While the science of reading offers a powerful approach to literacy, implementing it can be both beneficial and challenging. This Spotlight will help readers identify how state leaders have approached reading policy implementation; review districts' experience moving to a 'knowledge-building' curriculum; evaluate best practices for teaching…

Improving comprehension skills is vital to building cognitive skills. Reading and literacy skills enable youth to gather information and create knowledge from various sources, and then to consider solutions to problems in and about their lives from both a cognitive and a creative standpoint. By implementing disciplinary reading strategies in the…

This newsletter, published five times a year, features articles on issues of concern to adult, family, and youth literacy practitioners, as well as recommended resources, announcements, and teaching strategies. This issue contains: (1) Using a License to Drive Improvement: Professional Development in Massachusetts (Jon Steinberg); (2) Building…

Many schools mandate that teachers use scripted lessons and specific reading programs. To minimize the many problems that such instructional inflexibility can create for struggling readers, this article describes five principles of motivation and shows how teachers can apply these principles with struggling readers within the framework of mandated…

This article reports that educators and experts across the country who work with English-language learners (ELLs) are moving toward a consensus that the federal Reading First program needs to be refined to become more effective for children acquiring English. Administrators in several big-city districts with large numbers of such students are…

Contends that learning centers must obtain "curricular congruence" with the classroom to provide remedial students with the content and strategies they need for achieving success in subject-matter classrooms. Suggests that better efforts are needed to coordinate remedial and classroom instruction. (MS)