Introduction
7
Table I.2: Benefits of the Literacy Triangle Students
Teachers
• Students who are lagging in their literacy skills will be able to get caught up, allowing achievement to soar in all content areas.
• Your planning time will be drastically simplified because you are planning the integration of the most important components in literacy.
• Student metacognition and comprehension will reach deeper levels, contributing to more meaningful and memorable learning.
• You will have less reteaching because front-end mastery will occur more often.
• Students’ enjoyment of literacy will improve because the reading, discussing, and writing tools are fun, relevant, meaningful, and respectful tasks that encourage them to engage with text.
• Students will have their needs met when teachers use the differentiation section for each strategy.
• Your students will read and communicate with deeper understanding and have a more positive literacy mindset. • You will be able to teach more in less time. Your classroom time will be more of students thinking and learning and less of you telling them about the content.
• Students will develop routines of discussing and writing about what they read and cultivate rich background knowledge and concept development. • Students will engage in culturally responsive literacy instruction, providing them opportunities to make meaning, choose texts, and lead discussions.
• Chapter 3 details the literacy triangle and discusses the importance of the literacy mindset and how it affects the amount of effort that students will exert as they encounter textual challenges. Part 2 includes chapters 4–7. Here, we journey into implementation of the literacy triangle. In chapters 4–6, we share before-reading, during-reading, and after-reading strategies to strengthen your students’ literacy skills. For each element of the literacy triangle journey, we offer the big three planning actions and strategies to support each action. For each strategy, we provide a definition (What Is It?), the rationale or research supporting it (Why Do It?), and how to teach the strategy the cha-chas way for highest impact. We describe step-by-step teaching (chunk) the strategy in a high-impact, cognitive-science-friendly manner so that learning is memorable and visible (chew and check). In addition, we provide possibilities for differentiation (change), including ways to enrich a strategy (bump it up) and scaffold it (break it down). To provide further support, we’ve included a box with each strategy indicating, with a check mark, the grade level and literacy area where it is most effective, and a star indicating where it might also be beneficial. We also provide possible criteria for success to challenge students to take ownership of their learning (student agency or self-assessment). Providing students with criteria for success helps them know exactly what is needed to demonstrate mastery of the learning
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• Students will feel motivated and take more ownership for their learning because of the self-assessment and reflection built into each strategy.
• You will experience fewer classroom behavior disruptions because of the increase in student agency, ownership, and engagement.
