Building Literacy Through Classroom Discussion: Research-Based Strategies for Developing Critical Readers and Thoughtful Writers in Middle School

Want to help students achieve greater depth of reading, writing, and understanding? This book shows teachers how to facilitate discussions where students share rich, defensible interpretations of literature and solid, reasoned, understandings of any concepts under study. Based on the authors’ extensive research in middle schools, it describes why discussion-based instruction is crucial to achievement, and then shows you how to introduce and sustain discussions. The authors clearly define the teacher’s role and provide lots of successful strategies such as provocative statements and journal jots. Trouble-shooting sections answer common questions teachers have, such as how to correct a wrong interpretation and how to teach students to build on each other’s comments.

Mary Adler is an Assistant Professor of English at California State University Channel Islands. She specializes in English education, including literature instruction, classroom discourse, and writing development and processes. Previously she was a Research Scientist for the National Center on English Learning and Achievement at the University at Albany, State University of New York.

Eija Rougle received her Ph.D from SUNY from the Department of Education: Educational Theory and Practice. She is currently a lecturer and research scientist at the University at Albany, School of Education and at the National Research Center on English Learning & Achievement. She coaches teachers in Capital district middle schools as a facilitator of professional and instructional development. Eija and Mary were facilitator colleagues in the two-year study Partnership for Literacy that involved some 70 middle school teachers, some 1400 students and 18 middle schools in both Wisconsin and New York state. The partnership for Literacy-research study was conducted by Arthur Applebee, Judith Langer and Martin Nystrand. Eija has been teaching and studying literacy from Kindergarten to College level in Sweden, Finland and Russia, as well as the United States.