Analyze any nonfiction text with the set of questions on this sheet. Class members practice inferring by noting the main idea and purpose of a passage. They also analyze an opinion in the passage and write a brief summary. See the...

How do all the lessons and activities you have planned for your class align to Common Core State Standards? This can feel like a very daunting question. Help ease the process by referencing a template that not only lists and...

After reading a text or covering a new topic, have class members fill out the four boxes on this page with facts. Individuals can use words or drawings to represent the facts.

Start off analysis of a text with a worksheet that asks pupils to complete several tasks. Class members note down a couple of characters or people and their distinguishing traits, describe the most important event, summarize the text...

Help your class tackle chunks of text with a simple graphic organizer. Pupils read three paragraphs and, as they read, draw pictures in the provided boxes that demonstrate what each paragraph says. There are three boxes on the page and...

Why is it important to use precise language? Participants explore this question in the fourth activity in a series of 15 on effective instruction. Perfect for all content areas, the activity promotes appropriate language choice through...

Invite your learners to take a close look at Abraham Lincoln's presidency through analysis worksheets of several images and primary documents, presented on an educational poster entirely dedicated to this great United States...

Work with your department or on your own to create organized unit plans that connect to all parts of the Common Core standards. The three-page template includes space to summarize the unit, list standards for each category of the ELA...

What self-management techniques help scholars achieve their goals? Readers review a list of strategies for managing stress, increasing motivation, and setting goals. They discover how to monitor their emotions, create checklists to stay...

Help your students develop a growth mindset with a list of sample strategies for prioritizing efforts instead of results.Pupils learn how to embrace mistakes, set high expectations, and focus on process over product.

In the hustle and bustle of life in the classroom, it's easy for teachers to lose track of the standards they have taught, and those that still need to be addressed. This Common Core checklist provides educators with an easy-to-use...

How have educational standards evolved? Educators of adults examine expectations in the 10th workshop out of 15 to better determine how standards have grown. Participants respond to a variety of sample questions to determine how they...

A thorough lesson plan template allows teachers to design balanced and standards-based lessons for any grade. The template includes spaces for unit vocabulary and concepts, objectives, and additional resources.

From baseball and tennis to capture the flag and four-square, here is a great document that will help you design your next unit on a sport-related activity. 

This resource includes a list of over 40 world religions and their major features, such as brief summaries of their origins and history, beliefs in god and an afterlife, practices, foundational texts, etc.  The document also...

Art classes, like any lab class, require extensive preplanning and set-up time. Use this planning template in the quiet before the storm to identify the equipment and materials that will be needed, the procedures and processes...

This article summarizes a study that evaluated the effectiveness of intensive instruction in the Word Identification Strategy, a learning strategy for decoding multi-syllabic words. Results indicate that intense strategy instruction...

Links are provided for leveled reading lessons created by preservice teachers at Auburn University. Levels include emergent literacy, beginning reading, growing independence and fluency, and reading to learn.

Many areas of instruction can have a rippling effect for the expansion of readers' repertoire of skills, including pre-reading, predicting, testing hypotheses against the text, asking questions, summarizing, etc. Literacy-rich,...

Summarizing teaches students how to take a large selection of text and reduce it to the main points for a more concise understanding. Upon reading a passage, summarizing helps students learn to determine essential ideas and consolidate...

In its practice guide Improving Adolescent Literacy: Effective Classroom and Intervention Practices, the Dept. of Education offers five recommendations for increasing the reading ability of adolescents. Those recommendations are...

To improve students' reading comprehension, teachers should introduce the seven cognitive strategies of effective readers: activating, inferring, monitoring-clarifying, questioning, searching-selecting, summarizing, and...

Paragraph Shrinking is an activity developed as part of the Peer-Assisted Learning Strategies (PALS). PALS is a classwide peer tutoring program in which teachers carefully partner a student with a classmate. The Paragraph Shrinking...

In this short video, the strategies of summarizing, clarifying, and asking-answering questions are used. These instructional tools will help teachers show students how to access complex texts. [5:54] CCSS.ELA-Literacy.CCRA.R.10