NCTE offers consultants and services on content area literacy instruction that when used together, provide extended learning opportunities for teachers and makes a positive impact on learning. These opportunities include the Pathways Program, Web Seminars, Resource Kits and books for study groups.
Consultants are available to present one-day or multi-day presentations or provide year-round consulting. All workshops and presentations can be customized to meet your specific needs.
Content Area Literacy: Reading for Meaning (Grades 3-12)
Consultant: Peggy Albers
In this single or multiple-day workshop, teachers will understand how the reading process works, and how learners make sense of content materials. Teachers will learn the significance of understanding text structures within content materials and reader stances, and how to use these structures and stances to support students’ writing.
Content Literacy Strategies that Work
Consultants: Douglas Fisher or Nancy Frey
Audience: content teachers in middle and high school, administrators
At the end of this session, participants will be able to understand the use and advantages of content literacy strategies, describe a decision-making process for identifying and implementing a school-wide literacy approach, identify the components of a professional development plan to foster teacher proficiency and collegial coaching, link schoolwide approaches to a systematic accountability design, complete a planning tool for establishing and implementing a school-wide literacy program for their school site.
Developing Literate Behaviors
Consultants: Douglas Fisher or Nancy Frey
Audience: Elementary and English teachers
At the end of this session, participants will be able to describe a gradual release of responsibility model for developing literacy (focus lessons, guided instruction, collaborative learning, and independent work), identify the ways in which content, process, and product must be differentiated to ensure that students are successful in developing literacy, design an integrated unit of study for students, based on content standards using a gradual release of responsibility model of instruction.
Not Your Father’s Comic Books: Graphic Novels in the Secondary Classroom
Consultant: Nancy Frey
Audience: Middle and high school English and content area teachers, librarians and media specialists
At the end of the session, participants will be able to compare and contrast graphic novels and other visual genres, including comic books, manga, anime, and e-zines, and fanzines, identify criteria for selecting graphic novels for classroom use, based on developmental levels, content objectives, and readability, design ways for graphic novels to be used in instruction, teach composition through student development of their own graphic novels and link these practices to traditional academic writing.
Making Reading Happen—A Reading in the Content Areas Workshop
In the first part, Jeffrey Golub describes and demonstrates the concept of "making the invisible visible," and then, through a series of examples and activities, makes the various reading skills "visible" to the participants. The presenter goes on to engage the participants in specific classroom activities that utilize four important instructional strategies: The Close procedure; Making inferences; Read & Retell; Constructing and negotiating meanings.
Content Area Literacy Strategies
Consultant: Katherine McKnight Grade Level: 6-12
This workshop will explore the theory and practice involved in teaching content reading at the middle and secondary school level. It focuses on the literacy processes, which involves listening, speaking, reading, and writing. In addition, building on general knowledge of teaching literacy in middle and secondary schools, this workshop provides exploration of the methods of teaching reading and writing within the content areas. Through the exploration of current research in the field of adolescent literacy, participants will develop their knowledge of instructional methods associated with increasing comprehension for students in secondary schools.
Integrated Learning in Action
Consultants: David and Phyllis Whitin
Wondering how to integrate science, social studies, mathematics and language? This session addresses the conditions that support integrated learning from an inquiry perspective, with particular emphasis on reading, writing, and representing one’s thinking. It focuses on helping children to ask critical questions about information texts, especially numerical information.