The Literacy Series

Provides research overviews, instructional implications, and application of the key areas identified by the National Reading Panel as key to teaching reading successfully. The online modules include:

• Foundations of Teaching Reading: Phonemic Awareness
  Focuses on developing a deeper understanding of the research base, the components of phonemic awareness, and on effective instructional practices in this area. This module emphasizes applications of the research to scaffold effective reading practices.

• Foundations of Teaching Reading: Phonics
  Examines the sound-spelling correspondences in reading instruction. This module emphasizes four specific approaches to teaching phonics effectively.

• Foundations of Teaching Reading: Vocabulary
  Examines effective ways to develop vocabulary to scaffold comprehension. This module emphasizes listening, speaking, reading, and writing vocabulary.

• Foundations of Teaching Reading: Fluency
  Explores how fluency scaffolds comprehension and how it is different from automaticity. This module emphasizes specific strategies to promote development of fluency.

• Foundations of Teaching Reading: Comprehension
  Focuses on effective ways to help students extract meaning from text. This module emphasizes linking new knowledge to prior knowledge to scaffold meaning.

• Foundations of Teaching Writing
  Focuses on the writing process as a series of steps all writers go through. This module emphasizes writing as a form of communication that allows students to scaffold comprehension.

• Foundations of Teaching Reading and Writing: Putting It All Together
  Features a roundtable discussion among four experts: Dorothy Strickland, Catherine Snow, Connie Juel, and Isabel Beck. This module emphasizes the challenges of developing a lively and literate environment.

Offers the perspectives of leading researchers for critical aspects of literacy—the role of district/school culture in supporting early literacy, effective comprehension strategies, the recommendations of the National Reading Panel, strategies to prevent reading failure, and the importance of teacher preparation. The online modules include:

• Early Reading Success, Edward Kame’enui
  Focuses on four principles for early reading success and the cultures of schools and districts needed to support these. This module stresses the factors that contribute to early school success.

• Comprehension and Vocabulary Development, Isabel Beck
  Uses the Text Talk project to illustrate ways teachers can use children’s literature to help the youngsters make sense of the text. This module emphasizes the use of both contextualized and decontextualized language to promote comprehension.

• Effective Comprehension Instruction, Michael Pressley
  Examines the key components of effective literacy instruction and the research base for these. This module emphasizes structures in reading programs that help support the development of comprehension.

• Methods to Teach Children to Read, Sally Shaywitz
  Focuses on the work of the National Reading Panel and their report, Teaching Children to Read. This module emphasizes research-based strategies that define effective instruction.

• Preventing Reading Failures, Reid Lyon
  Poses reading failure as a public health issue and examines strategies to prevent reading failure in students. This module emphasizes the importance of well-trained teachers in preventing reading failure.

• Reading Instruction and the Importance of Teacher Preparation, Louisa Moats
  Examines the connection between teacher professional development and effective reading and language arts instruction. This module emphasizes how effective instruction is informed by deep understanding of reading development.

Focuses on the essential elements (phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary development, fluency, and comprehension) and proven, research-based strategies for effective reading instruction promoted by the National Reading Panel in their landmark study, Teaching Children to Read (2000). The online modules include:

• Phonemic Awareness and Phonics
  Promotes the critical nature of helping children manipulate phonemes through activities such as blending and segmentation to support development of spelling and reading. This module stresses the research that shows small-group instruction in phonemic awareness is more effective than whole-group or individual instruction. The phonics section of this module focuses on letter/sound correspondence, word patterns, word building, and blending. The module stresses the importance of these foundational skills in scaffolding reading, spelling, and writing skills.

• Letter-Sound Correspondences
  Offers teachers a range of effective strategies for teaching letter-sound correspondences for consonants, short vowels, and consonant digraphs and letter-sound correspondences in Spanish. This module emphasizes engaging and effective ways to teach this aspect of phonics.

• Word Building
  Offers teachers a way to help students decode text by building, decoding, and changing words made from 3–4 consonants and 1–2 vowels. This module emphasizes the application of letter-sound correspondences to promote decoding.

• Fluency
  Focuses on reading fluency, an often-neglected area of reading instruction, which is seen as the bridge between word recognition and comprehension. This module focuses on developing accuracy, speed, reading with expression, and automaticity.

• Vocabulary Development
  Focuses on developing both oral and print (reading and writing) vocabulary that is taught both directly and indirectly, in age-appropriate ways. This module stresses developing vocabulary in authentic ways, using literature as a base.

• Talking About Texts
  Is one of the two included modules that focus on comprehension. This module examines effective strategies teachers can use to frame discussions that help students construct meaning from text. This module emphasizes comprehension as an active process that builds on phonics, fluency, and vocabulary development.

• Comprehension Strategies
  Is the second module that focuses on comprehension by promoting the construction of meaning through strategies to improve text comprehension. This module focuses on comprehension strategies educators can use before, during, and after instruction.

Presents effective strategies for implementing the writing process with elementary students. Together, the three online modules that follow offer a comprehensive overview of how teachers can develop the critical structures that support effective writing, improve student writing through conferencing, and celebrate the final writing products by sharing and publishing the student text. The online modules include:

• Organizing for Writing
  Promotes developing and implementing structures to support student writing, including systematic instruction, modeling, focus lessons, prewriting, and connecting to literature. Writing as a recursive process is stressed in this module.

• Writing Conferences
  Encourages students to improve their writing through focused feedback in student-student or teacher-student writing conferences during every phase of the writing process. This module emphasizes the different purposes for writing conferences and how these map to the prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing phases of the writing process.

• Sharing and Publishing
  Provides a structure for helping students revise and celebrate their writing. This module emphasizes the multiple purposes for sharing writing and specific strategies to encourage students to share their writing with others.

Highlights two critical instructional strategies proven to improve reading practice and outcomes—scaffolding and differentiation. These practices are at the core of helping teachers target appropriate instruction to address student learning needs and provide the support the students need to become capable and confident readers. The online modules include:

• Scaffolding in Action
  Promotes the idea that effective scaffolding is more than simply offering students support as they learn challenging content; it includes nine common features that help students along the continuum to become independent learners. This module emphasizes the common features of effective scaffolding strategies and the knowledge and skills teachers need to scaffold children’s learning effectively.

• Differentiating Instruction
  Uses the three principles of the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) to inform instruction that addresses student learning needs: (1) representing information in multiple ways (representation); (2) providing multiple pathways for students to demonstrate their knowledge and skills (expression); and (3) using multiple methods to engage and motivate students (engagement). This module emphasizes UDL as a guiding principle to differentiate instruction and provide access to learning for students.

Promotes seminal ideas that inform teaching and learning of literacy. The three noted researchers featured focus on addressing the challenges that teachers often face in shaping effective literacy instruction: the impact of dyslexia, using the structure of language to promote literacy teaching and learning, and both the assets and constraints of teacher-centered and student-centered learning. The online modules include:

• Book Review: Overcoming Dyslexia, Sally Shaywitz
  Explores the biological basis for dyslexia and other reading problems and offers concrete ways to diagnose reading problems and specific strategies for helping teachers support students with dyslexia to help them become effective readers. This module emphasizes a number of accommodations teachers can make to help students with reading problems.

• Book Review: Speech to Print: Language Essentials for Teachers, Louisa Moats
  Focuses on the key aspects of language structure that teachers can use to inform their work. This book review stresses the sound system of speech and language, the structure of words, spelling, the study of meaning in language, and syntax.

• Book Review: The Academic Achievement Challenge: What Really Works in Classroom, Jeanne Chall
  Highlights the debate over teacher-centered and student-centered classrooms by providing an analysis of the benefits and constraints of both and stressing the importance, regardless of approach, of aligning the instructional design of a lesson with the expected student outcomes.

Promotes improved student outcomes in secondary language arts by providing research-based strategies for teachers to use to improve their practice relative to core high school language arts content. The online modules included are:

• Teaching Vocabulary (Project CORE: English Language Arts)
  Highlights specific ways teachers can improve and deepen instruction in vocabulary. This module also offers specific strategies to improve teachers’ instructional practice.

• Providing Text Evidence (Project CORE: English Language Arts)
  Focuses on improving instruction in key content that includes improving student performance in making inferences, generalizations, and conclusions with text evidence. This module emphasizes the development of strategies to improve teachers’ instructional practice.

• Analyzing Text Structures (Project CORE: English Language Arts)
  Enables teachers to improve their strategies in supporting student analysis of expository text structures. As with the prior CORE modules, this also provides specific strategies to improve teachers’ instructional practice.