Stuck in the Middle: Helping Adolescents Read and Write in the Content Areas

Don’t get stuck when students struggle in the content areas. Get Stuck in the Middle

"Over the past thirty years, we have been developing and implementing teacher-friendly, student-oriented strategies to help all students learn through reading and writing―especially those who struggle. In these pages, we share with you ways to differentiate instruction so that all students learn more content, more effectively, while simultaneously improving the reading and writing abilities they bring to our classes." Donna Hooker Topping and Roberta McManus

When students are Stuck in the Middle you need the very best strategies to help them move forward―strategies that pass the test of real teaching, to real adolescents, in real time. Fortunately, the teaching that helps them most is good for everyone in your content-area classroom.

Donna Hooker Topping and Roberta McManus help you support struggling middle school students with page after page of immediately useful, ready-for-differentiation teaching. These strategies work by making the process of content-area literacy transparent and repeatable.

Without interrupting the flow of instruction, Donna and Roberta’s strategies help adolescents:

• not only read texts but understand them too
• make crucial subject-area vocabulary stick
• grapple with themes, ideas, and content through writing
• find ways into content that fit individual learning styles.

“Content-area teachers have a unique opportunity to help students not only learn the material but also improve their overall literacy,” write Donna Hooker Topping and Roberta McManus, “so we offer our best strategies to you.” If you want to know how to help struggling readers make sense of the textbook, if you need help differentiating, or if you are overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of learning styles in your classroom, trust Donna and Roberta’s decades of experience. Pick up Stuck in the Middle and start getting students unstuck now.

Donna Hooker Topping has spent more than 30 years collaborating with Roberta McManus her coauthor on Stuck in the Middle. They have developed strategies that help students learn content through better teaching. “Better teaching, to us, is the result of a teacher’s conscious effort to embed literacy processes into content-area instruction. Resulting lessons lead students through the very strategic moves in reading and writing that lead to fuller comprehension of the content, strategies that will prepare them for lifelong learning.” Donna is Professor of Literacy Education at Millersville University in Pennsylvania. She is a former first-grade teacher, reading specialist, reading supervisor, language arts supervisor, and literacy consultant. She and Roberta are also coauthors of the Heinemann title Real Reading, Real Writing  and Donna also coauthored the Heinemann book Getting Grammar with Sandra Josephs Hoffman.

Roberta McManus has spent more than 30 years collaborating with Donna Hooker Topping, her coauthor on Stuck in the Middle. They have developed strategies that help students learn content through better teaching. “Better teaching, to us, is the result of a teacher’s conscious effort to embed literacy processes into content-area instruction. Resulting lessons lead students through the very strategic moves in reading and writing that lead to fuller comprehension of the content, strategies that will prepare them for lifelong learning.” Rboerta is a middle school science teacher in the Oxford-Area School District in Pennsylvania, where she infuses science with reading and writing strategies. She is also a popular workshop presenter on the topic of bringing literacy processes into the content areas. She and Donna are also coauthors of the Heinemann title Real Reading, Real Writing.