Disciplinary Literacy Professional Learning at Mountain Lake High

This chapter begins by defining disciplinary literacy and explaining why it can be a powerful tool to support struggling readers and their content-area teachers. Then, the authors discuss and critique various literacy professional learning initiatives tried at Mountain Lake High School (pseudonym) prior to the current disciplinary literacy focus. After providing background information about how the disciplinary literacy initiative at Mountain Lake got started, a brief overview of the planning year (i.e., Year 1) for professional learning is presented. Next, work being enacted during Year 2 is discussed. Finally, the authors discuss potential next steps in the work at Mountain Lake High along with possible implications of this work for the broader field of literacy.