Most Recommended Content

Elaine K. McEwan

Teach the Seven Strategies of Highly Effective Readers

To improve students’ reading comprehension, teachers should introduce the seven cognitive strategies of effective readers: activating, inferring, monitoring-clarifying, questioning, searching-selecting, summarizing, and visualizing-organizing. This article includes definitions of the seven strategies and a lesson-plan template for teaching each one.

Carol Booth Olson, Robert Land

Cognitive Strategies Toolkit

This article describes eight cognitive strategies — including monitoring, tapping prior knowledge, and making predictions — to help readers develop their comprehension skills.

Regina G. Richards

Understanding Why Students Avoid Writing

If parents and teachers understand why some students hate writing , they can targeted solution to address students’ reluctance. Learn some reasons students avoid writing, and how increasing the automaticity of writing skills and underscoring an appreciation for the purpose of writing can help.

Jennifer Berne

Teach the Elements of Writing

It’s a misconception that writing teachers simply tell students to write and wait to see what happens. Teachers should provide instruction in and exposure to various elements of writing to help students understand what good writing is.

Elaine K. McEwan

Use Easy Nonfiction to Build Background Knowledge

A Texas librarian shares his strategy of using nonfiction picture books to introduce new concepts to struggling adolescent readers and to build their background knowledge. Once students have been exposed to academic content in easy reading material, they are more confident in making the transition to textbooks.

Head shot of Rick Riordan

Fairy Tales, Folktales and Myths, Fantasy

Rick Riordan

“My goal in the classroom was always to make sure they were having so much fun that they didn’t realize they were learning.” ~Rick Riordan

Two middle school students working at white board

U.S. Department of Education

Explicit Vocabulary Instruction

Vocabulary instruction is an important part of English language arts classes, as well as content area classes such as science and social studies. By giving students explicit instruction in vocabulary, teachers help them learn the meaning of new words and strengthen their independent skills of constructing the meaning of text. Learn more in this excerpt from Improving Adolescent Literacy: Effective Classroom and Intervention Practices.

Group of teens studying at a table reading and writing

Reading and Writing Strategies

Browse our library of strategies that support interactive and engaging learning that helps students make stronger connections and deeper understanding of text and topics.

U.S. Department of Education

Recommendations for Improving Adolescent Literacy

In its practice guide Improving Adolescent Literacy: Effective Classroom and Intervention Practices, the Dept. of Education offers five recommendations for increasing the reading ability of adolescents. Those recommendations are summarized in this checklist.

Traci Maday

Stuck in the Middle: Strategies to Engage Middle-Level Learners

Learn about three strategies that can help create a meaningful curriculum to engage middle-level learners. The strategies draw from effective classroom practices across grade levels, as well as from research about the social, emotional, and physical development of middle-level learners.

Cori Brewster, Jennifer Railsback

Building Trust with Schools and Diverse Families

While increased family involvement is linked to improved student performance, it is not always fully understood and examined within schools. Different types of involvement may include parenting, communicating with schools, volunteering at schools, supporting learning at home, participating in school governance and decision-making, and taking part in school-community collaborations. In order to encourage and foster this comprehensive involvement with all families, school administrators and teachers must develop mutual trust, consider the different cultural attitudes some families may have towards schooling, and be diligent in reaching out.

National Institute for Literacy

Key Literacy Component: Decoding

Decoding is the ability to correctly decipher and identify a word from a string of letters. Students who struggle with decoding are at a disadvantage, but explicit instruction can help them learn this skill.

Joseph K. Torgesen

Five Areas of Instructional Improvement to Increase Academic Literacy

How can content-area, non-reading-specialist teachers contribute to academic literacy? They can incorporate these five techniques throughout their lessons: (1) provide explicit instruction and supported practice in effective comprehension techniques, (2) increase the amount and quality of reading content discussions, (3) maintain high standards for text, conversation, questions, and vocabulary, (4) increase student motivation and engagement with reading, and (5) provide essential content knowledge to support student mastery of critical concepts. Find out why these strategies and the literacy areas they represent are so important.

Kathy Christie , Kyle Zinth

Ensuring Successful Student Transitions from the Middle Grades to High School

The 9th grade year is critical to students’ success in high school — the influence of a broader number of peers (both positive and negative); the potential of developing bad habits such as skipping class; and entry into a larger, sometimes seemingly less caring, environment can all impact how students will react.

National Center for Technology Innovation, Center for Implementing Technology in Education (CITEd)

Adolescent Literacy: What’s Technology Got to Do With It?

Learn how technology tools can support struggling students and those with learning disabilities to acquire background knowledge and vocabulary, improve their reading comprehension, and increase their motivation for learning.

Charles A. MacArthur

Writing Disabilities: An Overview

Learn from an expert why some kids with learning disabilities struggle with writing and how some instructional approaches can help.

Roberta Sejnost, Sharon Thiese

Extended Writing-to-Learn Strategies

Writing enables students to process, organize, formulate, and extend their thinking about what they have been learning. In addition, teachers can also assign writing to help students evaluate what they know and understand about a topic. These writing-to-learn strategies help foster students’ abilities to make predictions, build connections, raise questions, discover new ideas, and promote higher-level thinking.