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You May Be Right, I May Be Crazy: MTSS and Tier I Instruction

This is a guest re-post of a blog recently written by Stephanie Stollar, founder of Stephanie Stollar Consulting and creator of The Reading Science Academy. Stephanie's message caught our eye -- she shares some important insights about issues related to implementing core literacy instruction for schools using a multi-tiered system of supports framework.

Stephanie Stollar | March 20, 2024 | 1 Comment

Planning Effective Writing Assignments

When you ask students to complete a writing assignment, how often do you receive something back that does not match what you were expecting from your students? Part of the problem is that students may not have enough information about your expectations. Often the directions for a writing task lack specificity.

Joan Sedita | March 5, 2024 | 0 Comments

Teaching with “W” Questions

The "W" questions -- who, what, when, where, why, how -- are small but powerful words that can be used in a number of ways to develop early elementary students' literacy skills, including oral language and discussion skills, reading comprehension, and writing skills.

Joan Sedita | February 5, 2024 | 5 Comments

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

The Writing Rope: Author Q and A

Since the publication of my book The Writing Rope: A Framework for Explicit Writing Instruction in All Subjects in August, 2022, I have been asked to do several interviews for podcasts, webinars, and articles about the book. The book has also led to inquiries about how Keys to Literacy's professional development courses are aligned with The Writing Rope. For this month's blog post, I have collected questions and answers from these interviews.

Joan Sedita | December 5, 2023 | 0 Comments

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

Motivating & Engaging Adolescents to Read

A significant number of the teacher trainings that Keys to Literacy delivers at schools and districts are focused on teaching reading comprehension, vocabulary, and writing to students in grades 5-12. A common question teachers ask us is, "How can I motivate students to read and stay engaged while they are reading?" This is not surprising given that there is strong evidence that students' motivation and interest in reading school-related texts declines after they move from elementary to middle school, and this is particularly true for students who have difficulty learning to read (Torgesen et al., 2007; Kamil et al., 2008). This post provides information about this topic and suggests instructional practices associated with improved motivation.

Joan Sedita | October 4, 2023 | 1 Comment

Writing Personal Reactions to Narrative Text

The Writing to Read report summarized the findings from a meta-analysis of the research related to how writing supports reading (Graham & Hebert, 2010). One of the key recommendations was to ask students to respond in writing to narrative text (e.g., a story or a biography), such as writing a personal response to narrative material read or writing about a personal experience related to it. The report suggests that this might take the form of a response journal, for which the teacher asks students to write their feelings, reactions, and questions during or after reading a story or other form of narrative text, such as a biography. Personal responses to narrative text help students clarify and organize what they are reading and become aware of their reactions to the text.

Joan Sedita | August 28, 2023 | 0 Comments

The Importance of Teaching Prosody as Part of Reading Fluency

Fluency, along with phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, and comprehension, is one of the five components of reading identified by the National Reading Panel (2000). The panel found compelling evidence that instruction to increase reading fluency is critical to both comprehension and future reading success and ease. Fluency plays a role in helping students become motivated readers. It is the ability to read connected text at varying degrees of complexity accurately, appropriately paced, with logical phrasing and prosodic expression, with little conscious attention to the mechanics of reading. Fluency combines rate, accuracy, automaticity, and oral reading prosody (expression), which taken together facilitate the reader’s construction of meaning. Prosody is the rhythmic and melodic aspects of speech. It is reading with good expression, intonation, including pitch, tone, volume, and emphasis on certain words.

Joan Sedita | July 11, 2023 | 1 Comment

Vocabulary Instruction for English Language Learners

Together with my colleagues at Keys to Literacy, I have recently updated the content in our Key Vocabulary Routine professional development course, including information related to vocabulary instruction for English language learners (ELLs). This quote from Michael Graves sums up an important message for teachers of all grades and subjects: “While most of the assistance we provide for ELLs will not be different in kind from that we provide for English only students, many ELLs will need to be taught more words, will need more powerful instruction, and will need to be given particular help in mastering word-learning strategies. This is also true of other students who enter school with small vocabularies.” (2016, p. 41)

Joan Sedita | June 6, 2023 | 1 Comment

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