Content Teachers
Sort by: Date Title
When ELLs Struggle: Recognizing the Signs
When working with struggling English language learners (ELLs), it's important to note that there are similarities among linguistic, cultural, and learning disability explanations for behaviors demonstrated by ELLs. This article can be used as a starting point for conversations regarding diverse learners who are struggling.
Engaged, accountable reading requires students to interpret, and respond, often creatively. This article suggests several personalized ways to hold students accountable for their reading.
Familiarity with Greek and Latin roots, as well as prefixes and suffixes, can help students understand the meaning of new words. This article includes many of the most common examples.
Engaging Parents in Literacy Learning
Students whose parents are involved in the academic school experience tend to be good readers and are successful in school. Even for those who struggle and perhaps read below grade level, if their parents are involved in school, then parents provide a support system to ensure achievement. Use the template in this article to generate ideas both from teachers and from parents themselves about how to engage parents with literacy assignments.
Developing "Student-Owned" Vocabulary
Students should learn specific vocabulary and academic language to comprehend content text, but they should also become independent in understanding and owning vocabulary. This article offers tips for developing students' "vocabulary ownership."
Develop Fluency Using Content-Based Texts
Fluency is the missing piece of the reading puzzle for many older students. They can decode, but they cannot do it automatically and accurately enough to comprehend text. Here are some fluency-building activities to complement content delivery. See also Teach Students How to Fluently Read Multisyllabic Content Vocabulary.
Teach Students How to Fluently Read Multisyllabic Content Vocabulary
Dysfluent readers are so consumed with word identification that they cannot focus on extracting or constructing meaning from the text. Here are some activities to develop students' fluency skills, so that they may move on to access content. See also Develop Fluency Using Content-Based Texts.
The Teaching Moves of a Strategic Teacher
Research demonstrates the effectiveness of the 12 strategic teaching moves described in this article. On any given day in any given classroom, the strategic teacher employs all of these moves — whether with the whole class, a small group, or just one student.
Extended Writing-to-Learn Strategies
Writing enables students to process, organize, formulate, and extend their thinking about what they have been learning. In addition, teachers can also assign writing to help students evaluate what they know and understand about a topic. These writing-to-learn strategies help foster students' abilities to make predictions, build connections, raise questions, discover new ideas, and promote higher-level thinking.
Reading (and Scaffolding) Expository Texts
To help students comprehend expository text structures, teachers can acquaint them with the signal or cue words authors utilize in writing each of the structures and use the graphic organizers offered in this article
Reading (and Scaffolding) Narrative Texts
Students need to learn the purposes and methods of narration in order to understand the narrative framework and to eliminate frustration when they read. When students know the narrative elements, they can more easily follow the story line and make successful predictions about what is to occur. In addition, understanding these elements develops higher-level thinking skills.
Previewing Texts in Content Classrooms
Textbook previewing strategies focus not only on the structure of the text — such as the table of contents, index, chapter introductions, and so forth — but on a content overview, which focuses on the concepts and questions covered in the chapter and their interrelationships.
Use Cooperative Learning Groups to Engage Learners
When teachers structure cooperative learning groups as part of the overall reading program, they also open the door to a multiple intelligences approach to literacy, which is inherent in cooperative learning. This article offers guidance on Literature Circles and Cooperative Tear, two cooperative learning strategies supported by research.
Analytical Writing in the Content Areas
Because writing is thinking, the organization of students' writing reflects both the structure of their thinking and the depth of their understanding. Students should be writing in all their classes, explaining what they know and how they know it. Thus, it's essential for content-area teachers to give students meaningful analytical writing assignments. Read An Introduction to Analytical Text Structures for more information and graphic organizers to help with writing instruction.
An Introduction to Analytical Text Structures
Many students are used to writing narratives — stories, description, even poetry, but have little experience with analytical writing. This article is an introduction to six analytical text structures, useful across content areas. See also Analytical Writing in the Content Areas.
A Sample Literacy Process Interview Protocol
Literacy process interviews are informal assessments designed to gauge how readers and writers think about their work as they are engaged in it. Participants’ responses aren't scored, but are used to guide program educators as they teach different literacy skills and strategies.
In this excerpt from her essay "Literacy Development for Latino Students," published in The Best for Our Children: Critical Perspectives on Literacy for Latino Students, Teacher's College Press, the author describes the reading program she uses to take her reluctant readers from dreading the library to not wanting to put a book down.
Fitting the Response to Intervention Framework with Mathematics Education
While there is a great deal of information on reading and RTI, there is a dearth of research on math with RTI. Thus, the development and implementation of reading and RTI has blazed a path to RTMI (Response to Math Intervention).
From the Lunchroom to the Classroom: Authentic Assessment and the Brown Bag Exam
A Brown Bag Exam uses found objects and images to help students activate prior knowledge and creates a framework for students to express their understanding. Students work individually and in collaboration to create concrete connections between the reading and the Brown Bag items. Unlike traditional assessment, the Brown Bag Exam is an exam filled with conversation, idea exchange, and learning.
Using Technology to Support Struggling Students: Questions, Argumentation and Use of Evidence
Knowing how to engage in signature scientific acts, such as formulating questions and using evidence in arguments is an important part of science learning. This InfoBrief from the National Center for Technology Innovation offers more information about using technology to support struggling students.
Using Technology to Support Struggling Students: Visualization, Representation and Modeling
Science learning often involves creating abstract representations and models of processes that we are unable to observe with the naked eye. Learn more about visualizing, representing, and modeling to aid struggling learners.
Using Technology to Support Struggling Students: Student Engagement and Identity with Science
In an increasingly complex world, all students need to be scientifically literate. While some students may go on to pursue advanced careers in the sciences, basic scientific literacy is critical for all students.
Using Technology to Support Struggling Students: Science Literacy, Vocabulary and Discourse
To be scientifically literate, students must be able to express themselves appropriately. Learn how to help struggling students master specific vocabulary and be able to use it in their science writing activities.
Literacy Coaching in the Middle Grades
From time constraints to a de-emphasis on literacy to a limited research base, coaches in middle schools face challenges that do not exist in the elementary grades.
Captioned Media: Literacy Support for Diverse Learners
Captioned or subtitled media is a great tool for teachers looking to differentiate classroom instruction — research has shown that ELLs, students with learning disabilities, and students who struggle academically may all benefit from following along with captions while watching a classroom video. Learn more about the benefits of captioned media and additional resources for captioned material in this article.
Adolescent Literacy: What's Technology Got to Do With It?
Learn how technology tools can support struggling students and those with learning disabilities to acquire background knowledge and vocabulary, improve their reading comprehension, and increase their motivation for learning.
NEA’s annual Read Across America celebration is a great opportunity for tweens and teens to both celebrate their literacy and language skills and share them in meaningful ways.
Teachers often find the Holocaust to be an overwhelming subject to approach with their students. While the Holocaust offers important lessons to today's students, it can be a difficult to find the appropriate amount of information to share with young learners. This article highlights the importance of the Holocaust in today's classroom, and offers suggestions for integrating historical fiction into the unit of study.
Curricular Connections: Holocaust Remembrance
The Holocaust is often a difficult topic to discuss with students. This guide offers tips for approaching the subject, as well as cross-curricular connections for a more meaningful reading experience.
How to Increase Higher Order Thinking
Parents and teachers can do a lot to encourage higher order thinking. Here are some strategies to help foster children's complex thinking.
As students grow older, they are asked by their teachers to do more and more with the information they have stored in their brains. These types of requests require accessing higher order thinking (HOT).
Teaching Content Knowledge and Reading Strategies in Tandem
Many areas of instruction can have a rippling effect for the expansion of readers' repertoire of skills, including pre-reading, predicting, testing hypotheses against the text, asking questions, summarizing, etc. Literacy-rich, content-area classrooms include a variety of instructional routines that provide guidance to students before, during, and after reading.
Content-Area Literacy: Mathematics
Of all the academic disciplines taught in middle and high school, the one we least expect to entail reading extended texts is in mathematics, but math texts present special literacy problems and challenges for young readers.
Content-Area Literacy: Literature
Reading complex literary texts offers unique opportunities for students to wrestle with some of the core ethical dilemmas that we face as human beings. The growth of ethical reasoning is one of the most compelling reasons for schools to develop students' capacities to read complex works of literature. Students who enter high school as struggling readers are quite capable of engaging with such texts, in part because these same students are often wrestling with complex challenges in their own lives.
Content-Area Literacy: History
The ability to read historical documents including contemporary explications about societal, economic and political issues provides a direct link to literacy as preparation for citizenship. As in the other disciplines, schools are unique sites for youth across class and ethnic boundaries to learn to read such documents and to develop the skills to engage in such reading for college and career success.
Content-Area Literacy: Science
The demands of comprehending scientific text are discipline specific and are best learned by supporting students in learning how to read a wide range of scientific genres. Besides text structures emphasizing cause and effect, sequencing and extended definitions, as well as the use of scientific registers, evaluating scientific arguments requires additional skill sets for readers.
Writing Disabilities: An Overview
Learn from an expert why some kids with learning disabilities struggle with writing and how some instructional approaches can help.
Creating a Welcoming Classroom Environment
On a daily basis, ELLs are adjusting to new ways of saying and doing things. As their teacher, you are an important bridge to this unknown culture and school system. There are a number of things you can do to help make ELLs' transitions as smooth as possible.
Tips on Starting a Community Service Project
A successful community service project is the result of clear objectives, thoughtful planning and coordination, savvy use of resources, and follow-through.
Professional Learning Communities
Professional learning communities (PLC) establish a schoolwide culture that develops teacher leadership explicitly focused on building and sustaining school improvement efforts. Generally, PLCs are composed of teachers, although administrators and support staff routinely participate. Through participation in PLCs, teachers enhance their leadership capacity while they work as members of ongoing, high-performing, collaborative teams that focus on improving student learning.
A Beach Bag Full of Summer Learning Resources
Learning shouldn't stop just because school is out. Here are some ideas to keep students reading, writing and thinking all summer long.
Teacher-Student Interactions: The Key to Quality Classrooms
The Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS) describes ten dimensions of teaching that are linked to student achievement and social development. Each dimension falls into one of three board categories: emotional support, classroom organization, and instructional support.
Explicit Comprehension Strategy Instruction
Use explicit strategy instruction to make visible the invisible comprehension strategies that good readers use to understand text. Support students until they can use the strategies independently. Recycle and re-teach strategies throughout the year.
How Can Instruction Help Adolescent Students with Motivation?
Teachers have an important role to play in influencing and supporting students' motivation for learning. This article highlights four classroom strategies that educators can use to engage students with texts.
Key Literacy Component: Writing
Students who don’t write well aren’t able to learn and communicate effectively. This article explains what good writing skills are and how to help struggling young writers gain those skills through proper instruction.
Key Literacy Component: Text Comprehension
Text comprehension allows readers to extract or construct meaning from the written word. Students who misread words or misinterpret their meanings are at a disadvantage. Proper instruction can boost students’ skills in this key area.
Key Literacy Component: Vocabulary
What’s in a word? Mastery of oral and written vocabulary promotes comprehension and communication. Find out how proper instruction can help students who struggle with vocabulary.
Key Literacy Component: Fluency
Fluent readers can read text accurately, smoothly, and with good comprehension. Students who get bogged down in the mechanics of reading have trouble with this skill. With proper instruction, struggling readers can improve their fluency.
Key Literacy Component: Decoding
Decoding is the ability to correctly decipher and identify a word from a string of letters. Students who struggle with decoding are at a disadvantage, but explicit instruction can help them learn this skill.
October is Learning Disabilities Month
October was designated LD Month in 1985 through a proclamation by President Ronald Reagan. Each year the celebration is used to educate the public about learning disabilities.
Student Motivation and Engagement in Literacy Learning
Teachers can help students build confidence in their ability to comprehend content-area texts, by providing a supportive environment and offering information on how reading strategies can be modified to fit various tasks. Teachers should also make literacy experiences more relevant to students' interests, everyday life, or important current events.
Extended Discussion of Text Meaning and Interpretation
Teachers should provide opportunities for students to engage in high-quality discussions of the meaning and interpretation of texts in various content areas as one important way to improve their reading comprehension.
Direct, Explicit Comprehension Strategy Instruction
Comprehension strategies are routines and procedures that readers use to help them make sense of texts. Struggling adolescent readers need direct, explicit instruction in comprehension strategies to improve their reading comprehension.
Explicit Vocabulary Instruction
Vocabulary instruction is an important part of reading and language arts classes, as well as content-area classes such as science and social studies. By giving students explicit instruction in vocabulary, teachers help them learn the meaning of new words and strengthen their independent skills of constructing the meaning of text.
