Disciplinary Literacy

As students advance through middle and high school grades, the required level of literacy skills increases significantly to meet the growing demands of reading and writing in different content areas. Students need to be able to understand the language used in school texts that becomes increasingly complex and specialized. This post focuses on what is frequently described as disciplinary literacy – what it is, how it is different from basic reading skills and content literacy (i.e., general reading skills and strategies), and the role that content area teachers can play in helping students develop the literacy skills needed to support content learning.
Joan Sedita | November 12, 2024 | 0 Comments
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Making Inferences to Support Comprehension

We make inferences every day by reaching conclusions based on clues and reasoning. We figure things out by applying our knowledge and experience to the situation at hand. If we infer that something has happened, we don't actually see or hear the actual event, but from what we know, it makes sense to think that it has happened. Helping students understand when information is implied in text (not directly stated) will improve their inferencing ability.
Joan Sedita | October 8, 2024 | 0 Comments
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In Support of Main Idea and Comprehension Strategy Instruction

This post is focused on making the case for explicit instruction of comprehension strategies, including teaching students to identify and state main ideas. The growing awareness of the role of background knowledge in supporting reading comprehension has led some literacy professionals and journalists to proclaim that building background knowledge is the main solution to addressing students’ difficulties with reading comprehension. They posit that once students have learned decoding skills, having solid knowledge on the subject of the text is the key to comprehension; therefore, schools should spend less time on teaching comprehension strategies and more on teaching subjects such as science and social studies. In particular, they often identify teaching of main ideas as an instructional practice that should be abandoned. I disagree; students benefit from a combination of comprehension strategy band background knowledge instruction.
Joan Sedita | January 3, 2024 | 3 Comments
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Teaching With Challenging, High-Quality Text

All students across all grades should be provided access to complex, grade-level texts that offer opportunities to develop academic language (vocabulary and syntactic awareness) and acquire knowledge about the world, both of which contribute to development of reading comprehension.  High academic expectations for all students using challenging text is an important way to support students from multiple ethnic, linguistic, and cultural backgrounds.
Joan Sedita | November 2, 2023 | 0 Comments
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Vocabulary Strategy: Use of Context

An important strategy to help students build their vocabulary is use of context – i.e., using the clues or hints provided in the text that surround an unfamiliar word to help guess the meaning without depending on a dictionary. This can include words, phrases, or sentences that appear before, after, or close to the word. It can also include visuals or headings embedded in the text – basically anything that helps a reader understand the meaning of an unfamiliar word. Expository, non-fiction text tends to offer more context clues than narrative text.
Joan Sedita | January 5, 2023 | 11 Comments
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Providing Reading Interventions Grades 4-9

A new research guide titled Providing Reading Interventions for Students in Grades 4-9 was released recently from the Institute of Education Sciences that summarizes research-based instructional interventions for older students who struggle with reading. The report was written by a panel of reading researchers and practitioners, chaired by Dr. Sharon Vaughn after reviewing the research related to intervention instruction for older students.
Joan Sedita | May 5, 2022 | 0 Comments
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The Science of Reading Comprehension

The term Science of Reading has been the focus of attention for several years (see my January, 2020 post). The term refers to the research that reading experts, especially cognitive scientists, have conducted on how we learn to read. This body of knowledge, over twenty years in the making, has helped debunk older methods of reading instruction that were based on tradition and observation, not evidence. Much of the discourse around instruction based on the Science of Reading tends to focus on the importance of explicit instruction for phonemic awareness, phonics and fluency. But what does the research tell us about effective instruction for comprehension?
Joan Sedita | October 3, 2021 | 1 Comment
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How to Teach Main Idea

The ability to identify and state main ideas and distinguish them from supporting details is a foundational comprehension skill. Instructional practices for this skill are an integral part of several Keys to Literacy professional development programs, including The Key Comprehension Routine and Keys to Content Writing. Its importance as a reading skill is highlighted as one of the 10 anchor standards in the Common Core ELA standards.
Joan Sedita | April 2, 2019 | 8 Comments
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Question Generation: A Key Comprehension Strategy

For this post, I want to focus on teaching students to generate their own questions while reading to improve comprehension. There is significant evidence that learning to generate questions while reading improves memory, integration and identification of main ideas, and overall comprehension (Rosenshine et al., 1996; National Reading Panel, 2000; Trabasso & Bouchard, 2002). Question generation is one of the four student strategy activities in The Key Comprehension Routine. You can take an online professional development workshop about how to teach question generation by going to the Keys to Literacy Teachable website.
Joan Sedita | September 6, 2018 | 4 Comments
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Background Knowledge and Reading Comprehension

A recent article “Why American Students Haven’t Gotten Better at Reading in 20 Years” in The Atlantic addressed the critical role that background knowledge plays in the ability to comprehend. The article subtitle was “Schools usually focus on teaching comprehension skills instead of general knowledge – even though education researchers know better.”
Joan Sedita | May 22, 2018 | 6 Comments
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Literacy in Every Classroom

The focus of the February 2017 issue of Educational Leadership is “Literacy in Every Classroom”. The journal has several excellent articles aligned to our work at Keys to Literacy. Only members of ASCD can access the full edition, but there are a few articles that are available free to the public. I have listed them below and added notes connecting the instructional practices suggested by the authors with our Keys to Literacy teacher training routines.
Joan Sedita | March 20, 2017 | 1 Comment
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Teaching Reading for Understanding

In the November/December 2016 issue of Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, Goldman, Snow and Vaughn present the results of a three-year adolescent literacy project that focused on three projects that examined content literacy instructional approaches. While each project had its own model of building comprehension, all were successful in improving student outcomes. Three common practices to support content literacy instructional practices are: engaged reading, small and whole group work, and knowledge building. The findings of the study support a continuing body of research that supports the teaching, modeling, and practice of content literacy instructional strategies that are embedded in the disciplinary classroom using subject-area text. This is foundational underpinning of all Keys to Literacy professional development!
Joan Sedita | January 17, 2017 | 0 Comments
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Why We Need Writing Instruction in Science

I work with a lot of science teachers while visiting schools to deliver literacy professional development. The Common Core literacy standards call for teachers of all subjects to provide reading and writing instruction. Understandably, many science teachers tell me they don’t understand why literacy instruction is something they should be doing, especially given classroom time demands placed on them to cover a lot of science content. My response: look at the science standards!....
Joan Sedita | May 10, 2016 | 1 Comment
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Scaffolds to Support Summarizing

Summarizing is one of the most effective activities for improving both comprehension and writing skills (National Reading Panel, 2000; Graham & Perin, 2007). Summarizing enhances comprehension as students select, condense, and synthesize in their own words the big ideas of what they have learned. Summarizing also lets teachers monitor student comprehension. It’s not surprising that the Common Core has devoted one of the ten reading standards to summarizing....
Joan Sedita | March 29, 2016 | 11 Comments
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Text Driven Comprehension and Close Reading Instruction

Basic comprehension strategy instruction, close reading instruction, and text-driven instruction are closely related. Comprehension strategy instruction provides the foundational, basic comprehension skills that students need to get “under their belt” in order to apply the more complex, critical thinking skills required to closely read challenging text. Basic comprehension strategy instruction should be text-driven -- i.e., taught and practiced using content-related text. Teachers will not be effective if strategies (such as main idea and summarizing skills) are taught and practiced in isolation. Likewise, close reading skills need to be text-driven – i.e., using challenging content-related text....
Joan Sedita | January 26, 2016 | 1 Comment
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Why Students Need to Read Challenging Text

Why do literacy standards focus so much on making sure students learn to read complex text? Common Core Appendix A: Research Supporting Key Elements of the Standards (2010, p. 2-4) provides some insight, summarized below.

The demands and complexity of reading in a college setting, in workforce training programs, and in civic life in general have either remained the same or increased over the last fifty years. However, K-12 texts have actually declined in difficulty and sophistication and become less demanding....

Joan Sedita | July 28, 2015 | 0 Comments
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Teaching Text Structures

This blog post is devoted to encouraging teachers of all grades and subject areas to teach students about text structure. It is an excellent way to improve writing and reading comprehension.

Text structure is the arrangement of ideas and the relationships among the ideas; readers and writers who are familiar with text structure recognize how the information is unfolding. Common Core Reading Standard #5 focuses on teaching text structure.

As students advance to middle and high school grades, the text that they have to read and write become increasingly varied in style, vocabulary, text structure, purpose, and intended audience....
Joan Sedita | July 21, 2015 | 1 Comment
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Challenge Students With Challenging Text?

The title of a recent piece in The Hechinger Report caught my attention: ”Should we tailor difficulty of a school text to child’s comfort level or make them sweat?”

The author of the piece, Annie Murphy Paul, notes that the practice of leveling students’ reading material so that teachers can adjust the difficulty of text to suit the ability and skills of the reader is very popular and has been around for over sixty years....
Joan Sedita | June 16, 2015 | 2 Comments
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Great Read Aloud Books

When my first grandchild was born nearly nine years ago, I received a message from my friend Jim Trelease. I’m not normally a name-dropper, but yup, Jim Trelease contacted me to give me his list of top read-aloud books for grandparents. Mr. Trelease is internationally known for his best selling book, The Read Aloud Handbook. His career was spent in reading books, assessing them for their quality as read-alouds, and traveling the country educating parents and teachers on the value of reading aloud to students. When I grow up I want to be Jim Trelease.....
Becky DeSmith | June 9, 2015 | 1 Comment
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What Makes a Text “Complex”?

Many educators I meet while I am delivering literacy professional development ask this question:

“What makes a piece of text complex, and how can I determine if the text I use is complex?”

The Common Core literacy standards place significant emphasis on the need to teach students how to read challenging, complex text, as noted on pages 2-3 of Common Core Appendix A (Research Supporting Key Elements of the Standards).

This focus is driven by research showing that as demands that college and careers place on readers have either held steady or increased over the last fifty years, the complexity of K-12 reading texts have unfortunately trended downward in difficulty. The result is that there are too many students entering college or the work force without the ability to read and understand the text they will encounter...
Joan Sedita | April 7, 2015 | 0 Comments
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Mentor Text Lessons to Improve Student Writing

The seminal report Writing Next (Graham & Perin, 2007) is based on a meta-analysis of research related to best instructional practices for improving student writing. One of the eleven elements identified in the report as most effective is Study of Models (i.e., provide students with opportunities to read, analyze, and emulate models of good writing). Showing models is also one of the six instructional practices that make up the teaching routine for Keys to Content Writing (Keys to Literacy’s writing professional development program). But many teachers are not sure about where to find good mentor writing samples, or what would be a good focus for analyzing a mentor text....
Joan Sedita | March 17, 2015 | 2 Comments
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Close Reading ..Read, Think, Talk, Write

Whenever I do a close reading lesson with teacher observers, there is always a block of time after the lesson when teachers debrief with me. They share what they saw, what affected them, how they think the strategies would look in their classrooms with their own students. In these debriefs, teachers at all grade levels consistently comment on the power of one particular part of the lesson: READ a little, THINK a little, TALK a little, WRITE a little. Let me explain.....
Becky DeSmith | January 13, 2015 | 1 Comment
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Close Reading and Collective Responsibility

Someone once told me that bloggers should write about things that matter to them. “Passion is contagious!” A lot of things matter to me, and I tend to be a pretty passionate person. In my world of teaching TIME and COLLECTIVE RESPONSIBILITY are two things that matter to me.

I currently present workshops on Close Reading, and I love it. Done correctly, Close Reading can increase reading confidence, ......
Becky DeSmith | October 14, 2014 | 3 Comments
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Hot Topics in Literacy Education for 2015

For the past 20 years, Jack Cassidy, former president of the International Reading Association, has conducted a survey polling 25 leading literacy scholars and researchers to find out "what's hot and what's not" in the field of reading. “Hot” trends, as defined by survey respondents, indicate those receiving the most attention in a given year (not those that are most important). In this year's “What's Hot, What's Not” survey, which was published in the September/October 2014 issue of Reading Today, the following five topics were named “very hot” for the second consecutive year.......
Donna Mastrovito | October 8, 2014 | 1 Comment
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A Treasure Trove of Literacy Instruction Material

Achieve the Core provides tools and resources that teachers can readily use at every grade level and in all subject areas.

In case you have not already visited this website, I’m devoting this blog post to making you aware of what I consider a “treasure trove” of free instructional resources that are evidence-based and tightly aligned with meeting Common Core literacy standards.....

Joan Sedita | September 11, 2014 | 0 Comments
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ACCESSING KEYS TO LITERACY PD DURING SCHOOL CLOSURES

We are closely monitoring the COVID-19 situation and the impact on our employees and the schools where we provide professional development.

During this time period when onsite, face-to-face training and coaching is not possible, we offer multiple options for accessing our literacy PD content and instructional practices.

If you are a current or new partner, explore our website or contact us to learn more about:

info@keystoliteracy.com
978-948-8511