Teaches Reading Skills? – Among some of the secondary teacher participants, there remained the belief that elementary teachers are primarily responsible for teaching reading skills.

Teacher Engagement – During the four meetings, coaches worked hard to engage these subject area teachers with background information about disciplinary literacy.

Coaching Challenges – Discipline teachers were passionate about discussing their instructional practices and student learning needs in their subject area. This challenged coaches to encourage teachers to discuss disciplinary literacy instruction more broadly.

Differentiation for Teachers – This notion was tenuous for this project as differentiation in accordance with a subject area is what the teachers crave, however, common grounding and disciplinary literacy practices were also points of discussion during the sessions.

Literacy in the Disciplines or Disciplinary Literacy? – Teachers’ held strong beliefs about the importance of teaching students to “learn to read” as opposed to focusing on disciplinary content knowledge and disciplinary literacy. Moreover, their understanding of the distinct nature of disciplinary literacy was still developing. The facilitators worked to send the message to use specific subjects to enhance and/or connect to literacy. Teachers began to adopt instructional strategies for oral language skills in relation to students’ disciplinary knowledge.

Instructional Strategies and Instructional Resources – Participating teachers expressed the goal of making curriculum accessible for all students. They noted the reliance on textbooks in secondary classrooms and grappled with how to prepare students to access information in them – they did not always recognize the variety of alternative texts. Other instructional resources for differentiating instruction were featured (e.g., speech-to-text apps, GOOGLE Read and Write), but were not often adopted.

Professional Learning Needs – Teacher participants regarded concrete lesson ideas and explicit resources as the most helpful.  They were challenged to shift their professional learning outcomes from specific goals to broad ways of thinking about gap closing in disciplinary literacy. Teachers expressed that they were looking forward to additional on-site coaching and follow-up sessions (for the entire school year) to enhance their accountability.

Facilitation Style and Approach – There was well-established recognition for relationships among teachers and facilitators who were supporting. It was a challenge to differentiate facilitation to support teachers where they were at, and for provincial literacy leads to support consultants/coaches where they were at in relation to their school boards’ mandates. The provincial literacy leads can be a valuable asset to consultants/coaches when working with teachers who are facing implementation challenges.