How do you get kids to read—and actually understand —hard texts? Teachers know it’s important for students to read historical primary sources, scientific research studies, or literary texts with unfamiliar language, like Shakespeare or the Odyssey . Research also shows that adolescents need high...

In my post series about text sets , I’ve outlined research on text sets from cognitive , disciplinary , and critical perspectives. Each of these perspectives offers specific aims for what a literacy unit’s texts might look like. But how might a teacher bring them together? How can a teacher aim for...

Just what is a text set , anyways? Turns out, a teacher’s text set depends a lot on their perspective on literacy. In this blog post series, I’ve described the QTS text set from the cognitive perspective and the Project READI text set from the disciplinary literacy perspective . To complement those...

In my last two posts, I sketched the popularity and emergence of research on text sets , and outlined the Quad Text Set (QTS) framework aimed at helping students reading more complex texts . In this post, I’ll discuss text set framework called Project READI , whose goal is to scaffold students’ use...

Text sets are popular for many teachers and researchers, but the definition of a text set —any thematically-linked collection of texts—can often be quite vague. In this post, I’ll explore a specific approach to designing text sets: a cognitive approach with the goal of building students’ ability to...