CI 414/504: Disciplinary Literacies Fall 2026

I found Buehl’s description of the elements that increase text complexity really important. While I know these blog posts are not intended to summarize the readings, I wish to create a chart that briefly describes and draws connections between these text elements and the comprehension strategies required to make sense of them. This is largely in service of expanding and monitoring my own comprehension of Buehl’s text (let’s get meta, baby!), but also to provide context before I pose some questions and wonderings that surfaced for me as I read Chapter 2. The above chart reveals the depth of comprehension work required to make sense of texts as they grow in complexity. If the goal for many middle and high school disciplinary teachers is largely connected to absorbing specific content, then it is easy to see why teachers would eschew traditional texts and engage in what Buehl terms “reading avoidance” (2017, p. 41) – instead, seeking out sources that require fewer comprehension demands. F...

“All it takes is some confidence and a willingness to get started.”  This line from the video really stood out to me. Learning can sometimes feel like doing something for the first time—you might feel confused, nervous, or think you cannot do it. But once you start, you can slowly figure things out.  Buehl’s reading also made me think about how every subject has its own way of learning and thinking.  While reading Buehl, I started thinking about how we read differently depending on what we are learning. Reading a story, a science article, or a math problem does not feel the same. Sometimes I understand something better when I see a picture, hear someone explain it, or connect it to something I already know.  This made me wonder:   Are we really taught how to read in every subject, or are we just expected to figure it out?  We may need words, pictures, examples, or someone to guide us. Learning isn't always about getting it right the first time.

  Imagine when adolescents face complex texts, specifically in subject-area content, the reading can feel overwhelming and intimidating.  In subject-area classrooms, there are demands where students not only understand the content but also demonstrate specific problem-solving skills. They need to analyze an unfamiliar historical document, interpret diagrams and maps, or perhaps follow some mathematical logic. It is tempting to simply hand out a summary worksheet to students rather than involving them in reading, isn't it?    That way might be simpler and time-saving. However, teachers can let students peek behind the process, demonstrating how expert readers actually make sense of all that content, and help students see that even teachers take time to process the reading. Here is how think-alouds can facilitate making the invisible process of reading visible to our students. So why Think-Aloud? When we model our thinking out loud, we let our students see our thin...

  🥔 Couch Potato Homework Blog 🥔 Blogger: Klarissa Guillen Typing from: My Mac book & on the living room couch w/my dogs :) MARIA MONTESSORI!!!!  From all of the readings and the videos in my head I kept thinking about my girl Maria! I say this because she truly has helped guide a lot of the teaching framework that I use at school. I teach at a half Montessori and half CPS school where we need to use both traditional teaching along with Montessori methods. Metacognition is defined in the "what is metacognition?" article as thinking about thinking, the monitoring and control of thought. It was also categorized into three parts: metamemory-metacomprehension, problem solving, and critical thinking. The Montessori method is based on  educational theories centered on self-regulation, deep reflection, and independent error correction.  A lot of what I read and saw crossed in my mind with a lot of what I have learned to adapt in my own teaching at my sc...

 The most interesting thing I felt in the readings was that it's not about a student being good or bad at reading or being literate. It's more about teaching students, or these adolescents, how to approach difficult readings. What might seem easy in one subject can also be a weakness in another. Some students are stronger readers than others, and some students might be able to read the text but not actually grasp what they read. Schoenbach et al. actually talked about this in the form of reading apprenticeship. Essentially, what he explained is that teachers should make their thinking visible. This is especially useful because most students just see the teacher understand the text, but they might not understand and pretend they do. Putting our thinking out loud is actually a strategy that also helps because it helps students not only understand the text but also gives strategies on what to do when they get stuck on advanced readings.  For me, this would be insanely useful in a...

When I asked myself this question, I realized that these are not necessarily the same thing. Knowing the text ≠ knowing how to read the text In Schoenbach, Braunger, Greenleaf, and Litman (2003), one of the concerns is what they describe as  “teaching around the text.”  When teachers do most of the explaining, students may learn  about  the text without getting enough opportunities to actually grapple with it themselves. What I find interesting about Reading Apprenticeship is that it does not treat struggling with a text as something that should always be eliminated by the teacher. Instead, the framework emphasizes making the normally  invisible mental processes of reading visible and accessible .  Sometimes, having information is not the same thing as knowing how to  think through information . One of the most interesting ideas I found in Martinez’s paper was the  illusion of knowing . Martinez describes this as believing that one understands som...

One thing that stood out to me in these readings is that learning isn't just about whether a student gets the right answer. Students also need to understand how they are learning and what they can do when something becomes difficult. This is where metacognition becomes important. Martinez explains metacognition as being aware of your own thinking and being able to monitor and adjust it while you are learning. I think this is something we expect students to be able to do without really teaching them how. I know there have been plenty of times when I have been working on something and thought, “I just don't get it.” But there is a big difference between knowing you are confused and actually knowing why. Are you missing background information? Did you misunderstand something earlier? Are you using a strategy that isn't working? I think being able to ask yourself those questions is a skill that can make someone a much more independent learner. This connects really well with Gre...

There are many topics this can cover, but the biggest ones will be related to the film   Stay Close   and the readings about disciplinary literacy, rigor, and habits of practice. To start off, I watched  Stay Close , a 19-minute documentary about Keeth Smart, an American fencer from Brooklyn. The film follows his journey from struggling as a young fencer to becoming the world-ranked #1 fencer and eventually winning a silver medal at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The second reading I looked at was Buehl’s Chapters 1 and 2, which focus on how students need to learn how to think and learn within different subjects instead of simply memorizing information. The third reading was Fisher and Frey’s “Rigor Is More Than Hard Work,” which explains that rigor is not simply about giving students harder or more work. Finally, I looked at Wickens, Manderino, Parker, and Jung’s “Habits of Practice,” which focuses on students actually participating in the practices of a specific discipline....

When I taught Kindergarten in NYC public schools, we did a months-long study of trees in the city. Students learned about: The different types of trees The critical role trees play in an urban ecosystem and beyond Threats trees face in our community and in the world  Ways we can work to protect trees. Of course, the content itself facilitated vocabulary development and built critical background knowledge to support reading comprehension in the early grades. But, perhaps more importantly, the study functioned to support the development of  transferable cognitive and process-based habits that could be applied broadly to many areas of study, including: Asking questions Reading for answers Writing about learning Engaging in scientific observation Interviewing experts Social and environmental advocacy In other words, we developed the study, in large part, to teach students how to think and learn, not what to think and learn (I’m reminded of the age-old adage about giving a man a ...

  🥔 Couch Potato Homework Blog 🥔 Blogger: Klarissa Guillen Typing from: My Mac book & on the living room couch w/my dogs :) I think after watching the episode and reading the readings on disciplinary literacies I can definitely split my discipline in half. As I teach Spanish as a foreign language I do see the divide in teaching my students through global communicators or communication in general to then also teaching grammar, punctuation, and language rules they have to work on all skills simultaneously. I think the best image to include for this blog post is the ladder of language proficiency Journey map I often refer to when teaching my students. When we put rigor, hard work, identities, meaning-making, identities, disciplinary thinking, etc. in one subject it is very overwhelming. I have come to reflect on these articles because it seems like no matter what subject or disciple is being taught, the end goal for each one is to master something. But even mastering anythings b...

Here are my responses to the reflections from the Buehl reading! Reflection #1 Reflection #2 I aligned each row with my identities from the first reflection. The top row are texts I read as a doctoral student, the middle are texts I read for Christian formation, and the bottom are texts I read in connection with my womanhood. Reflection #3 Can you tell what I felt confident in when I was in high school? I'd love to hear about y'all's reflections as well!

 I feel like school gives us specific guidelines for what a "good" student looks like. They get good grades, finish their work on time, participate in class, and usually seem to understand the material pretty quickly. Even though we all know that learning is not always that simple, I think students can easily start measuring themselves against that image. If something takes them longer to understand or they struggle with an assignment, it can feel like they are not good at the subject rather than just learning something difficult. The readings, in different ways, both challenge the idea that learning is just about how much information a student can understand or how difficult the work they are given is. Instead, they focus on what students are actually doing and how they are participating in learning. I am a Teaching of Mathematics major, and I think about this a lot with subjects like math, especially since there is such a strong stereotype around who is "good at math....

Hello Reader,  Today I will talk about the term rigor in classrooms. In the article “Rigor Is More Than Hard Work,” I agree with the idea that rigor in education is “creating an environment in which each student is expected to learn at high levels, each student is supported so he or she can learn at high levels, and each student demonstrates learning at high levels.” I agree with this definition because it defines rigor with an equitable lens. Thinking about my own education in high school, I would say that some of my classes had rigor. I went to Disney II Magnet high school in Chicago and one class that had the appropriate level of rigor was my AP Language and composition class. In this class, we would practice writing essays within 45 minutes to prepare us for the AP exam. We would also work on how to annotate and find important details about the text. I remember the teacher would provide us with written notes, helpful guides for writing certain types of essays. He also showed us...

    Reading "Rigor Is More Than Hard Work" by Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey was very informative, and it got me thinking. Regardless of what age I was, anytime I wanted to improve something and do better, only one thing came to mind: work more, do more... more and so on. Reading this article made me realize that more isn't always better. There are so many other ways to improve and understand while challenging yourself that don't require increasing quantity or "hard work". This article spoke about how, as a teacher, you can provide rigorous education. As teachers, we need to balance challenging the students and the difficulty levels.  This was the chart that was shown in the reading, and it gives a nice visual representation of how to assess the tasks being assigned to students.  The most ironic thing about this to me was the fact that today I needed help in my analysis class. I was telling my friends that I would go home over the weekend, work on more questi...

 I have always been interested in the difference between knowing something and actually being able to do something. Think about how often we describe ourselves this way. I'm not a math person. I'm not a science person. I'm not athletic. I'm not a good reader. I have definitely heard students say things like this, and I think many adults have probably said something similar about themselves (including me and maybe you?). Buehl's discussion of disciplinary literacy made me think about why this happens. Reading is not exactly the same in every subject. A student needs to learn how to approach a text through the practices of a particular discipline. A historian, for example, might ask different questions of a text than a scientist would. and they emphasized on asking students to develop “habits of thinking” like an expert and instead propose “habits of practice.” If we tell a student to “think like a scientist,” we might accidentally make the student wonder whether they...

 After I read chapter one, I had many ideas on how to actually think like a student and at the same time be able to help students learn the ability to be insiders. Keeth Smart similarly learned to be an insider not from learning about fencing, but from actually thinking like an experienced fencer. He went from being an outsider (fencing isn't for me) to being an insider and doubling down on his fencing career thanks to his coach. His development is also consistent with what Buhel mentioned in the apprenticeship chapter, in which he learned most from another experienced fencer. He had a very hard time learning, but that shift in perspective after he graduated was his biggest change to become the best. His story is extremely sad as well because he faced many setbacks, yet he had the hunger to keep going. I kind of imagine if there is no motivation, would that still keep him fencing if he never switched from being an outsider to an insider? If they don't see themselves as insiders...

Keeth Smart’s journey to being a world champion fencer was not a linear nor inevitable process; it required several reconstitutions of his “fencer identity” throughout. To start, most kids of color without economic privilege do not have fencing role models that look like them. Peter Westbrook, a black Olympian fencer and inner-city youth coach, was integral to giving Smart and his sister the opportunity to imagine themselves as fencers in the first place. Then, once the two started training under him, his sister was immediately elevated to the identity of a fencing prodigy, while Smart was largely relegated to the sidelines. In turn, Smart did not identify as a fencer – he wanted to be an engineer instead – even as his parents consistently pushed him in that direction. At some point, though (I believe sometime after being the only one on his team to not make the world championship), something shifted for Smart. He began to assume a new underdog identity, embodying the “kind of person w...

  I wish the video would have touched more on the disparities within oak park.  First, there is a clear "blame" put into the neighboring communities like the Chicago  Neighborhood right next to Oak Park,  Austin.  In this article  , we see more of the  disparity being blames on members who are "not part of" the community.  Here is a screenshot of how problematic I thought this article was and how much it justified racial disparities within Oak Park's policing practices. This struck to me because in the video we also saw a police officer inside the school. ON A TOTAL DIFFERENT THOUGHT:  I also thought about Oak Park as a place that you either have to be from there or know people from there to understand it. If you think you know oak park because you have been through North Avenue or drove by Harlem and see the historic homes and places like Whole Foods and immediately think how only rich people can live in this place and that they mi...