Engaging Students in Disciplinary Literacy

by Erik Lepis and Kirsten Widmer 

Effective reading instruction in middle and high school isn't just about comprehension—it's about making content accessible and fostering a deep, active relationship with challenging texts within the disciplines. This is the Science of Secondary Reading, and a powerful framework for understanding it is the Active View of Reading (AVR) Model, first introduced by Nell Duke and Kelly Cartright in 2021. An evolution of both the Simple View of Reading and Scarborough’s Reading Rope, the AVR model emphasizes that reading is a dynamic process involving word recognition and language comprehension, interconnected by bridging processes, and guided by the reader's active self-regulation. The latter includes motivation and engagement, executive function skills, and strategy use, which are the engines that drive all other processes and are crucial for a reader's success as they work together to create a holistic reading experience where the reader is not just a passive recipient of information but an active constructor of meaning.

For adolescent readers, motivation and engagement are paramount. They act as powerful levers that drive the successful application of the reader's skills and sustained attention. They include three interconnected dimensions:

1. Behavioral Engagement: the student's consistent effort, persistence, and strategic use of tools (e.g., highlighting, note-taking, re-reading).

2. Cognitive Engagement: the student's willingness to invest mental effort to truly understand the text, involving critical thinking, analysis, and making connections.

3. Affective Engagement: the student's feelings, interests, and motivation toward the reading task—do they want to read the text?

With Disciplinary Literacy—the specialized ways of reading, reasoning, and communicating within specific subject areas (e.g., history, science, mathematics), engagement differs based on the discipline:

• Scientists: remain objective and ask relevant questions, while analyzing the data with a careful eye towards detail, to evaluate the evidence and critique methods and conclusions.

• Historians: make comparisons across sources, actively think and question bias, consider perspectives, and corroborate accounts to piece together timelines.

• Mathematicians: work to solve puzzles using symbols and abstract ideas while uncovering patterns and relationships, seeking to understand the problem that needs to be solved

• Literarians: analyze characters, settings, and conflicts to uncover meaning while paying close attention to literary devices and craft to reveal themes and ideas

When students are truly engaged, they are motivated to apply the domain-specific knowledge and strategies necessary to unlock a challenging disciplinary text. Secondary educators can foster this engagement by honing in on four key areas:

1. Relevance: ensuring the content is relevant to students' lives

2. Choice: allowing students some autonomy in selecting texts or topics

3. Disciplinary Practices: explicitly demonstrating how experts in their field read, annotate, and read closely

4. Authentic Tasks: asking students to read and write for genuine disciplinary purposes rather than just to answer end-of-chapter questions

By leveraging student motivation and engagement, we empower secondary students to transition from general readers to powerful knowledge constructors in their disciplines.

Following is an example of how this might unfold in a history class in a unit on Women’s Suffrage.

1.Relevance: Use an essential question that interests students and connects the topic of study to their lives

Building relevance for adolescent readers requires knowing your students, including their specific interests and concerns, and also an understanding of their own “sociocultural context” to connect to their beliefs and experiences. In the classroom, we can think of building relevance in any number of ways. We might choose to show the relevance of our entire discipline by highlighting articles or other short texts that answer the common question “When am I ever going to use this?” or “What can you even do with a degree in _______?” Or, as in this example, we might motivate students to engage in a unit of study by connecting to current events.

For students who are about to embark on a study of women’s suffrage as part of US History, we might first connect it to a larger conceptual understanding of rebellion, where students are engaged in an inquiry with the essential question, such as, “Why do people rebel?” We could look at articles or videos of recent acts of protest and how administrations respond to those protests. As students share their ideas in partners or small groups, they can begin to both formulate theories and apply disciplinary practices, like sharing findings, engaging in reasoned discourse, and considering diverse perspectives, as well as the more typical comprehension work of main idea and detail.

2.Choice: build background and conceptual knowledge with various topics connected to the essential question  

Next, engage students in building conceptual and background knowledge by creating text sets around topics that connect with rebellion to build motivation through choice. Some conceptually connected topics might include: The Boston Tea Party, Nat Turner’s Rebellion, The Civil War, The Montgomery Bus Boycott, Stonewall, Black Lives Matter, etc. Utilizing multi-media text sets that include video, infographics, maps, first-person accounts,  photographs, articles, etc, students can choose a topic of interest and work together to inquire, investigate, develop, and share ideas from the texts they read.

Students then present and share their information with the other groups in class, working to answer the essential question (along with other relevant guiding questions), “Why do people rebel?” through presentations, jigsawing information, or contributing to a class K/W/L to start the unit.

3.Modeling Disciplinary Practices

To better equip students to read the texts of the unit (and here we encourage teachers to add a variety of texts rather than rely on a textbook, which often encourages skimming for information and fails to meet one of the major demands of the discipline itself—to consider diverse perspectives), teachers should model practices specific to the discipline. For example, they would think aloud to expose their process and demonstrate how to read, question, draw conclusions, and annotate in a way that captures key ideas. Further, they would model and scaffold how to engage in debate, synthesize ideas across topics, and notice patterns to collaboratively work towards answering the essential question.

4.Collaboration on authentic tasks

Part of the job of historians is not only to identify historical contexts but to present their findings. Presentations could take a variety of forms that include: writing essays or blogs, creating infographics, exhibits, performances, or coordinating peaceful protests of their own rebellions.

Motivation and engagement increase when students work together and actively participate in constructing knowledge versus simply notetaking from lectures or reading from a textbook. Additionally, taking on the responsibility to work cooperatively, make shared decisions, hold one another accountable, and showcase their learning in various, authentic ways mimics real-world experiences that they will encounter in the future, regardless of what fields of study they pursue. Most importantly, the conceptual knowledge gained over just learning the facts of a single topic develops their relevant background knowledge for countless other topics they may study throughout history and for both current and future events.    

Bringing It All Together

The Science of Secondary Reading reminds us that effective reading instruction in middle and high school is about more than comprehension. It is about helping students think, question, and connect like experts in the field. When we build relevance, offer choice, model disciplinary practices, and design authentic tasks, we turn reading into purposeful inquiry.

As students engage in these ways, they begin to see themselves not just as readers but as historians, scientists, mathematicians, and literary thinkers who actively construct meaning. That is the heart of the Science of Secondary Reading: empowering students to take ownership of learning, apply their thinking, and see reading as a tool for understanding both text and the world around them.