Literacy Resources for Teachers: Professional Texts

What if someone slipped you a piece of paper listing the literacy practices that ensure students demonstrate more than a year's worth of learning for a year spent in school? Would you keep the paper or throw it away? We think you'd keep it. And, that's precisely why acclaimed educators Douglas Fisher, Nancy Frey, and John Hattie wrote Visible Learning for Literacy. With their trademark clarity and command of the research, and dozens of classroom scenarios to make it all replicable, these authors apply Hattie's research and show you: how to use the right approach at the right time, so that you can more intentionally design classroom experiences.

Educators across content areas have turned to Classroom Strategies for Interactive Learning for almost two decades. This fully updated fourth edition delivers rich, practical, research-based strategies that readers have found invaluable in the context of today's classrooms.

This book provides 3rd through 12th grade teachers with more than 50 tools and techniques for helping their students read independently and critically.

Being literate in an academic discipline means more than simply being able to read and comprehend text; it means you can think, speak, and write as a historian, scientist, mathematician, or artist. Doug Buehl strips away the one-size-fits-all approach to content area literacy and presents a much-needed instructional model for disciplinary literacy, showing how to mentor middle and high school learners to become "academic insiders" who are college and career ready.

As an English teacher, Kate Roberts has seen the power of whole-class novels to build community in her classroom. But she's also seen too many kids struggle too much to read them--and consequently, check out of reading altogether. Kate's had better success getting kids to actually read - and enjoy it-when they choose their own books within a workshop model. "And yet," she says, "I missed my whole-class novels." In A Novel Approach, Kate takes a deep dive into the troubles and triumphs of both whole-class novels and independent reading and arrives at a persuasive conclusion: we can find a student-centered, balanced approach to teaching reading.

Scott Filkins brings us into his classroom and the classrooms of his colleagues to demonstrate how high school teachers across the disciplines can engage in inquiry-based reading assessment to support student learning. Filkins' classroom portrait highlights the importance of incorporating genuinely formative assessment into our instruction.

Filkins unpacks his own history with assessment through engaging “confessions” of his early practices and eventual growth toward a framework that situates reading assessment in an inquiry model. Throughout the book, he showcases his colleagues’ attempts to use an inquiry framework, including the various tools and documentation methods that help them inquire into their students’ habits and thoughts as readers, use formative assessment to fuel the gradual release of responsibility framework, and use reading assessment as a means of professional reflection.