Adolescent Literacy in the Era of the Common Core: From Research into Practice

Adolescent Literacy in the Era of the Common Core provides school leaders, teachers, and others with strategies and best practices for advancing adolescent literacy in the classroom. Exceptionally clear and accessible, the book addresses a full range of topics in this vitally important field, including disciplinary literacy; vocabulary instruction; classroom discussion; motivation and engagement related to digital literacy; the use of multiple texts; and writing to learn.

This book presents “usable knowledge” of the highest order and of immediate value to school leaders and teachers. It will be required reading for all educators concerned with promoting and furthering adolescent literacy today.

Jacy Ippolito is an Assistant Professor in the School of Education at Salem State University, Salem, Massachusetts. His research and teaching focus on the intersection of adolescent literacy, literacy coaching, school reform, and teacher leadership. Since completing his doctorate in education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE), Ippolito has taught courses at Salem State and HGSE, and he continues to consult in Boston-area K–12 schools as a licensed reading specialist and literacy coach. Ippolito’s writing has appeared most recently in the books Adolescent Literacy (2012), Best Practices of Literacy Leaders (2012), and Essential Questions in Adolescent Literacy (2009), as well as in journals and online publications such as The Elementary School Journal (2010), Texas A&M Corpus Christi’s CEDER Yearbook (2010), the Literacy Coaching Clearinghouse (2009), the Massachusetts Reading Association’s Primer (2009; 2005), the Harvard Educational Review’s Special Issue on Adolescent Literacy (2008), and the International Reading Association’s Standards for Middle and High School Literacy Coaches (2006). After earning his master’s degree in education from HGSE, Ippolito taught in the Cambridge Public Schools for over seven years. He also holds a bachelor’s degree in English and psychology from the University of Delaware’s Honors Program.

Joshua Fahey Lawrence is an Assistant Professor of Language, Literacy and Technology in the Department of Education, University of California, Irvine. His research focuses on creating and testing interventions and teaching methods to improve adolescent literacy outcomes and understanding L1 and L2 language and literacy development. Lawrence’s experience as a Boston Public School teacher has motivated his interest in children’s language and literacy development. After receiving his doctorate at Boston University, Lawrence completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Harvard Graduate School of Education under the advisement of Catherine Snow. During that time, he worked on a quasi-experimental study of the Word Generation program in Boston schools. The first paper from this study demonstrated that language-minority learners benefited more from program participation than English monolinguals did (published in the Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness). A follow-up study suggested differential impacts for proficient and limited-proficiency language-minority students, and that improvement from program participation was sustained a year after the end of the program (in Bilingualism: Language and Cognition). More recently, Lawrence has been working on a randomized trial of the Word Generation program funded by the Institute of Educational Sciences (Catherine Snow, Principal Investigator). Lawrence is a research associate with the Strategic Educational Research Partnership and committed to leveraging the results of research to build literacy knowledge and improve instruction for struggling students.

Colleen Zaller has a master’s degree in applied linguistics, with a focus on adolescent literacy and language development among English language learners. Over the past four years, she was a Research and Evaluation Associate at Brown University. She has led evaluations of the written, taught, and tested curriculum for English language learners in New York and Connecticut and has conducted implementation research of adolescent literacy interventions funded under the Striving Readers program. In addition to her work in evaluation, Zaller has delivered professional development workshops on school improvement for diverse learners and instructional approaches to enhance learning for English learners. Prior to her work at Brown University, Zaller coordinated intervention services and taught English language arts and ESL to adolescents and adults in urban settings in Baltimore, Boston, and Providence and abroad in Mexico and China.