Texts are rarely, if ever, simplified so that students have the opportunity to grapple with grade-level texts and successfully engage with them to build college- and career-readiness. Teachers can provide additional high-quality, relevant texts for context building up to the main reading.
related resources →Materials apply text engineering (chunking a text in meaningful units, inserting headings, inserting questions) to alert students to key queries to consider before moving on in the text.
related resources →Materials help teachers indicate what is essential to understand and why it is essential; materials should alert students to connections between texts and concepts.
related resources →Instead of replacing a word with a simpler word, student texts provide students with reading strategies (e.g. determining words in context) or include parentheses with explanations, definitions, or more details.
related resources →Curriculum spirals concepts, skills, and language throughout to give students consistent exposure and multiple opportunities to learn them over time.
related resources →Curriculum spirals concepts, skills, and language throughout with increasing sophistication, precision, and/or complexity.
related resources →Materials should contain scaffolds (e.g. visual organizers, sentence frames/starters, hands-on materials, role-plays) to support students' developing academic reasoning skills.
related resources →Materials offer opportunities for students to engage in multiple close readings of complex texts to promote deep understanding of texts' themes, concepts, structure, etc.
related resources →Materials should include opportunities for the development of research skills, and teacher guidance should demonstrate how to build these skills into the material and lead this endeavor in a collaborative manner before students are required to research independently.
related resources →Teachers guide students to revise and then edit their writing through a process that focuses on specific issues each time rather than trying to address all content and editing issues simultaneously.
related resources →Units include pair or group conversation activities that help students practice their abilities to develop and challenge ideas using evidence-based reasoning, allowing them to engage with ideas and engage with ELA practices (inferring meaning from texts, making arguments, supporting claims with text evidence, etc.) before writing extensively about them.
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