Pared down standards, according to ASCD author Mike Schmoker, are the cure to the Common Core. In this provocative article, Schmoker describes how the Common Core literacy standards have largely been a "disaster"--their tangled implementation "an impossible profusion of grade-by-grade minutiae." To "right the ship of…

Due to the Common Core State Standards, close reading is becoming a common practice in today's elementary and middle school classrooms. Qualitative content analysis of journal publications was used to determine the (a) prevalence of close reading in the existing literature, (b) knowledge about close reading from the research literature, (c) themes…

This study focused on the use of a standardized reading assessment to examine reading comprehension among English language learners (ELLs) and English fluent middle school students, focusing on two text genres: informational and narrative. The Common Core State Standards require students to develop skills in both genres. However, ELLs may not…

The article examines the results of two quasi-experimental studies of the implementation and impact of the Literacy Design Collaborative (LDC), an intervention designed to support secondary teachers' transition to Common Core State Standards in English language arts. The first study examines LDC implementation by eighth-grade social studies and…

Frustrated with the restrictive nature of the Common Core Standards, the author calls on her teaching peers and colleagues to resist a system that denies them and their students access to what teaching and learning should be about.

Four reading strategies and several web tools that are effective for reading closely and identifying textual evidence are described and explained. As teacher-educators with many years of experience teaching reading and the language arts, we have found these reading strategies and web tools helpful for middle school students as they consider…

Nonfiction texts demand critical literacy, as evidenced by these teachers' experience teaching Phillip Hoose's "Claudette Colvin: Twice toward Justice" with ninth graders. In addition to selecting high-quality nonfiction, the authors are committed to high impact teaching of those texts. For the authors that means supporting students'…

This authoritative, easy-to-use guide will help educators plan and implement intervention lessons for struggling readers that align with the English Language Arts Common Core State Standards. All three authors run successful summer reading programs and supervise tutors who are becoming reading specialists. In this comprehensive resource, they…

The authors offer a new perspective on close reading that uses a range of multimodal texts to capitalize on the visual nature of contemporary society and to support literacy within the academic disciplines. Specifically, a qualitative study explored teachers' perspectives on the use of Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS), a practice borrowed from…

In the past several years, especially with the adoption of the Common Core State Standards, emphasis has been placed on connectivity among different academic subjects as well as between those subjects and the world. Simultaneously, there has been an increasing trend toward examination questions that are wordier and require more thinking and…

We tested the effects of teaching reading skills through U.S. History content for 38 eighth-grade poor readers whose reading ability ranged from 2nd to 4th grade levels. Half of the students received special education services and half of the students were English Language Learners. Students were taught to decode multisyllabic words, learn…

The second edition of this essential handbook provides a comprehensive, updated overview of the science that informs best practices for the implementation of response to intervention (RTI) processes within Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS) to facilitate the academic success of all students. The volume includes insights from leading scholars…