Disciplinary Literacy Task Force

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Roseville High School Principal Jason Bettin, Interviewed by Liz Lietz

Inheriting a Challenge, Seizing an Opportunity

When Jason Bettin arrived at Roseville High School, he inherited a building that was facing declining results on state accountability measurements. At the same time, nearly the entire administrative team at the school was new to the building, and they needed to take a hard look at which programs were (or were not) delivering adequate results. Several issues needed to be addressed at the Tier 1 level, and until that happened, what was in place at the Tier 2 and 3 levels could not be successful. This involved a lot of cost-benefit analysis with the building-level leadership team, not just administrators. "When we calculated the cost vs. the measurable improvement we were seeing from certain interventions, we realized we needed to change our approach," Bettin reflected. That recognition became the seed of a larger transformation.

Rather than continue with the status quo, Bettin and his leadership team made the strategic decision to realign resources to focus on addressing Tier I needs: academic, behavioral, and social-emotional. Part of this shift led to redistributing two teacher’s intervention hours to spread them across core content departments. The goal of improving Tier I instruction led to a focus on literacy within each discipline and every class. Quality literacy instruction in all areas was a Tier I instructional need; taking the approach that literacy was every teacher’s responsibility was a bold move that required difficult conversations and hard scheduling decisions. But it was also the structural foundation upon which everything else would be built.

Finding the Right Framework at the Right Time

Around the same time Bettin was rethinking his school's approach to literacy support, Macomb ISD re-launched its disciplinary literacy professional learning series. The timing proved to be fortuitous. Bettin assembled a small, dedicated team - including two half-time instructional coaches, one specializing in English and one in math- and brought them through the initial PD series. What they encountered resonated immediately.

"We were pretty quickly hooked," Bettin recalled. “We thought, ‘this is something that's missing from the way we talk about literacy.’" By the midpoint of that first year of learning, the team had already made up their minds: this framework needed to reach every teacher in the building.

Building the Team and the Structure

Bettin's vision required more than enthusiasm — it required structural intentionality. The administrative team carefully designed the schedules of his disciplinary literacy team so that content-area leaders in English, social studies, science, and math each held a shared open hour every day. That time wasn't free time; it was embedded professional learning. Teachers could develop materials, observe each other's classrooms, co-plan lessons, and process their implementation challenges together.

"We call it an MTSS hour," Bettin explained. "My disciplinary literacy people all have that same hour all year long. So they've got a prep within their own department teams, and then they've got this open hour where they are together." This dual layer - departmental collaboration and cross-content coordination - became one of the initiative's powerful assets.

Two instructional coaches, one working mornings, one afternoons, completed the architecture. Each staff member’s roles were designed to evolve over time: beginning with producing resources and materials, and gradually shifting toward classroom modeling, co-teaching, and providing direct feedback to teachers. Bettin was deliberate about keeping this work entirely separate from teacher evaluation, believing that trust and culture change require safety, not surveillance.

Taking It School-Wide

After the school’s core team had a year's head start in the disciplinary literacy framework, Bettin brought the conversation to his Deputy Superintendent and the secondary principals. With central office support secured for professional learning around disciplinary literacy, the initiative officially expanded to all staff across the 6–12 buildings. The rollout was structured deliberately: rather than dropping new ideas on teachers and moving on, the team maintained momentum between PD sessions with targeted follow-up, resources, and continued conversation.

A key challenge was helping every teacher -not just those in traditional "literacy" subjects - see themselves as part of the solution. "I would constantly say to my math teachers, they have a double-edged sword in their room," Bettin said, "because kids are struggling with math content, and they're struggling with reading, and you're assigning word problems with vocabulary they don't understand. We've all got to support this." The school’s non-core staff were also included: physical education teachers, auto shop instructors, and others worked through problem-framing activities to discover how disciplinary literacy could live in their contexts too.

Using Data to Drive the Next Chapter

After the initial cycle of learning, the disciplinary literacy team collected feedback. Using Microsoft Forms, they designed a layered survey — roughly ten questions for the whole school and another ten tailored to each department — giving them both building-wide and department-level insight into strengths, challenges, and current practices. With the help of a team member skilled in AI tools, the data was synthesized into accessible summaries.

But the team was careful not to simply hand teachers a report and call it data-use. "We recognize AI hallucinates, so we're not just going to trust the results," he noted. Instead, at an early release day in January, departments ran their own data table process: identifying successes, naming challenges, brainstorming solutions, and building focused action plans. When the disciplinary literacy team then ran their own meta-analysis across all eight data tables, two clear themes emerged: drawing inferences and the variety of strategies teachers use to build vocabulary.

Those themes became the compass for the current phase of work. "Now we can shape a plan of how we're going to support sustainability based on what our staff needs," Bettin said. And crucially, staff themselves had named those needs, making buy-in more organic.

Sustaining What's Been Built

Now in the sustainability phase - the third year of the cycle - Roseville High School is focused on deepening implementation rather than introducing new concepts. The team has embedded disciplinary literacy prompts directly into unit planning templates, ensuring that when teachers design instruction, literacy is a conscious layer of focus. Roseville High School staff has created protocols for collaborative conversations that feel less awkward and more productive. Direct links on planning documents keep the DL Resource Hubs accessible to keep prior learning within reach.

Perhaps the most telling sign of cultural integration, in Bettin's view, is “the fact that I'm seeing my gym teachers request the coaches come down to help them figure out how to instruct literacy in a gym class. That's a really good sign that this is integrating into your culture, that this is what we do."

Measuring What Matters

Bettin expects to see the results of this work in the school's performance index. The most recently released index showed growth across every area, a first for the building. This information was met with rounds of applause when the data was shared with staff. He tracks coach logs monthly to monitor the shift from resource-producing to classroom-embedded support. And the building-level team listens for the quality of conversations in collaborative settings, watching for teachers' growing confidence to discuss and act on literacy in their disciplines. The team’s previous learning and collaborative time embedded in their work day have prepared them to notice evidence of disciplinary literacy implementation.

"I think [the measure of success is] going to be a lot of formative things," he said. "Are we seeing it in the classrooms? Are we seeing people's confidence to discuss literacy shine through in our collaborative conversations?" For Bettin, a culture change is the goal, not compliance.

Lessons for Other Leaders

When asked what advice he would offer to a building leader just beginning this journey, Bettin is both honest and practical. “Start with a small team,” he says. “Find people who can do the real work of keeping it going between sessions. Make sure staff recognizes the literacy challenge in front of them before you begin. And then, critically, figure out how to protect the time and space for that team to sustain the effort across years, not just months.”

"You gotta be beating the drum on it," he said. "Don't think the right approach is collecting artifacts and having everyone turn them in. You'll get compliance, but I don't know that you'll get the culture change. You have to keep talking about it, and you have to build in opportunities for people to share what they're doing with their peers."

"You've got to be having conversations about it with those outside your building, so that your direction doesn't get swayed by competing interests. Securing support from the central office, both philosophically and in terms of staffing and funding, was essential to making this a true district-level initiative.”

A Work in Progress, and Worth It

Bettin is the first to acknowledge that this journey has been anything but a straight line. "There is no way we will ever say we walked into this knowing exactly where we were going to be in three years," he said. "It was a lot of team problem-solving, a lot of stumbling, and a lot of going down a path and saying ‘let's go this way instead’." What has made the difference, he believes, is the consistency of a team that has stayed together, learned together, and kept moving forward together.

The work is hard. The distractions are real. But for Jason Bettin and Roseville High School, the commitment to disciplinary literacy has become more than a professional development initiative. It has become the way they think about teaching, about learning, and about every student who walks through their doors.