Learning Opportunities

We will look at a growing body of research on the need to promote sustained engagement with reading in classrooms and discuss practical ideas for creating a sense of urgency, agency, and responsibility in adolescents. We can design effective, incremental instruction along a predictable progression of skills necessary for students to become critical, thoughtful readers combined with accessible and interesting materials. First, create readers then lead them to analyze how texts work. This workshop will focus on both.

We increase reading comprehension when we lead students to analyze a text's structure and craft while providing students with vision for creating their own complex stories and essays. Create craft studies of the elements of story: the use of voice and point of view, character development, sensory details, and the impact of multiple narrators on text complexity. Use passage studies from the books you’re already talking about in your classroom as models of sentence structure variety and rhythm and lead students to independently analyze the books they are reading. We will study writing in modern literature, argument, and in research to plan for engaging practice that helps young readers craft with intention, voice, and increasing skill.

Target Audience

Grades 7 - 12 Teachers