Articles

//This page lists articles discussing up-to-date educational practices and ideas.//

Research: Oral-language practice helps English-language learners Researchers and educators who specialize in teaching English-language learners say that spending more classroom time practicing oral-language skills will help these students find their "voice" in their new language. Researchers suggest that English-language learners and other at-risk students benefit from working in small groups or pairs, building an academic vocabulary and improving "deep reading" skills through structured academic conversations and teacher-guided debate. Education Week (premium article access compliments of EdWeek.org) (10/21)

Reading aloud to students is a technique that is being used by many teachers in older grades to help improve the literacy of adolescent students. Some history teachers say reading aloud from primary texts helps students better grasp the modern-day meaning of documents written 200 or more years ago, while other teachers find the technique especially helpful with English-language learners or students who have learning disabilities. Some are concerned, however, that the technique could be overused and may be masking poor reading skills among older students. Education Week (premium article access compliments of EdWeek.org) (1/6)
 * Some teachers are reading aloud to adolescent students **

Shared reading offers rich instructional opportunities as teachers share in the workload while students access the text too. Embedded in the middle of the gradual release of responsibility, shared reading has elements of a read-aloud and guided reading, but it’s most valuable for explicit demonstration opportunities with shared text.
 * [|Shared Reading Opportunities for Direct Literacy Instruction]**

Young or inexperienced writers need to both observe knowledgeable writers at work and participate in writing events in authentic and well-supported ways. Shared writing lessons will allow you to both model and actively engage students in the writing processes that they most need in order to improve their writing.
 * [|Shared Writing]**

In this Strategy Guide, you'll learn approaches that can help you differentiate the reading experience for students depending on their age, interests, and ability.
 * [|Differentiating the Reading Experience for Students]**

In this Strategy Guide, you'll learn approaches that can help you differentiate the reading experience for students depending on their age, interests, and ability.
 * [|Differentiating the Reading Experience for Students]**

It turns out that reading comprehension strategies are as effective in one's second language as they are in one's first language. For ELLs, the development of and access to useful background knowledge is crucial for their comprehension of texts in their second language. What follows is a Strategy Guide for developing comprehension that incorporates the gradual release of responsibility model.
 * [|Supporting Comprehension Strategies for English Language Learners]**

In this strategy guide, you will learn how to organize students and texts to allow for learning that meets the diverse needs of students but keeps student groups flexible.
 * [|Using the Jigsaw Cooperative Learning Technique]**

Young and/or poor writers need to observe experienced writers at work in ways that will actually help them to write more effectively themselves. Write-aloud lessons, known as modeled writing, will help you to provide authentic explanations for your students, demonstrating how writers actually go about constructing various kinds of texts.
 * [|Write Alouds]**

This strategy guide introduces the RAFT technique and offers practical ideas for using this technique to teach students to experiment with various perspectives in their writing.
 * [|Using the RAFT Writing Strategy]**

Shared reading offers rich instructional opportunities as teachers share in the workload while students access the text too. Embedded in the middle of the gradual release of responsibility, shared reading has elements of a read-aloud and guided reading, but it’s most valuable for explicit demonstration opportunities with shared text.
 * [|Shared Reading Opportunities for Direct Literacy Instruction]**

In this strategy guide, you will learn how to organize students and classroom topics to encourage a high degree of classroom participation and assist students in developing a conceptual understanding of a topic through the use of the Think-Pair-Share technique.
 * [|Using the Think-Pair-Share Technique]**

Teacher read-alouds demonstrate the power of stories. By showing students the ways that involvement with text engages us, we give them energy for learning how reading works. By showing them how to search for meaning, we introduce strategies of understanding we can reinforce in shared, guided, and independent reading.
 * [|Teacher Read-Aloud That Models Reading for Deep Understanding]**

Guided reading gives teachers the opportunity to observe students as they read from texts at their instructional reading levels. This strategy guide describes ideas that support guided reading, including practical suggestions for implementing it in the classroom; introduces guided reading; and includes a reading list for further investigation.
 * [|Using Guided Reading to Develop Student Reading Independence]**

Teachers are often asked to modify instruction to accommodate special needs students. In fact, all students will benefit from the following good teaching practices. The following article takes the mystery out of adapting materials and strategies for curriculum areas.
 * [|How to Adapt Your Teaching Strategies to Student Needs]**

Differentiated instruction, also called differentiation, is a process through which teachers enhance learning by matching student characteristics to instruction and assessment. Writing instruction can be differentiated to allow students varying amounts of time to complete assignments, to give students different writing product options, and to teach skills related to the writing process.
 * [|Differentiated Instruction for Writing]**

Differentiated instruction is based on the premise that instructional approaches should vary and be adapted in relation to individual and diverse students. This brief looks at how differentiation strategies applied to reading can be designed to help students learn a range of skills including, phonics, comprehension, fluency, word prediction, and story prediction.
 * [|Differentiated Instruction for Reading]**

There are a variety of grouping formats that have been proven effective for teaching reading to students with learning disabilities: whole class, small group, pairs, and one-on-one. This article summarizes the research and implications for practice for using each of these grouping formats in the general education classroom.
 * [|Grouping Students Who Struggle With Reading]**

Differentiating instruction is more complex than just providing different students with different learning experiences. Learn about this distinction by reading classroom examples that contrast differentiated literacy instruction with simply different instruction.
 * [|Differentiated Classroom Structures for Literacy Instruction]**

Teachers do their best to improve students' fluency, but sometimes the information they have to work with is incomplete and, therefore, leads them down the wrong path. For example, silent reading or 'Round Robin' reading seem like good ways to improve fluency. But, in fact, increasing fluency requires more practice, more support, and more guided oral reading than either of these strategies can deliver.
 * [|For Students Who Are Not Yet Fluent, Silent Reading Is Not the Best Use of Classroom Time]**

Part of teaching reading is motivating the children to practice, practice, practice. Find out how to use children's poetry to encourage kids to read.
 * [|Using Poetry to Teach Reading]**

There are a variety of well-validated ways to increase comprehension skills in students through instruction; these are summarized in this article. In addition, new hypotheses about effective comprehension instruction are emerging, and these are also summarized. Although too little comprehension instruction is now occurring in schools, much is known that would enable such teaching to be done with confidence; more will be known as the emerging hypotheses are evaluated in the years ahead.
 * [|Comprehension Instruction: What Makes Sense Now, What Might Make Sense Soon] **

During the 1990s and through 2008, significant emphasis was placed on the use of research to determine how children learn to read and why some students struggle with reading. Seminal meta-analyses of research and subsequent summary reports such as // Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children // (Snow & Burns, 1998) and the report of the National Reading Panel (2000) began to connect that research to implications for instruction.
 * [|Adolescent Literacy: Addressing the Needs of Students in Grades 4–12]**

**[|Effective Vocabulary Instruction]** Vocabulary is one of five core components of reading instruction that are essential to successfully teach children how to read. These core components include phonemic awareness, phonics and word study, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension (National Reading Panel, 2000). In 1997, Congress charged the NIH and the Secretary of Education to convene a national panel to assess the status of research-based knowledge, including the effectiveness of various approaches to teaching children to read. In April, 2000, the resulting National Reading Panel released its report “Teaching Children to Read: An Evidence-Based Assessment of the Scientific Research Literature on Reading and Its Implications for Reading Instruction”. **[|Middle and High School Reading Achievement: A School-Wide Approach]** An effective, school-wide model for teaching reading should include a two-prong approach: a plan for providing reading instruction to good readers (close to grade level or above), and a plan for providing reading instruction to struggling readers.
 * [|What Every Educator and Parent Should Know About Reading Instruction]**