Classrooms That Work

Practical help for providing balanced, comprehensive literacy instruction for all students, particularly those from culturally diverse backgrounds and those who are struggling with reading and writing.

This popular resource provides comprehensive, balanced, practical literacy instruction for all students in todays increasingly diverse classrooms, especially students from culturally diverse backgrounds and those struggling with reading and writing. As the Common Core raises the bar for all children, Classrooms That Work helps educators meet the challenges by presenting lesson frameworks for providing reading and language arts instruction that helps all children achieve their highest literacy levels. In a clear, friendly writing style, the authors emphasize the importance of promoting the integration of phonics and literature-based process writing and reading instruction to enhance all students learning and reading skills. The book clarifies concepts, defines key terms, and offers just the right balance of research and practical coverage to make the content complete without being overwhelming. New to the Sixth Edition:

• NEW! A state-of-the-art framework for lessons that involve students in learning. A practical Word Detectives lesson framework is included for teaching students how to use all of the clues in the textcontext, pictures, and morphologyto figure out word meanings (Chapter 6).
• NEW! Each comprehension and writing lesson framework is illustrated with a sample lesson and each lesson incorporates the gradual release of Responsibility Model. Each lesson is set up as follows:
  • I Do and You Watch: At the beginning of the lesson, you model and show students how they need to think and what they are to do.
  • I Do and You Help: The class helps the teacher think and do something.
  • You Do It Together and I Help: Students arrange in groups to work together and complete the task. The object is to talk to and teach each other how to do the kind of thinking required by the task.
• Three new chapters cover reading informational text, integrating writing with science and social studies, and diagnostic procedures for targeting Tier 2 interventions for struggling readers who are not making adequate progress.