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.
What do teachers of English language learners (ELLs) in middle and high school need to know to support their students’ success? Take a look at these resources, as well as additional information from our sister site, Colorín Colorado.
Teaching Literacy Online is a practical guide for secondary and college teachers of English in digital and online environments. Like other, practical, “how to teach online” books, TLO includes an overview of good practices and guidelines for teaching in digital environments. However, it goes further, by providing detailed suggestions and examples to model good digital teaching practices. You’ll learn how to apply the online teaching guidelines through:
Digital organization;
Engagement with materials;
Analysis and synthesis of information; and
The production of texts in a multitude of media and modalities.
By focusing on the engagement, analysis, and production of texts, TLO positions literacy pedagogy as the driving force when making decisions about how to teach online and/or with different digital applications.
Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education
Graham, S., Bruch, J., Fitzgerald, J., Friedrich, L., Furgeson, J., Greene, K., Kim, J., Lyskawa, J., Olson, C.B., & Smither Wulsin, C. (2016). Teaching secondary students to write effectively. Washington, DC: National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance (NCEE), Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education.
It’s a misconception that writing teachers simply tell students to write and wait to see what happens. Teachers should provide instruction in and exposure to various elements of writing to help students understand what good writing is.
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.
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.
