Top 5 Things You Can Do to Improve Your Literacy Instruction
How can you help students improve their ability to understand complex text and their writing skills? Probably not in the ways you’ve been led to believe work best. The standard approach to reading comprehension has students practice skills and strategies like “making inferences” about texts on a random variety of topics. And writing is generally relegated to a separate block, with students writing about topics unrelated to the core curriculum. But evidence indicates what really boosts students’ literacy is to connect reading and writing. Plus, comprehension and writing instruction should be grounded in rich content. And all aspects of literacy need to connect—not just reading and writing, but also listening and speaking.
In this webinar, participants will learn:
- Why it’s important to read aloud to the whole class from a series of complex texts, staying on the same topic for at least two to three weeks—and how to find resources for those “text sets”
- How to ask questions that put content in the foreground rather than skills and strategies
- Why it’s crucial to organize classroom libraries by topic as well as reading level
- Why spending a lot of time on meaty social studies and science topics is the best way to boost reading comprehension
- How students’ comprehension improves when they write about what they’re learning and get explicit instruction in constructing sentences, paragraphs, and essays