Can a Science teacher be a Literacy teacher?

     When I started teaching for the New York City Board of Education in 2004, I was practically told that while I am a Science teacher, I am also a Literacy teacher. While I was willing to become one, I was not ready to be one. So I started with the basics. I realized that speaking to my students' former teachers and taking time to study their academic and school records are plus factors, and the everyday encounters in the classroom are even valuable learning experiences for me. I believe that teachers can better raise the level of literacy of their students when they know their students' academic levels. Benchmarking should be the initial step a teacher undertakes in order to seriously and conscientiously teach their students. From there, teachers know where their students are and how they can operate inside the classroom.
     As a Science teacher, I always believe in scaffolding my students' learning experiences. What I usually do is present a simple concept model of the lesson, provide them with the necessary concepts and principles that would concretize their conceptual frame of mind. Then I allow my students to ask some essential questions that describe and validate their own conceptual framework. After a thorough discussion and interaction, I allow the students to extend their learning by making some reports, writing activities, booklogging, or presentation. These extension activities are usually geared towards at least four important styles, and my students have the freedom to choose the extension activities that they want to pursue. I also believe that the best way to increase my students' critical thinking capabilities is through collaborative and cooperative learning. I assign students in a group, give them a task and the necessary materials and teacher support, and allow them to validate and critique each other's outputs.
     When I taught in New York City schools, I was even provided with more opportunities to learn in the literacy and special education courses that I took. The regular professional development sessions also helped me understand my students more, and have provided me more productive strategies and techniques to teach them. How being a literacy teacher worked for me in my Science class is indeed a result of hard working and careful planning. What successes I have gained and insights I have learned in my classroom are now shared with my colleagues as I regularly present them in the yearly New York City Writing Project's Teacher-to-Teacher conferences, the yearly Science Council of New York City's scientific conventions, and most recently in the National Science Teacher's Association's national conference. 
     Students in my Science class incorporates reading and writing as part of their project outputs, and using the available information and communication technologies, they are creating projects through multimodal presentation capabilities.