Explicit Comprehension Instruction

Explicit instruction is systematic, direct, engaging, and success oriented--and has been shown to promote achievement for all students. This highly practical and accessible resource gives special and general education teachers the tools to implement explicit instruction in any grade level or content area. The authors are leading experts who provide clear guidelines for identifying key concepts, skills, and routines to teach; designing and delivering effective lessons; and giving students opportunities to practice and master new material. Sample lesson plans, lively examples, and reproducible checklists and teacher worksheets enhance the utility of the volume. Purchasers can also download and print the reproducible materials for repeated use. Video clips demonstrating the approach in real classrooms are available at the authors' website: www.explicitinstruction.org. See also related DVDs from Anita Archer: Golden Principles of Explicit Instruction; Active Participation: Getting Them All Engaged, Elementary Level; and Active Participation: Getting Them All Engaged, Secondary Level

Serafini has created a teaching treasure trove that contains nearly a year's worth of comprehension instruction plus an extensive list of children's literature that he has successfully woven into his own reading workshop. Lessons in Comprehension introduces and reinforces meaning-making concepts through eight broad thematic strands that scaffold understanding and responsibility for novice readers.

Endorsed as a foremost Best Teaching Practice, this guide is rich with models, a complete instructional plan, and real-life examples. Students will understand how to apply comprehension strategies competently while they are reading. Includes a CD of classroom reproducibles and supports.

The goal of this book is to help address middle and high school classroom teachers', administrators', and parents' immediate need for basic information about how to build adolescents' reading and writing skills. Adolescents entering the adult world in the 21st century will read and write more than at any other time in human history. They will need advanced levels of literacy to perform their jobs, run their households, act as citizens, and consider their personal lives. They will need literacy to cope with the flood of information they will find everywhere they turn. They will need literacy to feed their imagination so they can create the world of the future. Despite the call for today's adolescents to achieve higher levels of literacy than previous generations, approximately 8.7 million 4th-12th grade students struggle with the reading and writing tasks that are required of them in school. Ongoing difficulties with reading and writing figure prominently in the decision to drop out of school. These indicators suggest that literacy instruction should continue beyond the elementary years and should be tailored to the more complex forms of literacy that are required of adolescent students in middle and high school. The purpose of this book is to summarise and discuss the most recent adolescent literacy research and to describe promising research-based instructional practices that can improve an adolescent's academic reading and writing skills.

All key issues of research and practice in comprehension instruction are addressed in this highly regarded professional resource and course text. Leading scholars examine the processes that enable students to make meaning from what they read--and how this knowledge can be applied to improve teaching at all grade levels. Best practices for meeting the needs of diverse elementary and secondary students are identified. Essential topics include strategies for comprehending different types of texts, the impact of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), cutting-edge assessment approaches, and the growing importance of digital genres and multimodal literacies. User-friendly features include end-of-chapter discussion questions. New to This Edition Incorporates the latest research and instructional practices. Chapters on the CCSS, critical theory, culturally responsive instruction, and response to intervention. Chapters on teaching fiction and informational texts in the secondary grades. Expanded coverage of multimodal literacy learning. Timely topics such as text complexity, close reading, digital literacies, and neuroscience are discussed in multiple chapters.

A straightforward, reader-friendly guide to teaching comprehension, this book prepares teachers for one of their most important tasks—helping all their students make the critical leap from "learning to read" to "reading to learn."