Skill Instruction Research
LiteracyTA’s teaching philosophy and methodology is built on skill-based pedagogies, research on adolescent literacy, and over 100 years of combined classroom practice.
The sources listed below provide a snapshot into the types of texts that have influenced our work and guided our practice both as teachers and educational leaders.
Our ideas continue to be inspired by our students, our daily work in the classroom, our LiteracyTA members, and by talented researchers and practitioners who help move education forward. We are thankful to all who have dedicated their lives to helping students reach their dreams and ultimate potential.
Bridging the Gap: A Critical Reading and Writing Guide
The Art and Science of Teaching: A Comprehensive Framework for Effective Instruction
In this book, Marzano offers a useful framework for effective teaching. Marzano provides questions for teachers to help them plan and evaluate their teaching while providing ways for students to participate in the learning process. This insightful teacher book can help teachers examine and develop their knowledge and skills.
Common Core Standards Website
Improving Students’ Learning With Effective Learning Techniques: Promising Directions From Cognitive and Educational Psychology
Pathways to the Common Core: Accelerating achievement
This accessible and carefully-researched volume should be required reading for anyone interested in the motivations, research, and values behind the Common Core Standards (CCS). The authors point out what the standards are---and what they are not--- and provide specific implications for instruction and school-wide adoption.
The Differentiated Classroom: Responding to the Needs of All Learners
Written by the "guru" of the differentiated instruction movement, this classic text works from a definition of differentiated instruction ("teachers begin where the students are, not the front of a curriculum guide") and then explains, in considerable detail how such a classroom can be established and the instructional strategies that work.
Building Academic Language: Essential Practices for Content Classrooms
This volume is chock full of suggestions for approaching vocabulary sensibly in the classroom. In addition to providing a considerable number of enjoyable and focused activities, the author provides an excellent suggestions for teaching brick (specialized terms) and mortar (cross-disciplinary terms) within, and beyond the content areas.
Comprehending in the content areas: The Challenges of Comprehension, Grades 7-12, and What to Do about Them
Teaching Academic Language in L2 Secondary Settings
Reading for Understanding: How Reading Apprenticeship Improves Disciplinary Learning in Secondary and College Classrooms
In this volume, the authors first discuss what real reading means (e.g., it's not "decoding"); then, they provide suggestions for engaging students in the reading process, making their thinking visible, completing long reading and sustained reading assignments, and assisting students to build their knowledge in the content areas.
Content-Area Reading: Literacy and Learning Across the Curriculum
In an accessible volume that has been very successful, these authors apply research and theory to classroom practices, answering questions such as: "What influences content literacy?" "What do good readers do?" and "How can the two types of metacognition (knowledge and task) be defined and taught?" These questions are followed by examples of applications, e.g., story problems, webs for creating a thesis, and double-entry journals.
The Transition to College Writing
This intelligent volume, written by a Cornell college professor, examines with knowing eyes the differences between high school and college, approaches to sustained reading, "how good writing gets written," referring to the work of others, and the remarkable variations in form and purpose in college assignments. Arguing that "the purpose of college writing is to give individuals more to say, with broader perspectives and stronger voices of their own with which they can take more active, constructive roles in the professions and public life." The author demonstrates how disciplinary contexts and other factors influence the individuals and their purposes.
Everyday Genres: Writing Assignments across the Disciplines
This volume emphasizes the importance of understanding, analyzing, and contextualizing different types of writing in the disciplines. After explaining the contemporary definition of genre as a contextualized text that "carries significant ethical and social values and ways of being in the world," p. 1, she explains the importance of instructors' sharing, analyzing, and assigning different genres, depending upon their discipline and the class goals. Providing examples of assignments and activities in various disciplinary classrooms, she suggests how instructors of science, history, music, math and other areas of instruction can share their expertise in the classroom.
Improving Adolescent Literacy: Effective Classroom and Intervention Practices
Teaching and Researching Reading: Reading (Applied Linguistics in Action)
Grabe and Stoller offer practical advice for practitioners and researchers, including evidence-based teaching ideas and a multi-step iterative process for conducting meaningful action research on reading-related topics.
They Say/ I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing
This light and useful book shows students how to frame their arguments in the larger context of what else has been said about their topic, providing templates to help them make the key rhetorical moves in argumentation.
Why Don't Students Like School? A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions about How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom
Literacy Standards In Action
We've mapped our literacy lessons and reading, speaking, and writing skills to state standards, Common Core, and NGSS. The standards are "the what" to teach. Our lessons are "the how" to meet the expectations defined by the standards. Click on the links below to view our quick reference table that maps standards to literacy lessons.