Further Explanation of Best Practices in Middle School Literacy

General Reading Comprehension - Many of your students are often reading below their
expected grade level, and ironically, their texts and class materials are often above grade level.
Therefore, we need to teach them what strategic readers do when they are reading texts above
their level. In order to be strategic readers, we need to teach them about their reciting voice (the
one that says the words on the page) and their thinking voice (the one that tells them if what they
are reading makes sense). By using think-alouds, Stop and Say Something, passage chunking,
and students recordings of their think-alouds and self-reflections of their think-alouds and
passage annotations, we will teach students to strengthen their thinking voice. We will teach
them to know exactly when and why meaning breaks down, and they will have a variety of
strategies to fix up their confusion. The other problem with reading challenging text is being
able to boil a complex set of ideas down to a simple one (summary and main idea vs. supporting
details). The GIST activities and Somebody Wanted But So will help students with thinking of
the bigger ideas, as should your classroom discussions.

Vocabulary - Content area teachers are often overwhelmed by the amount of vocabulary they
are expected to teach their students. Its hard to know what words should be pre-taught and for
how long or using what methods. The four-level framework found in the attached PDF should
give you a very good handle about how to prioritize vocabulary instruction. Teachers should
really focus their energy on content specific vocabulary and also on teaching general academic
vocabulary through word families and morphology (prefixes, suffixes, roots). Teaching through
morphology, word families, word sorts and categorization helps students become strategic
readers: we are not just giving them one definition, we are equipping them with the skills needed
to recognize a variety of new words. These are transferable skills. Its very important that both
you and your students are encourage to use again and again in your classroom (exit slips or
papers or discussions) the words from the word walls they have created. Such natural repetition
will guarantee the words are fully understood and that they stick.

Writing - These are the main goals for writing based on current best practices: 1) We assign
writing found in the real world and we surround students with examples and models of those
various authentic forms. 2) We allow students to make mistakes and improve some of their
pieces of writing by receiving feedback from us and their peers (about things besides - and only
at the very end including - grammar) during writers conferences. 3) We show students that
writing is hard and takes metacognition and self-review by modeling our own process of writing
with our own assignments and by having students assess themselves. Its important to remember
writing CPR: give students choice, allow them to PUBLISH (turning into teacher is not
publishing) their work, and respond to the content in a delicate and also positive way. The RAFT

method gives students choice over what to write and in what real-world format and it also
specifies an audience. Since these are usually fun and creative be sure to allow students to share
them with the class!

H.O.T Reading Skills - After we are sure students have understood the text on a basic level
(General Reading Comprehension section), it is time to activate their H.O.T. (Higher Order
Thinking) reading skills. This is where students think BEYOND the text and begin to judge both
the author and the text for bias, purpose, validity, etc. Students will analyze the strategies that
different authors use to get their points across. They will think critically about the impact that
text structure and features have on the overall message and they will make judgments about the
quality of the evidence and ideas presented. Since this is a challenging task at first, we suggest
lots of teacher modeling, partner work, and whole group discussion so students can learn from
others after completing the suggested strategies and charts from this section.