Adolescent Literacy in the Era of the Common Core

Adolescent Literacy in the Era of the Common Core (by Jacy Ippolito, Joshua Lawrence and Colleen Zeller) is primary texts used in our hybrid teacher courses.

“Adolescent Literacy in the Era of the Common Core provides school leaders, teachers, and others with strategies and best practices for advancing adolescent literacy in the classroom.
Exceptionally clear and accessible, the book addresses a full range of topics in this vitally important field, including disciplinary literacy; vocabulary instruction; classroom discussion; motivation and engagement related to digital literacy; the use of multiple texts; and writing to learn.
This book presents ‘usable knowledge’ of the highest order and of immediate value to school leaders and teachers. It will be required reading for all educators concerned with promoting and furthering adolescent literacy today.” (From the publisher’s website)

Click here for more details from the Harvard Education Press website.

Disciplinary literacy (CH. 2 & 3)

• Chapter 2 – Emily Philips Galloway, Joshua Fahey Lawrence, and Elizabeth Birr Moje
  Research in Disciplinary Literacy: Challenges and Instructional Opportunities in Teaching Disciplinary Texts
• Chapter 3 – Lisa Messina
  Disciplinary Literacy in Practice: The Disciplinary Literacy Network as a Vehicle for Strengthening Instruction Across Content Areas

Key Resources

• Disciplinary Literacy Speech/PowerPoint from Elizabeth Moje – In this key note presentation at the at the National Reading Initiative Conference, Elizabeth Birr Moje makes the case for a disciplinary literacy that, rather than hewing to generic literacy strategies, focuses on the literacy skills required of practitioners in a content.
• Disciplinary Literacy in Practice.pdf – These are copies of the resources that Lisa Messsina and her team used as described in chapter 3. Try them out yourself!
• The Carnegie Content Area Literacy Survey – These surveys were designed to allow school and district leaders to take the pulse of their school literacy community and to design a strategic response to the calls for increased attention to literacy in the content areas.
• Reading in the disciplines – The challenges of adolescent literacy – This report authored by Carol Lee and Anika Spratley lays out many of the important challenge that students face when reading secondary texts for content learning.

Vocabulary (CH. 4 & 5)

• Chapter 4 – Joshua Fahey Lawrence, Bridget Maher, and Catherine E. Snow
  Research in Vocabulary: Word Power for Content-Area Learning
• Chapter 5 – Christina L. Dobbs
  Vocabulary in Practice: Creating Word-Curious Classrooms

Key Resources

• The Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English is a great tool for finding user friendly definitions.
• The Word Generation Program is freely available to any school, teacher or program that is interested in support student vocabulary development across the content areas.
• Word Nik is an extremely rich online dictionary that provides examples of the use of each target word, as well as related words, synonyms, antonyms, etc.
• Word sift and Visuwords both provide a visually interesting way to explore related words and word families.

Book Resources


Discussion (CH. 6 & 7)

• Chapter 6 – Catherine J. Michener and Evelyn Ford-Connors
  Research in Discussion: Effective Support for Literacy, Content, and Academic Achievement
• Chapter 7 – Abigail Erdmann and Margaret Metzger
  Discussion in Practice:Sharing Our Learning Curve

Key Resources

• The Word Generation Website includes a nice review of some of the recent research related to improving student discussion with accountable talk and debate.
• Project Zero’s Visible Thinking Routinesis a repository of deep structures that can guide student observation, thinking, writing, and discussion.
• Sullivan County Board of Cooperative Educational Services, Shift 4: Text-Based Answers has compiled numerous resources to support CCSS work, including text-based discussions and text-dependent questions and answers.
• Zwiers & Crawford. (2009). How to start academic conversations. This is a fantastic short article that demonstrates how some simple teacher moves can support student discussion.
• While the School Reform Initiative’s protocols are mostly designed for use among adults in PLCs and CFGs, many of the protocols (especially text-based) are easily adapted for use in student discussions (our favorites include: text rendering, 4As, 3 levels of text, the block party, the chalk talk, the continuum dialogue, and more!)

Book Resources


Digital Literacy (CH. 8 & 9)

• Chapter 8 – Joshua Fahey Lawrence, Mark Warschauer, Binbin Zheng, and Diana Mullins
  Research in Digital Literacy: Tools to Support Learning
• Chapter 9 – Ann Mechem Ziergiebel
  Practice in Digital Literacy: Achieving a Cosmopolitan Orientation

Book Resources


Multiple Texts (Ch. 10 & 11)

• Chapter 10 – Cynthia Shanahan
  Research in Multiple Texts and Text Support
• Chapter 11 – Joanna Lieberman and Janet Looney
  Multiple Texts in Practice: Fostering Accessibility, Engagement, and Comprehension

Key Resources

• Cynthia Shanahan’s classic article “Using multiple texts to teach content”
• The National Writing Project and Laura Robb present: “Multiple Texts: Multiple Opportunities for Teaching and Learning”
• The Sullivan County Board of Cooperative Educational Services [SCBOCES] compiles resources related to the CCSS Staircase of Complexity and using multiple texts.
• Shanahan, Fisher, & Frey’s review of the challenges of teaching “Challenging Text”
• AUSSIE and NYCDOE’s easy-to-understand “Beginner’s Guide to Text Complexity”
• Janie Riddle Goodman’s primer: “Text Sets: Providing Possibilities for Adolescent Readers”

Websites We Use For Finding Texts


Book Resources


Writing-to-Learn (Ch. 12 & 13)

• Chapter 12 – Vicki A. Jacobs
  Research in Writing: The Rightful Place of Writing-to-Learn in Content Teaching
• Chapter 13 – Carol Booth Olson and Catherine D’Aoust
  Writing in Practice: Strategies for Use Across the Disciplines

Key Resources

• The National Writing Project provides research and professional development resources related to writing across all grade levels.
• The New York Times provides lessons and prompts for addressing writing standards in the Common Core.
• The National Council of Teachers of English shares “Beliefs About the Teaching of Writing”
• Adlit.org remains one of our favorite websites for finding short,research-based articles related to writing and other literacy domains.
• For a one-stop overview of writing across the curriculum, check out this excellent online resource: Bazerman et al. (2005) . Reference Guide to Writing Across the Curriculum

Book Resources


CCSS & Professional Learning (Ch. 1, 14 & 15)

• Chapter 1 – Jacy Ippolito and Joshua Fahey Lawrence
  Bridging Content and Literacy Knowledge and Instruction: A Framework for Supporting Secondary Teachers and Students
• Chapter 14 – Jacy Ippolito
  Professional Learning as the Key to Linking Content and Literacy Instruction
• Chapter 15 – Jacy Ippolito and Colleen Zaller
  Meeting the Challenge of the Common Core State Standards

Key Resources
Below are some of the websites we refer to most often when thinking about connecting our professional development and teaching to the Common Core State Standards.


Book Resources
The Continuum of Protocols suggests a possible sequence for introducing discussion-based protocols to educators.