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Secondary teachers nationwide are encouraged by the Common Core State Standards and recent research to enact disciplinary literacy instruction. However, little is known about how teachers make sense of teaching disciplinary literacy skills to adolescents. To what extent might adolescents still need the kinds of foundational support provided by what Shanahan and Shanahan called intermediate strategy instruction, or instruction in general reading comprehension strategies? In this article, the authors describe findings from a disciplinary literacy project in which a group of high school social studies teachers (and the authors) discovered that a complex layering of intermediate and disciplinary literacy work was required to meet students’ needs. Implications for teams of teachers wishing to explore this tension and keep their focus on helping students access and communicate content material are shared.

Increasingly, school leaders recognize the need for writing instruction to become a schoolwide priority. The writers’ workshop approach that was popularized 30 years ago is still relevant; it is still important to give students protected time to write, opportunities to address topics and audiences that matter, and timely feedback. Recent research emphasizes that students also benefit from explicit instruction in the craft and structure of specific types of writing and from working toward clear images of good writing. Teachers can accelerate students’ growth by developing shared expectations for good writing and a common language for talking about writing. Clear goals are important for teachers, too. Shared knowledge of effective writing instruction and ways to track writing growth over time lift the level of instruction across a school, supporting teacher‐to‐teacher collaboration. When student growth is regarded as feedback to teachers on their teaching, assessment‐based instruction helps schools participate in continuous improvement.

This study investigates the extent to which students' use of different discussion strategies fosters a balance between attending to the technical elements of authored texts and responding empathetically. Because small‐group discussion is a common approach to literary study, the analysis focuses on two small‐group discussions of “Charlie Howard's Descent,” Mark Doty's poem about the murder of a young gay man by other young men in his community. The two discussions were parsed into episodes that were scored according to the extent that they displayed balance. Then, each student turn was analyzed in terms of the discussion strategies employed. The analysis suggests that the strategies of searching for meaning, contextualizing, and interpreting contribute to the most balanced readings. Noting author's craft can lead to overly technical readings, although it has the potential to be paired with other strategies to facilitate a more balanced discussion.

Narrative research has become part of the landscape of education inquiry, yet its theory and practice are still debated and evolving. This article addresses the construction of narratives using literary elements common to nonfiction and fiction writings. The authors discuss these elements and use four narratives to illustrate them. They address how literary elements intersect with more familiar practices of generating and analyzing evidence to reveal themes, and they relate these intersections with wider issues about what can be known from research and how it can be learned.

I present a sampling of picture books with a focus on three peritextual features in particular: dust jackets, case covers that are different from the dust jackets, and endpapers. First, I briefly highlight scholarship related to peritextual features, followed by a description of four picture books with these three peritextual features, and explanations about how these features can support meaning making in regard to literary elements such as characterization, theme, plot, and setting. I conclude with the need to focus greater attention on peritextual features in picture books.

This article seeks to complicate the understanding of Bishop's () metaphor of mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors, with particular emphasis on sliding glass doors and the emotional connections needed for readers to move through them. The authors begin by examining the importance of the reader and the characters he or she meets. Next, the authors extend Bishop's metaphor by exploring the role of readers’ emotional connections to texts and characters. The authors then make recommendations for selecting appropriate books, linking books thematically, and guiding readers in ways to respond. They conclude with a call to action for teachers to consider their responsibility to #EmpowerTheReader.

Diverse classroom libraries offer opportunities for students to not only see themselves represented in books but also encounter lived experiences and perspectives that are different from their own. As classrooms increasingly include learners with cognitively and physically diverse abilities, teachers are faced with the challenge of selecting literature with humanizing depictions of individuals with disability labels. Historically, portrayals of disabilities in children's literature have included themes of pity and exclusion. In this article, the authors introduce a framework that educators can employ when selecting inclusive literature for their classroom libraries. Using this framework, the authors analyzed three sample picture books that teachers might also share with students to help them read with and against these texts. As a whole, this article offers a starting point for teachers beginning the process of creating inclusive spaces that foster the multitude of ways that students come to be, know, and learn.

This article examines how a literacy teacher and her students engaged students' Christian religious literacies in a secular classroom and the outcomes of those transactions. Case study methods; scholarship offering historical, cultural, and social perspectives on Christian religious literacies; and the New London Group's theory of a pedagogy of multiliteracies assisted this investigation. Three findings are discussed: First, the teacher's pedagogy of multiliteracies, in recruiting students' entire cultural, linguistic, and multiliterate repertoires for academic learning, also drew on students' religious literacies for teaching and learning in school. Second, students, with their teacher's support, recruited their religious literacies for analyzing and understanding secular literature and for producing academic writing. Third, religious literacies in the classroom produced tensions, which the students and teacher navigated by emphasizing a shared value of human empathy and their shared commitment to classroom community, pursuing understanding of one another's perspectives, and seeking underlying commonalities of different, or differently articulated, religious beliefs. This research contributes more robust understandings of the role of religious literacies in the lives of an increasing demographic of culturally and linguistically diverse youths.

The author describes a heritage language poetry translation project taught in a third- and fourth-grade classroom with both multilingual and monolingual students. Students interviewed family members about their heritage languages, worked with family and community members to choose and analyze a poem in their heritage language, identified essential features of the poem, and developed two interpretive translations of the poem in English. The author discusses supports provided for students with a variety of linguistic and academic profiles. Teaching literary translation centers the linguistic and cultural knowledge of multilingual students, and helps all students develop translingual competencies as close readers and nuanced writers.

This article provides a critical literacy approach to reading picture books that represent individuals with disabilities. It details close reading with a critical literacy stance as a scaffolded method for teachers to support students’ increased access to conversations about disability. A sample lesson plan and three prompting guides are provided to support teachers in text selection, planning and facilitation of lessons that analyze disability representation. Consistently engaging in close reading with a critical literacy stance will help students internalize the transferrable process that enables them to challenge and critique the stereotypes of disability they encounter in other texts, media, and everyday interactions.