As an important tool for instruction and text selection, Teaching to Text Complexity helps teachers learn to evaluate children's and young adult literature and informational text for quality and complexity to support rigorous literacy and content learning. In addition, this timely resource explores how instructional purpose shapes not only the kinds of curricular texts used, but also considers their complexity relative to readers. By offering a framework for text selection, this book helps teachers more deeply understand text complexity in today's standards as well as its importance when building and using text sets in the classroom and reading for different purposes.

This resource helps teachers learn to evaluate children's literature, YA literature, and informational texts for quality and complexity to support rigorous literacy and content learning. This book explores how instructional purpose shapes the kinds of curricular texts used, and also considers their complexity relative to readers. By offering a framework for text selection, this resource helps teachers better understand the importance of text complexity when building and using text sets in the classroom and reading for multiple purposes.

Looking for a way to increase engagement, differentiate instruction, and incorporate more informational text and student writing into your curriculum? Teaching with Text Sets is your answer! This must-have resource walks you through the steps to create and use multi-genre, multimodal text sets for content-area and language arts study. It provides detailed information to support you as you choose topics, locate and evaluate texts, organize texts for instruction, and assess student learning. The guide is an excellent resource to help you meet the Common Core and other State Standards.

Finding ways to organize your classroom instruction for knowledge building and literacy learning can be challenging. How can you incorporate more nonfiction and informational text in your content area curriculum while expanding and deepening representation with diverse texts? What can motivate student learning while providing equity and access for different learning styles and needs? Text sets are the answer!In Text Sets in Action: Pathways Through Content Area Literacy, authors Erika Thulin Dawes and Mary Ann Cappiello demonstrate how text sets offer students the opportunity to build critical thinking skills and informational literacy while generating interest and engagement across the content areas. Put your students in the center of the meaning-making in your classroom with multimodal multi-genre text sets in action. In Text Sets in Action, the authors: Model how text sets build foundational skills and metacognitive strategies as students experience a carefully scaffolded and sequenced exploration of ideas, academic, and content vocabulary Explain how text sets encourage classroom discussion by having students ask questions about what they read, debate different perspectives, and relate the texts to their own personal experiences and the changes they would like to see in the world Show how children's literature and multimodal, multi-genre texts can serve as mentor texts for student writing and inspire creativity and advocacy Demonstrate how to curate text sets that can introduce diverse and underrepresented voices into the classroom, fostering appreciation for different points of view and generate deeper critical thinking Provide resources and suggestions for designing text sets a multimodal, multi-genre text set can include children's literature of all genres, as well as digital texts, YouTube videos, news articles, podcasts, and more Text Sets in Action will help you create a collection of text sets that can be added to or edited over the years to align with your lesson plan goals. Teachers who have adopted this approach saw greater student reading comprehension and critical thinking skills. By introducing a multitude of text, teachers will ignite a spirit of inquiry and engagement for lifelong learning.

What does it mean to teach reading in the context of the middle and high school classroom? Don’t students already know how to read by the time they get to secondary school? And how can a busy teacher take time away from the packed curriculum of science, history, mathematics, or language arts to teach reading? This book presents a linguistic approach to teaching reading in different subjects; an approach that focuses on language itself. Central to this approach is a view that knowledge is constructed in and through language and that language changes with changes in knowledge. As students move from elementary to secondary schools, they encounter specialized knowledge and engage in new contexts of learning in all subjects. This means that the language of secondary school learning is quite different from the language of the elementary years. While in the elementary years the subject matter of reading materials is often close to students’ everyday life experiences, the curriculum of secondary school deals with knowledge that is removed from students’ personal lives and everyday contexts. The language that constructs this more specialized knowledge thus tends to be more abstract, technical, information-laden, and hierarchically organized than the more familiar and “friendly” language that students typically encounter during the elementary years. Students need to develop specialized literacies (literacy relevant to each content area) as well as a critical literacy they can use across subject areas to engage with, reflect on, and assess specialized and advanced knowledge. This functional language analysis approach is shown using actual secondary social studies, science, and math textbooks and using a literary text.

There is a big difference between assigning complex texts and teaching complex texts No matter what discipline you teach, learn how to use complexity as a dynamic, powerful tool for sliding the right text in front of your students’ at just the right time. Updates to this new edition include How-to’s for measuring countable features of any written work A rubric for analyzing the complexity of both literary and informational texts Classroom scenarios that show the difference between a healthy struggle and frustration The authors’ latest thinking on teacher modeling, close reading, scaffolded small group reading, and independent reading

The authors who contributed to this text believe that young adult literature (YAL) can meet the Common Core’s push to include literacy across content areas, as well as meet the standards in creative and effective ways. This text is intended to give educators a resource to aid them in creating a literacy curriculum. The included chapters written by experts from different universities across the country offer a variety of methods for using YAL to meet the standards while connecting with students. Following a framework first chapter introducing the importance of YAL and discussing its relevance, other authors tackle various ways to teach it. Each chapter may suggest different strategies and rationales for utilizing YAL, but each shares a common purpose with the others: to promote the efficacy of YAL to engage students while at the same time meeting the rigorous standards set forth by the Common Core.

The framework for teaching document is an evolving instrument, but the core concepts and architecture (domains, components, and elements) have remained the same.Major concepts of the Common Core State Standards are included. For example, deep conceptual understanding, the importance of student intellectual engagement, and the precise use of language have always been at the foundation of the Framework for Teaching, but are more clearly articulated in this edition.The language has been tightened to increase ease of use and accuracy in assessment.Many of the enhancements to the Framework are located in the possible examples, rather than in the rubric language or critical attributes for each level of performance.

The Common Core State Standards have put close reading in the spotlight as never before. While elementary school teachers are certainly willing to teach students to closely read both literary and informational text, many are wondering what, exactly, this involves. Is there a process to follow? How is close reading different from guided reading or other common literacy practices? How do you prepare students to have their ability to analyze complex texts measured by Common Core assessments? Is it even possible for students in grades K–5 to “read to learn” when they’re only just learning to read? Literacy experts Diane Lapp, Barbara Moss, Maria Grant, and Kelly Johnson answer these questions and more as they explain how to teach young learners to be close readers and how to make close reading a habit of practice in the elementary classroom. Informed by the authors’ extensive field experience and enriched by dozens of real-life scenarios and downloadable tools and templates, this book explores *Text complexity and how to determine if a particular text is a right for your learning purposes and your students. * The process and purpose of close reading in the elementary grades, with an emphasis on its role in developing the 21st century thinking, speaking, and writing skills essential for academic communication and required by the Common Core. * How to plan, teach, and manage close reading sessions across the academic disciplines, including the kinds of questions to ask and the kinds of support to provide. * How to assess close reading and help all students—regardless of linguistic, cultural, or academic background—connect deeply with what they read and derive meaning from a complex text. Equipping students with the tools and process of close reading sets them on the road to becoming analytical and critical thinkers—and empowered and independent learners. In this comprehensive resource, you’ll find everything you need to start their journey.