Author and education nonprofit leader Lynne Munson recounts how she helped steer an ambitious curriculum development initiative that worked directly in concert with teachers. More than a decade later, district leaders have learned much more about how coherent, classroom-tested, and teacher-supported curricula can transform student learning. With…

Every reading and writing instruction initiative has its challenges and unintended consequences and leaves someone a bit behind. What's a school leader to do? This article offers three key questions that school leaders should ask every day to optimize literacy instruction in their schools.

Wide vocabulary knowledge is associated with proficiency in reading comprehension and scores on tests involving comprehension. Yet assessments show that U.S. students at various grade levels have demonstrated no improvement in their vocabulary knowledge since 2009. Literacy expert Timothy Rasinski and colleagues argue that students need improved…

According to a 2010 report by ACT, "Only 31 percent of students are performing at a college-and-career reading level with respect to successfully understanding complex text" (p. 5). This statistic demonstrates what educators know: Middle and high school students face numerous challenges in reading, understanding, connecting to, and…

Ironically, at a time when coaching seems to have come into its own as a way to improve teacher practice, school districts across the United States are experiencing funding cuts and eliminating coaching positions. The threats that budget woes pose to established school coaching programs led the authors to ask themselves what practices schools and…

When young readers encounter texts that contain too many unfamiliar words, their comprehension suffers. Reading becomes slow, laborious, and frustrating, impeding their learning. That's why vocabulary knowledge is a key element in reading comprehension. To comprehend fully and learn well, all students need regular vocabulary exploration.…

Despite the fact that two of every three students in U.S. schools have reading proficiencies below the level needed to adequately do grade-level work, schools don't make a point of offering either high-quality professional development for kindergarten teachers nor expert tutorial instruction for at-risk kindergartners. This means that most schools…

Traditional notions of literacy have been transformed regarding usage, purpose, context, and symbolic meaning. The context of individual reading and writing efforts is always inherently social. To achieve full literacy for all students, students must use texts to empower action, thinking, and feeling in the context of purposeful social activity.…

Contends that curriculum fragmentation does not exist, and that unless children develop a command of the details of any given body of knowledge, they will not be able to use their powers of critical and creative thinking. (Author/MLF)

Describes a Long Island, New York, school district's staff development project designed to improve student learning and thinking strategies by applying interactive and constructive learning theory. The three-year project focused on bettering reading instruction across the curriculum and used teacher-selected materials and demonstration lessons to…

Vocabulary is the hallmark of an educated person as it not only promotes reading comprehension but also enables to actively participate in the society. The four practices that teachers can use to expand students' vocabularies and improve their reading are presented.

After replacing its basal readers with a literature series, Tucson (Arizona) schools piloted a study group approach supporting long-term, innovative changes in reading instruction. Study groups gave teachers the chance to consider their beliefs, share ideas, challenge current practices, blend theory and practice, identify professional and personal…

Research conducted with a sample of 86 classroom teachers concerning the teaching of reading suggests that the needs they report must be analyzed by objective means to determine the underlying conditions that result in expression of the symptoms. (Author/MLF)

About 30% of U.S. students leave primary grades without basic reading competence and cannot fully profit from secondary education. A San Diego high school developed a multidimensional reading course that stresses building vocabulary through natural language and reading, reading at school and at home, listening to teachers read, practicing phonetic…

Research demonstrates that students learn to read words in contextual guessing, letter-sound decoding, analogy, and insight. The reading subtest results had demonstrated that the students in the word detectives group read significantly more words correctly than the students in the benchmark word identification program.