This research brief from the Center for Comprehensive School Reform and Improvement examines the research on teacher leadership and what it says about drawing on the skills of experienced teachers to facilitate school improvement.
This article presents a developmental framework of informational writing developed from a study of children’s writing in K-5 classrooms. See examples of children’s compositions at each developmental level, and learn how to use this continuum to support increasingly more mature forms of informational text.
Early intervention works. Because it is also expensive, it’s important to be able to identify the kids who are most at risk of reading failure. Thanks to a new generation of screening assessments, we can identify these students as early as kindergarten — and then invest in interventions for them.
Technology — and especially the subset of technology tools known as assistive technology (AT) — can be an effective element of the writing curriculum for students with disabilities. Since writing is so integral to school success, AT is often indicated to assist students with disabilities.
Read and discuss poetry with nature imagery with students. Take students on a poetry walk around the school, neighborhood, or community to observe and collect sensory images from direct experience with nature: the sights, sounds, smells, and textures of things outdoors. Students can take a poetry journal with them to write down words as they observe, listen, smell, and touch things outside the classroom.
The NAEP 2000 reading results provides further evidence of a longstanding gap in verbal skills between rich and poor children in the United States. This article describes the history of this achievement gap, speculates on its causes, and makes recommendations for closing it.
Multilingual families can be powerful partners on behalf of their children. Yet what these partnerships look like will be unique to each school setting and community — and may require some thinking outside of the box. This section includes some key tips and recommended resources from our sister site, Colorín Colorado.
Music stories are compositions of a narrative or descriptive sort. Students can listen for the story in the music, and this type of music can be integrated with literature, literacy, social studies, science, mathematics, and the other arts.
Here are a dozen simple strategies to help your children keep the academic skills they learned during the school year. Support them as they read. Give them material that is motivating — and some of it should be easy. Help them enjoy books and feel pleasure — not pressure — from reading. The summer should be a relaxed time where their love of learning can flower.
Just as we differentiate our core content instruction to meet individual student needs, our approach to digital citizenship should take student diversity into account. Get tips and strategies for teaching critical digital citizenship skills to your students with learning and attention issues.
ELL students learn new words everyday, and it’s essential that they have a deep understanding of what those words mean. Without comprehension, new words are useless. The key to helping ELL students succeed is to give them explicit instruction in the academic language of the content they are learning in class. This article offers some strategies and resources for getting started!
Listening to your child read aloud — though for longer times and without the timer — can be good practice for fluency and comprehension. Ask questions about the text, and repeat the reading if your child struggles with word recognition, pace, or expression. And always be positive and encouraging.
Speech recognition, also referred to as speech-to-text or voice recognition, is technology that recognizes speech, allowing voice to serve as the “main interface between the human and the computer.” This Info Brief discusses how current speech recognition technology facilitates student learning, as well as how the technology can develop to advance learning in the future.
To many students, revision means correction. This article defines revision and suggests ways teachers can encourage their students to truly revise their work.
Executive function is a set of thinking skills that include working memory, flexible thinking, and self-control. Trouble with executive function can make it harder for kids to focus, follow directions, get organized, plan, and handle big emotions. All of these challenges can make reading and learning more difficult.
