The top-down approach of assigning the whole class articles by authors of historically privileged identities, and expecting students to dutifully read and reflect in writing, is an ineffective way to respect, excite, connect with, and challenge students, most especially students of identities historically marginalized in the online academy. In…

Building on the concept of transformative learning and exploring the role of reflection in graduate professional education, this article uses student and educator reflections from the graduate course on reading practices to narrate four stories of learning. These stories, structured based on the "4Ls" model of reflection, describe what…

Teaching reading successfully requires deep knowledge of the reading process and development, as well as the implementation of impactful reading instruction and differentiation. This book aligns Montessori didactic materials and pedagogy, developed over a century ago, with current research on reading development. Readers will gain a solid overview…

This essay aims to continue a conversation initiated in the 1980s about the contrasting terms "peer" and "tutor." This essay begins with a brief history of the terms, and applies Kenneth Burke's concept of identification to peer tutoring to attempt to explain these contradicting terms. Burke's theory of identification…

Developing young children's vocabulary is essential for later reading success; thus, early childhood classrooms require a comprehensive vocabulary approach that teaches academic vocabulary. Yet even providing young children with child-friendly definitions of sophisticated words can be a challenge. First, the authors outline the components of a…

The Assessment-to-Instruction (A2i) Professional Support System has been shown to be effective in improving literacy proficiency among young readers by combining data-driven technology with professional development (PD) activities to help teachers provide personalized literacy instruction. To identify efficient ways to expand the reach of A2i,…

The middle and high school years represent a unique challenge for students who have not yet attained proficiency with word reading. By this time, it is generally expected that students will be able to independently read a variety of texts to gain content knowledge and to read for understanding. Students with or at-risk for learning disabilities…

Most investigations of literacy programs are relatively short-term endeavors. Here, we reflect on what we have learned in 7 years of studying a program to teach word-learning strategies. The program was developed with a 3-year Institute of Education Sciences (IES) Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant and is currently being studied in a…

In the late 1980s Batia Laufer worked with teachers who believed that to understand a text it was enough to understand 80% of the text's word tokens. In response, Laufer set out to calculate the minimal text coverage, i.e., percentage of running words in a text the reader should understand to comprehend it reasonably well. In 1992, she explored…

The term "Science of Reading" (SOR) has become a popular phrase in practitioner circles. To best serve students, it is important that teachers and interventionists are knowledgeable about the SOR. This article provides a special educator's guide to the SOR by reviewing critical elements that have emerged in public discourse about the…

In response to McLean (2021), Laufer (2021) makes three claims which are either not supported by research or are based on studies with important limitations. First is that a vocabulary size, instead of a level, can be used to match learners with lexically appropriate materials despite test creators and research not supporting this. Second is that…

This article describes an instructional strategy developed to integrate reading and writing. This strategy invites students to use reading, writing poetry, and illustrating as tools to represent intertextual connections to self-selected paired text. It identifies poetic inquiry as the research methodology, discusses intertextuality, and provides a…

In this "Open Dialogue: Peer Response," the author notes that in the initial paper, "Contributions of Educational Psychology to Understanding Student Learning: What Has Been Discovered - What More Could Be Done?" Entwistle lays out a useful summary of the way that psychology has contributed to an understanding of student…

How students learn to read and how reading is best taught are often the focus of media, public, and political criticism. The contemporary reading reform movement is the latest chapter of a long history of controversies, dating from at least the early 20th century. Throughout the decades, attention has focused on how teachers teach reading…

English language learners (ELLs) need to build competency with the English language quickly, in order to benefit from classroom instruction. Reading Recovery offers theoretical underpinnings which support accelerated language acquisition with valuable applications in a classroom setting. Teachers need to develop language as a meaningful whole,…