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Engaged, accountable reading requires students to interpret, and respond, often creatively. This article suggests several personalized ways to hold students accountable for their reading.
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.
What Should an Assessment System Look Like?
The developmental nature of reading means that diagnosing the reading comprehension ability of adolescents is more challenging than diagnosing reading comprehension among third graders. In particular, assessments should not only capture the increased sophistication of the reading task in the middle and high school years, but should also capture the specialization of the many tasks that comprise reading comprehension for older readers. Educators must think carefully not only about what the assessments they use consider "grade-level" text, but also how those assessments capture or fail to capture the processes involved in reading in different content-area classes.
Imbedding Adolescent Literacy in Out-of-School-Time Programs
How can structured out-of-school (OST) time programs provide more support to students and schools in advancing literacy skills? How might these programs incorporate adolescent literacy development activities, while preserving their unique youth development approach?
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.
Types of Adolescent Literacy Initiatives in Out-of School-Time (OST) Programs
Enhancing adolescents' literacy abilities in structured out-of-school time (OST) programs is a growing area of interest among OST enrichment providers. Schools and community-based agencies have developed a host of after-school remedial tutoring programs that provide intensive instruction for struggling students, while project-based youth development programs incorporate text-rich activities to provide highly motivating opportunities for young people to practice their reading and writing skills.
What Is This Thing Called RTI?
Response to Intervention (RTI) is a complex subject and states and districts have a lot of discretion with the implementation of this three-step, research-based approach to intervention and placement. Learn about some of the common misconceptions of the RTI process and read about additional RTI web sources.
Having Your Child Tested for Learning Disabilities Outside of School
Children who struggle with reading often need extra help. This help usually comes from the school, but some parents choose to look outside the school for professionals who can assess, diagnose, tutor, or provide other education services. The following article provides information on how to find the right person for your child.
Teaching Writing to Diverse Student Populations
Writing is a complex operation requiring knowledge of text structure, syntax, vocabulary, and topic, and sensitivity to audience needs; so it is not surprising that many teens find writing challenging. This article identifies the qualities of strong writing instruction, and offers advice to teachers for incorporating writing instruction into their practice, using tools like notebooks and journals, and sharing strategies that reinforce the importance of pre-writing and revision.
Recommendations for Research to Improve Reading Achievement for African American Students
This article includes research recommendations in the areas of standardized testing, teacher quality, after-school programs, parent involvement, reading and study skills, and computer games and simulations.
Literacy Instruction in the Content Areas: Getting to the Core of Middle and High School Improvement
Every content area, from chemistry to history, has unique literacy demands: texts, knowledge, skills. But how are these critical literacies learned, let alone taught?
Professional Development to Improve Adolescent Literacy
Beyond general best practices, what sorts of professional development will help teachers improve the literacy of their older students? This article by the National Council of Teachers of English advocates building professional communities among secondary school teachers, encouraging interdisciplinary collaboration, and consulting literacy coaches.
Best Practices for Adolescent Literacy in Afterschool and Summer Programs
The Center for Summer Learning examines the characteristics of effective summer learning opportunities, gives examples of high-quality programs, and presents an agenda for improving such programs.
Engaging Family and Community in Afterschool and Summer Programs
Informal literacy experiences often serve to shape young people's identity as readers and writers as much as or more than formal schooling.Community and family support can emphasize the importance of reading and writing, build confidence, influence young people's literacy habits, and encourage youth to seek out ways to engage in literate activities. Through a renewed national push for literacy on all levels, both families and community members have diverse opportunities in which to impact students' literacy skills.This article offers strategies to develop community engagement.
Professional Development Helps Out-Of-School-Time Staff Support Adolescent Literacy
Learn about several efforts underway to increase the training and professional development options available to out-of-school-time staff, including seasonal workers.
The Impact of Afterschool Programs that Promote Personal and Social Skills
This meta-analysis of 73 programs finds that afterschool activities can have a positive impact on children’s personal and social skills, including problem-solving, conflict resolution, self-control, leadership, responsible decision-making, and self-esteem. Youth who participate in afterschool programs show significant improvement in their feelings, behavior, and school performance. Research demonstrates that the most effective programs are SAFE (sequential, active, focused and explicit).
Teach the Seven Strategies of Highly Effective Readers
To improve students' reading comprehension, teachers should introduce the seven cognitive strategies of effective readers: activating, inferring, monitoring-clarifying, questioning, searching-selecting, summarizing, and visualizing-organizing. This article includes definitions of the seven strategies and a lesson-plan template for teaching each one.
What Does Research Tell Us About Teaching Reading to English Language Learners?
In this article, a seasoned ELL teacher synthesizes her own classroom experience and the findings of the National Literacy Panel on Language-Minority Children and Youth to make recommendations for effective literacy instruction of ELL students.
A Theory of Adolescent Reading: A Simple View of a Complex Process
How do adolescents move from reading words to applying knowledge learned from a text? See the adolescent reading model and the Strategic Intervention Model (SIM) clearly illustrated.
Reading Comprehension Strategies for English Language Learners
Explicit teaching of reading comprehension skills will help English Language Learners apply these strategies to all subject matter.
Urgent but Overlooked: The Literacy Crisis Among Adolescent English Language Learners
English language learners (ELLs) represent more than 10% of the national pre-K through 12th grade enrollment, and more than 70% of these ELLs fail to develop strong literacy skills. To increase this group's educational, college, and job opportunities, policymakers must address the unique ELL literacy questions.
Teach to the Test? Just Say No
It is possible for educators to make better choices about how and when to teach to the test than the alarmist newspaper articles and editorials would seem to suggest. This article from the Center for Comprehensive School Reform and Improvement aims to help readers think beyond simple compliance with federal law or basic implementation of programs.
Professional Development: The Route to Reform
A discussion of factors — sustained deep learning, connection to actual classroom instruction, and collaboration with peers — that can help educators teach literacy within their content area.
This checklist prepared by the PACER Center will help parents prepare for and get the most out of Individualized Education Plan (IEP) meetings with the school staff.
Improving Reading Skills in the Science Classroom
Science texts are often more challenging for students than other text types. This article contains strategies teachers can use to increase reading comprehension, helping students make sense of complicated science concepts.
How to Know a Good Adolescent Literacy Program When You See One: Quality Criteria to Consider
Literacy programs seem to have sprung up everywhere, but how can you tell the good ones from the bad ones? This guide identifies the key elements to consider in evaluating adolescent literacy programs.
The Center for Summer Learning compiled this quick review of statistics on summer learning loss.
How Parents Can Be Advocates for Their Children
Parents are often the best educational advocates for their children, especially children with a learning disability. The Coordinated Campaign for Learning Disabilities (CCLD) has developed the following tips to help parents champion their child.
