Engaged students achieve better reading success. Grounded in current research, this book provides resources and strategies to help educators improve literacy culture in their schools and inspire a love of reading in their students. Author Lorraine M. Radice demonstrates how educators can promote literacy through social media and shares ways in…

In this article, Inoue offers an antiracist reading practice for students in literacy classrooms of all kinds. This practice draws on a number of disciplines in order to help students read in ways that help them see the structural and personal in the judgments they make with and in language as they read. Central to an antiracist reading practice…

The author reflects on the development of her own reading life and how that rich reading life failed to influence how she taught reading early in her career. During graduate studies, while researching in classrooms where reading workshop was the instructional model and through talking to those exemplary teachers, the author came to understand both…

The ability to ask questions is essential to learning, reasoning, and understanding. This column introduces a sequence of activities that incorporate the use of digital images and online texts into intentional opportunities for even the youngest learners to work with their teachers and classmates as they wonder, anticipate, explore, and think…

University educators work with preservice teachers who often feel overwhelmed when facing high school science classrooms full of reluctant readers. These struggling students often have various special-education modifications or are English language learners (ELLs) with different degrees of language proficiency. Teachers report that these students…

Students must be proficient readers of nonfiction texts to be successful in school and life. Since engaging students in this genre can be challenging, this article focuses on how students can respond digitally and socially to nonfiction through the use of free, secure social networks. Not only can students become more engaged in learning when…

Technology has become a catalyst influencing not only the medium, but also the variety of texts that adolescents encounter. It blurs the standard distinction between in-school and out-of-school literacies and fosters an interplay of reading for recreational and academic purposes. How students feel about reading remains an important question, to be…

The Big Lift™ (Big Lift) is a preschool-third-grade collective impact initiative in San Mateo County, California. The initiative is a partnership of the County of San Mateo, San Mateo County Office of Education, and the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. Launched in 2012, the initiative aims to boost children's reading proficiency by third grade…

The activities described in this article, Prediction Path and Quotation Cafe, are adapted from the IRA book "Building Reading Comprehension Habits in Grades 6-12." They highlight the reading comprehension habit of making inferences and predictions, which can be used across content areas and grade levels. In creating this toolkit of activities, the…

By now we've all seen examples of Wordle, the technology app that converts chunks of text into a word cloud featuring words of different sizes according to their prevalence in the text. But you haven't seen the real power of Wordle until you've seen Lee Ann Spillane's high school students use it to analyze patterns and symbolism in The Great…

The workers of the 21st Century will be expected to do more reading and writing than has been done in the past. In order to be successful, one author, Langer, stated that students need to possess "high literacy." According to the literature, it is evident when reading is truly a priority and supported by all stakeholders because there are high…

Tens of thousands of students begin each new school year with the hope that they will finally find "the" teacher who will help them succeed as readers, writers, and learners. This book shows how teachers can provide the type of differentiated instruction that struggling readers need by drawing on students' individual and cultural backgrounds, as…

Teachers, parents, and librarians are constantly looking for methods and materials that engage students as readers and motivate them to increase the time they spend reading. In this article we describe findings from a study of middle schoolers' magazine reading habits that gave us a close look at the power of magazines as supplemental supports for…

Today's young adult (YA) literature is every bit as complex as the audience it's written for, unflinchingly addressing such topics as homosexuality, mental illness, AIDS and drug abuse. In this much expanded revision of his 1996 book, veteran author Michael Cart shows how the best of contemporary YA lit has evolved to tackle such daunting subjects…

This article investigates the relationship between teachers' personal reading habits and their instructional practices. Teachers responded to a questionnaire that revealed their attitudes toward reading, the amount of time they spent reading per day and the kind of literacy practices that they used in their classrooms. Results indicate: (1) while…