What Is It?

The creation of a student-centered classroom is key to effective adolescent literacy development. A classroom dynamic that builds upon students' background information, interests, and experience and that encourages/facilitates experience-based/student choice/involvement activities will support reading comprehension, student engagement and motivation, and development of positive literacy identities. Literacy development thrives in classrooms where 1) students and teachers regularly engage in interactive discussions and 2) teachers use varied groupings to meet the needs of diverse learners.

Suggested Strategies and Resources: Personal Context

Instruction builds upon background information, interest, and experience.
Research suggests that building upon students' background information, interest, and experience is not only key to engaging reluctant readers and writers; it is also key to helping weak readers make connections to the text which they may not make on their own. This is especially important for English language learners.

Suggested Strategies and Resources: Experiential Learning

Students frequently participate in experience-based activities which offer choice/involvement.
Such activities encourage students to make connections between their lives and their schoolwork. Teachers frequently arrange for experiential learning experiences, inviting students to get involved with activities that help others and address school, community, or regional issues. Students help decide what they will read, how they will present learning, and how they will work. Students research issues of interest to them and/or write about their experiences in reference to the topics at hand. Research confirms that student investment in learning increases when power in the classroom is shared and hands-on experience is a key facet of learning.

Suggested Strategies and Resources: Facilitation of Discussion

Teachers facilitate rather than "lead" discussions.
Skillful facilitation of discussions is an effective way to generate critical thinking, involve students in their learning, scaffold individual assignments, and assess comprehension. A classroom that is structured to welcome and respect different opinions and perspectives can become a truly supportive learning community. Note that this is very different from the teacher-led, question-and-answer sessions that more typically occur in secondary classrooms.

Suggested Strategies and Resources: Varied Groupings

Teachers use varied groupings.
Fluid and varied groupings are structural keys to meeting the needs of diverse learners. Such groupings also make possible the variety of learning experiences and practices that are effective in supporting literacy development. A mix of whole group, small group, paired, and individual work activities throughout the week is necessary because students are multi-faceted as learners and because literacy development is complex.

Teachers can change grouping strategies to match the needs of learners and the objectives of different tasks. This allows for a variety of working arrangements over the course of each week. Different configurations that allow for heterogeneous and homogeneous groups can give teachers ample time to interact with those needing additional support and to incorporate structured and unstructured literacy development (reading, writing, speaking, listening).

Before you can implement this Key Component, your stakeholders will need to consider some or all of these questions. The questions could be used in 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 you use time, space, personnel, and materials/resources 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?