The debate between content area and disciplinary literacy continues. Should content teachers adopt more general strategies, as often suggested by language arts teachers, or learn more discipline‐specific strategies? Neither choice positions content teachers as expert. In this inquiry, a team of middle school teachers uncovered their reading strategies in their disciplines and embedded the most useful ones in their classrooms. In this descriptive case study, field notes of team meetings, classroom observations, interviews of teachers and students, and student work samples were collected and analyzed. Results indicated that teachers were metacognitive and used both discipline‐specific and general strategies in their teaching. Learning was most powerful when the entire team collaborated to work on content connections and to give students specific ways to overcome confusion. Implications point to rethinking the divide between discipline‐specific and general strategies and promoting authentic collaboration of content area and language arts teachers.