Power Tools For Adolescent Literacy

Winner: Association of Educational Publishers 2009 Distinguished Achievement Award Finalist: Association of Educational Publishers 2009 Golden Lamp Award Are there students in your classroom who have hit the reading wall? Studies indicate comprehension regresses in many students once they reach middle school. Teachers need the right resources in their classrooms for engaging students in reading. This book is a veritable encyclopedia of literacy strategies secondary teachers can apply to all content areas immediately. It integrates key strategies, research from top literacy experts, and proven intervention practices. Benefits: Gain access to the most relevant research on literacy and its application in the classroom. Employ powerful tools to aid reflection and the implementation of new strategies. Discover over 50 strategies for engaging adolescent learners, empowering strategic learning, building comprehension, developing vocabulary, and writing to learn. Access over two dozen reproducibles for teachers and students.

This book offers a new vision for teaching literacy to adolescents that moves beyond reading for its own sake and toward reading as a way to motivate students to connect with their world. The authors draw on the voices of adolescent readers to discover how teachers can encourage their students to explore their identities, face injustices, and contribute to their communities. Readers learn how to incorporate the core issues of a socially responsible pedagogy into their own curricula to support strong literacy skills across the content areas. Each chapter includes reflection questions that move the reader toward personal and professional development, along with classroom applications that provide specific strategies and ideas for engaging literacy projects. This dynamic book: Outlines a socially responsible pedagogy that will assist teachers in creating meaningful experiences to motivate even the most disengaged students, takes a critical approach to teaching and learning that recognizes the importance of explicitly addressing issues of power and identity, examines effective school-wide models that promote a climate of responsibility toward the larger society.

"This rich resource walks middle and high school literacy leaders through a comprehensive process for conceptualizing, initiating, and, most important, sustaining a schoolwide literacy learning program. The authors clearly know teachers and schools, and their reality-tested tools will prove invaluable in guiding and supporting middle and high school literacy leaders." —Doug Buehl Author, Classroom Strategies for Interactive Learning A systemic and sustainable approach for improving adolescent literacy and learning! Taking the Lead on Adolescent Literacy provides educational leaders with a user-friendly and comprehensive planning process for developing a new literacy initiative—or for dramatically enhancing a current plan--that has the power not only to raise student performance levels but also to positively impact graduation rates, employability, and higher education success. Using a five-stage framework that has been field-tested nationwide for more than a decade, the authors provide an array of resources to guide in-depth planning, implementation, and monitoring to ensure sustained results, supported by examples from literacy-rich schools, checklists and assessments, and a glossary of terms. Each stage in the process builds upon a school or district′s existing capacities and focuses on six detailed rubrics that can be implemented at every stage to help ensure long-term success: Student motivation and engagement Literacy across the content areas Literacy interventions Literacy-rich environment, policies, and culture Parent and community involvement District support of school-based efforts Helping educators build the critical skills in students for communicating and making meaning within an increasingly complex world, this book shows how a sustained focus on literacy can serve as a powerful lever for school improvement.

Supported Literacy for Adolescents, written by nationally recognized experts, introduces an innovative and field-tested instructional framework for preparing secondary students to succeed academically in a fast-changing and globally networked world. Filled with examples from science, history, literature, and special education classrooms, the book shows how teachers can enable diverse students, including under-performers, to develop critical thinking and other essential competencies along with the "multi-literacy" tools needed to engage in twenty-first century content learning.

Learn the 5 steps that school leaders can take to improve student literacy in all content areas, with targeted interventions for students who are struggling the most.

From leading authorities in both adolescent literacy and content-area teaching, this book addresses the particular challenges of literacy learning in each of the major academic disciplines. Chapters focus on how to help students successfully engage with texts and ideas in English/literature, science, math, history, and arts classrooms. The book shows that while general strategies for reading informational texts are essential, they are not enough—students also need to learn processing strategies that are quite specific to each subject and its typical tasks or problems. Vignettes from exemplary classrooms illustrate research-based ways to build content-area knowledge while targeting essential reading and writing skills.

Thorough and accessible, this professional resource and text shows how the latest research in adolescent literacy can be translated into effective practice in middle and high school classrooms. Leading authorities discuss findings on the adolescent learner, addressing such essential topics as comprehension, content-area literacy, differentiated instruction, gender differences in literacy learning, and English language learners. With a focus on evidence-based methods, coverage ranges from techniques for building digital literacy and comprehension skills to strategies for flexible grouping and writing instruction. Ideal for courses in adolescent literacy, each chapter includes guiding questions, discussion questions, and classroom examples.