With the pressures put on teachers today to meet standards, cover a dense curriculum, and be involved in numerous meetings, taking the time to reflect on instruction may be pushed aside. The authors examined the importance of reflection and its impact on teaching and learning. Reflection allows teachers to evaluate subjective and objective…

While research unequivocally points to the need to teach the language that supports participation in reading and writing activities in middle-grade classrooms, many educators grapple with how to create the instructional conditions that promote equitable and just opportunities for students to learn the Language of School Literacy (LSL). In this…

When working with bilingual readers, teaching for equity means building on students' linguistic strengths. To do so, we must provide intentionally designed holistic literacy instruction that encourages students to use their full literacy and linguistic repertoire. This article describes an asset-oriented approach called "Transliteracy"…

Practitioners face many challenges when working with students who are experiencing difficulty with comprehension. The act of creating meaning with texts is complex, and comprehension is often measured in schools as a product of reading. Product assessments, such as answering questions or retelling a text, take place after reading, which makes it…

The emphasis on improving writing instruction, especially the writing of non-narrative texts, may lead some teachers to seek effective ways to teach students. The IMSCI model, a scaffolded model for writing instruction, is useful for planning effective instruction. This article describes a research project conducted in a 4th grade classroom…

Dialogic teaching--a pedagogical approach that involves students in a collaborative construction of meaning and is characterized by shared control over the key aspects of classroom discourse--has been largely advocated by contemporary research and theory. However, studies in the US and UK continue to document the persistence of monologic…

The Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) of 2004 encourages schools to use interventions to ensure that students' literacy difficulties are not instructional problems before assuming a learning disability. The law frames these interventions in two ways: as a strategy for identifying students with learning disabilities--a measurement…

This study examined teachers' actions during small-group guided instruction as they scaffolded students' understanding. The data suggest that expert teachers use a process that has four components: questions to check for understanding, prompts for cognitive and metacognitive work, cues to alter the learners' attention, and direct explanations. As…

Acrostic poems make use of a keyword written vertically, where each line of the poem begins with a letter of the keyword. The structure of this formula poem combined with teacher modeling provides a scaffold for students, showing them how to think flexibly and develop ideas and choose interesting words. Moreover, encoding information in poetic…

This article discusses the importance of comprehension strategy instruction in the early grades. It explains how one teacher integrated Alphaboxes, making connections, and the discussion web as part of her read aloud instructional practice. The article argues that, through careful planning, higher order thinking strategies can be modified for…

Many teachers want to incorporate critical literacy into their instruction but are unsure of where to start. In this article, the authors pair Jones's (2006) three tenets of critical literacy (deconstruction, reconstruction, and social action) with books that highlight multiple perspectives. By combining this critical literacy framework with…

"I" poems are motivating invitations to write that can engage students in preparing for or responding to reading. In composing "I" poems, students assume the identity and voice of a person, place, or object and write from that perspective. The first-person narrative point of view is the most important feature of an "I" poem. "I" poems can rhyme,…

ACCESS is an organizational framework to help educators plan instruction that prepares students for high-stakes tests and promotes self-regulated literacy learning. ACCESS stands for tasks that are authentic, that require collaboration among students, that challenge students, that culminate with an end product, that allow self-direction by giving…

While writer's workshop provides a nurturing environment for many students, others struggle with the independence it gives. This may be due to the difficulty of coordinating the cognitive and self-regulatory demands of the writing process. Self-regulation refers to thoughts, feelings, and actions that individuals use to attain personal goals.…

Illustrates how teachers can help students learn from analogies using the Teaching with Analogies Model. (SR)