Students learn skills in context.
Research shows that better results occur when students learn skills in conjunction with examples and teachers stress the relevance and usefulness of these skills to students' lives. It does not show strong results for students who learn skills in isolation and are then expected to apply/transfer them appropriately at their own discretion.

Suggested Strategies and Resources: Explicit Instruction

Students learn reading comprehension strategies through explicit instruction.
Research clearly supports the teaching and use of a variety of reading comprehension strategies with adolescents before, during, and after reading. These include: use of Anticipation Guides, Directed Reading and Teaching Activity (DRTA), Reciprocal Teaching, KWL, Graphic Organizers, Think Aloud, Question Generating, Sensory Imagery, Drama, Art, and structured note-taking.

Teachers frequently use modeling/apprenticeship as a teaching technique and framework.
Reading and writing are complex combinations of skills that vary by context. Reading a scientific journal does not require the same set of skills as reading a historical novel. Writing geometric proofs, lab reports, short stories, poems, and persuasive letters requires overlapping but not identical sets of skills. Moreover, people who are proficient in some aspects of reading and writing are novices at others. It is important for students to see themselves and their classmates as developing readers and writers, continually trying to learn the craft. Teachers can effectively support literacy development by making visible their own processes as more expert readers and writers in their respective fields.

Teachers use a variety of assessment strategies and tools.
Literacy assessment tools provide ongoing feedback; teachers use this feedback to plan instruction and students use it to gauge progress in reading and writing. Literacy assessment tools include rubrics, self-assessment inventories, observation, learning logs/journals, Individualized Reading Inventories (IRIs), cloze passages, teacher-created assignments, and (where appropriate or mandated) standardized or standards-based tests.

Before you can implement this Key Component, your stakeholders will need to consider some or all of these questions. Use them for group discussions, needs-sensing activities, and informal small-group conversations.

• Which of the above best practices typically occur now as part of teaching and learning? Which do not? Why do you think that is the case?

• How would teaching and learning shift if the above best practices characterized education throughout the school? How would time, space, personnel, and materials/resources be used differently?

• What kind of support would teachers need in order to effectively incorporate these practices into teaching and learning on a daily basis?

• If these practices were to characterize what takes place in classrooms throughout the school, would any current instructional benefits be displaced or compromised?