Content area literacy has an important role in helping students understand content in specific disciplines, such as mathematics. Although the strategies are not unique to each individual content area, they are often adapted for use in a specific discipline. For example, mathematicians use mathematical language to make sense of new ideas and…

It is commonly accepted in the academy that developing a critical thinking capacity and related capabilities will make students more effective thinkers and writers, and that these are desirable traits for graduates to have no matter what path they take after graduation. While most academics agree that critical thinking is an essential component of…

As an instructional framework, Universal Design for Learning (UDL) can guide science teachers to purposefully apply evidence-based instructional practices to increase engagement and learning of students with disabilities (Israel, Ribuffo, and Smith 2014; Marino et al. 2014; Ok et al. 2016). This article describes how to use the Universal Design…

Flipped classrooms and inquiry-based learning (IBL) have each become popular in their own right, leading to a natural question: Why not combine these two great ideas? Although flipping a class usually involves students reading or watching videos before class, and IBL focuses on allowing and encouraging students to develop material on their own,…

Since 2009, the author has been using an activity that she calls "book tasting" to help teens select books for independent reading assignments. While she is sure she is not the first to do this kind of activity, the term "book tasting" seems to appeal to the teens. Book tasting has been extremely successful in pairing up students with texts that…

Pairing an inquiry lesson with a traditional reading activity creates a jarring philosophical mismatch between the interaction, deep thinking, and scientific reasoning that drives meaningful inquiry instruction and the "scan the text, copy the answers" response often obtained from elementary nonfiction readers. Realizing that there must be a…

When evaluating the effectiveness of their program, members of the Brooklyn College SEEK Department, a higher education opportunity program, decided to make their pedagogy more student-centered. They created a method of reading instruction, which they named critical inquiry. Its goals are to build community through teaching students to annotate,…

Reading is an essential part of science literacy, yet teachers often face challenges in incorporating reading in science classrooms. In this article, the authors share how they brought reading back into their science classrooms. They designed four quarterly reading projects with yearlong literacy routines that they used successfully with their…