In The Classroom Adlit

Bonisiwe Shabane

-Nov 1, 2025, 5:21 PM

What is accelerated learning? Is it just remediation? An accelerated student learning approach looks at achievement as a comprehensive endeavor with a strategic support system in and out of the classroom. Browse our library of strategies that support interactive and engaging learning that helps students make stronger connections and deeper understanding of text and topics. Inferencing is something we do all the time, but often students don’t realize this is a skill they naturally use. Watch as a 6th grade ELA teacher uses a simple photograph to help her students recognize all the information they can infer from the photo.

What do teachers of English language learners (ELLs) in middle and high school need to know to support their students’ success? Take a look at these resources, as well as additional information from our sister site, Colorín Colorado. Real World History: A DC public school invites students to develop their skills as historians as they study the Great Migration of African-Americans from the rural south to big cities. Strategy instruction helps students engage and make sense of what they are learning through an active process of learning. At the heart of strategy instruction is getting students to talk and write about what they are learning and thinking. Strategies span all areas of literacy development but we frequently use them during comprehension, vocabulary, and writing instruction with adolescent learners.

When should you use a particular strategy? A frequently used approach is to consider if a strategy is best used before, during, or after students read and write. “Before” strategies activate students’ prior knowledge and set a purpose for reading and writing. “During” strategies help students make connections, monitor their understanding, generate questions, and stay focused. “After” strategies provide students an opportunity to summarize, question, reflect, discuss, and respond to text. There are also several strategies that really find their strength being utilized multiple times during the reading and writing process (e.g.

before and after reading, etc.). Keep in mind that explicit teaching of reading comprehension strategies has value but not at the expense of content. Choosing fewer strategies to implement and giving students multiple opportunities to use them, perhaps even across disciplines, avoids less class time devoted to learning strategies and more time to learning content. AdLit is made possible by a generous grant from The Grateful American Foundation and AdLit are proud partners. What does research have to say about working on reading fluency development with older students?

Is it appropriate for secondary teachers to spend instructional time on it? Dr. From graphic novels to fantasy and fiction, these fabulous books spotlight the diversity, histories, cultures, and experiences among those who identify as Black. When it comes to breaking down barriers related to autism in the Black community, no one does it with more passion and clarity than Maria Davis-Pierre, a licensed mental health counselor, autism awareness advocate,... When teachers make the transition from textbook only classrooms to multi-text classrooms, the focus of study becomes concepts rather than the content of one particular book. Students gain both a broad perspective and an in-depth sense of the subject matter from reading many texts on the same topic.

— Dr. Gail Ivey A text set utilizes a collection of texts and other materials on a particular topic or theme that allows students to access the same curricula from varying perspectives while building a shared understanding. Typically students select from multiple texts then read, discuss and confirm their thinking within book clubs or literature circles. Opportunities to share in a whole class setting are interspersed throughout the thematic or topical study as well as interactions with other materials within the text set to deepen students’ understanding. There is no one way to use a text set.

Our hope is that you will explore the variety of texts and materials provided and choose those that will best engage your students in discussions and critical thinking. Compassion is often described as a virtue, but to many tweens and teens, moralistic goals seem lofty and unattainable. By tuning into and building off of students’ empathy, we offer a pathway to developing compassionate teens and better humans. That seems like a goal we can all aspire to! Friendships can change quickly in tween and teen years and are often defining relationships in adolescence. It’s not surprising then that friendship has been an enduring and popular topic in Middle Grade and Young Adult literature.

Let your students dive into the songs, texts, novels, and videos we have collected as they read and reflect on their evolving understanding of friendships. In this lesson, Ms. Ramsey helps her students work as “experts” to plan a piece of procedural writing written for a “novice” audience. Ms. Ramsey guides students in using an organizational structure that includes an introduction, steps, materials, domain-specific vocabulary, background, and a conclusion. Grade 6: Language Arts

Domain-specific vocabulary and transitional words are two important parts of explanatory writing. In this lesson, Ms. Ramsey provides her students with a chance to flesh out both using a graphic organizer. Working in pairs, the students consider their topics and the words they could use to enhance their writing. Grade 6: Language Arts Sixth grade history teacher Jodi Hoard prepares her students for a close reading of a text about Meresamun, a temple singer in Ancient Egypt.

In this clip, Ms. Hoard shows students how to read for the key idea and supporting details. Grade 6: History In this clip, Ms. Hoard “thinks aloud” as she annotates the first section of text from the day’s reading on Ancient Egypt. Ms.

Hoard models taking notes on challenging vocabulary words and concepts. She also shows the students how to fill-in the graphic organizer. Grade 6: History Ms. Hoard’s 6th grade students work on their own and with partners to navigate a text about Meresamun, a temple singer in Ancient Egypt. Ms.

Hoard helps her students to identify key ideas, to discuss some details and to draw inferences from what they’re read. Grade 6: History The Inquiry Chart (I-Chart) is a strategy that enables students to generate meaningful questions about a topic and organize their writing. Students integrate prior knowledge or thoughts about the topic with additional information found in several sources. The I-Chart procedure is organized into three phases: (1) Planning, (2) Interacting, and (3) Integrating/Evaluating. Each phase consists of activities designed to engage students in evaluating a topic.

I-Charts foster critical thinking and strengthens students’ reading skills. I-Charts can be used with the entire class, small groups, or with individual students. You’ll love them because they can easily be differentiated and provide a low-key evaluation of how much your students have learned about a topic. Finally, guide students through the integrating and evaluation phase. The last row gives students the opportunity to pull together their ideas into a general summary. Students will use their summarizing, comparative analysis, critical thinking, and research and reporting skills as they resolve competing ideas found in separate sources or develop new questions to explore based on any conflicting or...

Image what it would look like for a whole school to take an inquiry-based approach to learning. Wildwood IB World Magnet School uses the inquiry-based model to put students in charge of their learning, with lessons that stem from student questions and harness the power of curiosity. by Dr Valeria Lo Iacono | Last updated Oct 14, 2025 Activities you can run during your training sessions should NOT be restricted just to the classic team-building games and icebreakers! There are 12 other types of classroom activities for adults that you can also use and these activities each have a different purpose and benefit. So let’s take a look below at the types of classroom activities you can use and let’s look at some examples.

The best way to engage learners and help them remember and understand information is to make sure that they actively participate. So, you do not want to talk at them all the time but you want them to actively contribute in some way. Discover 20 ideas for including all students in classroom read alouds. These suggestions may work for students who need to fidget during whole-class instruction, those who need materials to keep focused, and those who require alternative ways of demonstrating attention, engagement, and interest. Adapted from: P. Kluth & Chandler-Olcott, K.

(2007). “A land we can share”: Teaching literacy to students with autism. The read aloud helps teachers build and experience a sense of community in the classroom, provides common ground for discussion, entertains, requires little formal student response (giving all learners a time to feel confident... For all of these reasons, it is heartbreaking to see students excluded from the read aloud. Learners may be left out because the teacher believes the activity will be of little benefit or because the student cannot participate in a typical way. One teacher told me she asked her student to be pulled from the read aloud because “he doesn’t even look up at the book.” Others may be excluded because it is believed there are...

One of my former co-teaching partners once asked if we should pull a student from the read aloud so we could address “functional skills” during that time. In both of these scenarios, the teachers described may not have appreciated the potential power of the read aloud. Including all students — including those with the most significant disabilities — in the read aloud is one of the easiest ways to promote language learning as the development of literacy skills in those... In addition, reading to students can improve their fluency (Blau, 2001), help them access content they could not access on their own (Crossley & McDonald, 1984; Blackman, 1999; Mukhopadhyay, 2000), and expose them to... And, to respond to my former co-teacher who thought other skills might be more important to develop, we should also consider that no skill is potentially more functional than reading.

In The Classroom Adlit

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