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The author explores the Names, Journeys, and Dreams project, in which culturally and linguistically diverse learners and their families engaged with picturebooks that inspired dialogic conversations, authentic writing, and family–school connections. The author provides four recommendations for incorporating picturebooks within the reading support class with diverse learners: enter the storyworld together, make families the curriculum, value multiple languages, and celebrate students as authors. Alongside sustained and reciprocal family engagement efforts that position families as instructional resources, centering diverse picturebooks within the intervention setting can help students grow more fully into their identities as readers, writers, and dreamers.

As the popularity of project‐based learning grows, so does the importance of understanding how this instructional approach can support students’ learning and development. The authors describe a project‐based approach to literacy and social studies instruction that research has shown to be effective. Key characteristics of the approach and illustrations of how those characteristics are enacted in a project‐based learning geography unit are identified. In the unit, students develop informational reading and persuasive writing skills and learn key social studies content and skills by engaging in the development of brochures about their local community for an authentic audience. The authors also describe how educators can navigate common challenges that can arise when transitioning to a project‐based approach.

The study focuses on a digital storytelling project conducted in a school district's transition program, in which adolescent refugee and immigrant English learners were invited to share aspects of their identities and social worlds through a range of modes. In this article, the authors look closely at one student's digital story through a multimodal analysis of three slides. The findings show how engaging with nonlinguistic modes provided enhanced opportunities for the student to explore and make visible complex and facets of his life and identity, particularly as they relate to difficult past experiences.

Comprehending expository reading material is a challenge for many students. Research has shown that students’ expository reading comprehension can improve with the help of text structure instruction. The purpose of this article is to present teachers with a framework for effectively implementing text structure instruction in their classrooms. Within this framework, the authors suggest four possible learning objectives for text structure instruction. They then describe instructional strategies related to each objective and ways to assess whether the objectives were met. Finally, the authors discuss some issues to consider when choosing expository reading material for students and present text structure unit plans for grades 2 and 5 as examples of how teachers might construct a unit.

Qualitative data analysis from open‐ended comments written by 206 undergraduates illustrates student attitudes, beliefs, and practices that reveal an academic reading paradox. Consistently, undergraduates report that reading is valuable, yet their noncompliance with reading assignments suggests otherwise. Undergraduates report that they achieve their academic goals with little reading and that they perceive reading as too voluminous and irrelevant to class outcomes. The data highlight a misalignment between conventional academic expectations that undergraduates will read in scholarly ways and their actual academic reading practice. Qualitative analysis illustrates that students do not experience academic reading as a venue for scholarly engagement in disciplinary discourse. Whereas the academic reading literature proposes that students develop along a continuum from novice to expert reader, findings suggest that the undergraduate experience of academic reading is not representative of that continuum.

This article describes four key principles from Targeted Reading Instruction (TRI, formerly called Targeted Reading Intervention), an evidence-based early reading intervention and professional development program. Focused on accelerating the growth of students not yet meeting grade-level expectations, one-on-one 15-minute daily TRI lessons engage students in developing phonemic awareness, phonics knowledge, decoding, fluency, vocabulary, and beginning reading comprehension. Four key principles guide TRI, which can be applied to classroom reading instruction. First, all work is done in the context of real words and connected text, placing meaning at the heart of instruction. Second, lessons keep it moving, as they follow a consistent structure, use activities to achieve multiple objectives, and make use of all available resources. Third, TRI teachers let the student do the work, engaging students in productive struggle. Fourth, explicit teaching of skills such as blending provides students with unique strategies to become confident independent readers.

Students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have more difficulty in achieving proficiency in reading comprehension than their neurotypical peers. As students with ASD are increasingly educated in inclusive settings, general education teachers must have knowledge of the characteristics of autism that may impede comprehension of text to understand which instructional methods will achieve the best outcomes in reading. The authors describe how to use reading assessment measures to determine an instructional approach for students with ASD.

The authors illustrate the compatibility of building K-2 readers’ foundational skills and their motivation for completing reading and related tasks within reading interventions. First, the authors introduce the orthographic mapping process, which requires foundational reading skills because of its role in facilitating fluent reading. Research demonstrating the relation between motivation and achievement is synthesized next to convey the need to maximize students’ motivation for intervention tasks. Finally, the authors offer five general design principles to support motivation. They underscore the importance of educators relying on these principles in combination with their deep knowledge of each student to offer intervention experiences that nurture motivation. An example of a foundational skills activity supportive of the orthographic mapping process and adapted to exemplify the motivation principle of focus accompanies each principle.

In this article, I showcase an informational text reading comprehension unit that centers on text features commonly found in science textbooks. I taught this unit to a sixth-grade class and highlighted the work samples of three focal students here. The overarching question that guided this work was as follows: How can I focus my instruction on three common text structures in informational texts: compare and contrast, cause and effect, and description? Moreover, I show how students’ interaction with informational texts, such as engaging activities, note-taking, and vocabulary, aided in comprehension.

The authors featured in this department column share instructional practices that support transformative literacy teaching and disrupt “struggling reader” and “struggling writer” labels.