Research indicates that feeling is fundamental to the multilayered experience of literary interpretation. However, despite great strides in U.S. high school classrooms, discussions about literature are still often characterized by known-answer discourses that exclude feeling. This article builds on small-scale studies of affective evaluation, an…

Helping students engage with complex texts has been a longstanding challenge, though teachers have received little guidance about practices that help students in engaging with texts. This paper provides a range of empirical evidence about a tool designed to provide formative insight into text-focused teaching, which we used to reliably score more…

Across one school year, in which I coached a fourth-grade teacher, she and I took an inquiry stance investigating how we could come to understand the reading identities kids held relative to Stephens' (2013) list of characteristics of effective and efficient readers. We also sought to understand how we could help kids develop, sustain, or extend…

This article presents a pedagogical framework for interpreting and discussing texts with others, ""havruta" inspired pedagogy." The framework is comprised of three overlapping domains: structures, stance and practices. We illustrate each domain through teachers' words and classroom practices, depicting how teachers in one context work within these…

This article focuses on the ways "hevruta" learning can contribute to teachers' capacity to be present to self, other, subject matter and the cultural context in which the learning occurred. "Hevruta" learning, when conceptualized for the purposes of teachers' professional development, brings to the fore both the interpretive and relational…

Preschool is a complex place, and some preschool educators come to their classrooms without formal training in language and literacy pedagogy. As a result, they need practical guidance and support to ensure that they are facilitating literacy success. An area ripe for targeted language and literacy instruction is shared storybook reading. We have…

In our theoretical framework, reading engagement entails multiple perspectives on reading that consist of motivational dispositions, cognitive strategies, conceptual understanding, and social discourse. Possessing these attributes, engaged readers are typically higher achievers than less engaged readers, who show fewer of these qualities or less…

The study of Jewish traditional texts in a "hevruta" learning setting (two people studying a text together) represents past as well as contemporary modes of Jewish religious and devotional study. More recently, "hevruta" learning has made its way into several contexts of professional development in Jewish education, including inservice settings…

A companion piece to the Resource Guide and the Teaching Strategies Series, Booklets A and B, of "Improving Students' Abilities to Read and Think," this manual is designed to instruct supervisory and training personnel in how to help teachers make the best use of those teaching guides. It describes the role of the curriculum leader and…