Secondary Teachers’ Adolescent Literacy Efficacy and Professional Learning Considerations
- Type
- Journal article
- Venue
- Reading Research Quarterly
- Year
- 2024
- Topics
- literacy · teacher-education · education
Citation
Savitz, Rachelle S; Morrison, Jennifer D; Brown, Christy; Aldrich, Charlene; Kane, Britnie D; O’Byrne, W Ian. (2024). Secondary Teachers’ Adolescent Literacy Efficacy and Professional Learning Considerations. Reading Research Quarterly.
Abstract
School requests for professional learning on adolescent literacy often stem from low or stagnant reading scores on state standardized assessments and legislative policies that require educators to complete literacy coursework. These decisions are often made without teachers’ voices, requiring teachers to take coursework they may not need or learn in ways that may not align with their content. To address this issue, we used our researcher-created and validated survey to ask middle and high school teachers about their self-efficacy toward adolescent literacy based on various professional characteristics, such as years of experience, teaching grade levels, content area, and taking the state-required literacy courses. Findings note that certain disciplines are more efficacious toward specific literacy practices, and taking state-required literacy courses is insignificant. Our implications are written for literacy scholars and teacher educators to revisit the premise and promise of the 2017 ILA Standards for K-12 literacy professionals, emphasizing the importance of being cognizant of our strengths and highlighting the need for collaborating and learning with and from teachers of all disciplines.
This article asks a simple but important question: what do secondary teachers actually believe about their own adolescent literacy knowledge and practice, and what should professional learning look like if we start from their experience instead of imposing generic mandates?
Notes
This paper is the first in what became a paired line of work with the Savitz team — this one focused on adolescent literacy efficacy, the 2025 paper (Savitz2025) extending into disciplinary literacy. Both share the same core argument: the field has been designing professional learning for teachers without asking teachers what they actually know or need.
The survey instrument we developed and validated here mattered. It wasn’t borrowed from an existing scale and retrofitted; we built it from scratch to ask teachers directly about their confidence across specific literacy practices. That gave us data that was genuinely informative rather than just confirmatory. The finding that taking state-required literacy courses had no significant effect on self-efficacy is the kind of result that makes policy people uncomfortable — and should.
What this study does well is hold the asset-based framing consistently. We came in not to measure what teachers didn’t know, but to surface what they did. The implication is institutional: if you want to improve literacy instruction, stop defaulting to deficit-based PD mandates and start with what teachers already bring. Communities of practice, where teachers are legitimate knowers rather than recipients of expertise, is the right frame.
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