Do you have a minute? Of course not. Between the demands of dozens of literacy initiatives, testing, accountability, and preparing your students for life, you are stretched very thin. That’s why we created Corwin Literacy. We believe all teachers are lifelong learners, and we’ve curated a collection of just-in-time solutions to meet your needs. With Corwin Literacy you have trusted experts such as Gretchen Bernabei, Jim Burke, Doug Fisher, and Nancy Frey at your fingertips helping you navigate every classroom challenge.
We get it. Your time is valuable, and very limited. That’s why we publish resources that are relevant, classroom-tested, and above all, practical. The research is there, but it’s woven in with activities, lesson plans, units, and rubrics that you can use in your classroom tomorrow. Best of all, we offer a variety of learning options—from books, videos, consulting, institutes, and online learning—for a truly robust blended learning experience.
Some say there are teachers, and then there are leaders. At Corwin, we know they’re one and the same. We invite you to lead with us, learn with us, and grow with us. Below are some of our newest books from the brightest stars in literacy.
Literacy Reading List
Mindsets and Moves: Strategies That Help Readers Take Charge, Grades 1-8 by Gravity Goldberg
What if there really were a framework for building students’ agency and independence?
There’s no “what if?” about it. When it comes to teaching reading, Gravity Goldberg declares there is a structure, one that works with your current curriculum, to help readers take charge. The way forward Gravity says lies in admiring, studying, and really getting to know your students.
Consider Mindsets & Moves your guide. Here, Gravity describes how to let go of our default roles of assigner, monitor, and manager and instead shift to a growth mindset. Easily replicable in any setting, any time, her 4 M framework ultimately lightens your load because they allow students to monitor and direct their reading lives.
- Miner:Uncovering Students’ Reading Processes (Focus: Assessment)
- Mirror:Giving Feedback That Reinforces a Growth Mindset (Focus: Feedback)
- Model:Showing Readers What We Do (Focus: Demonstration]
- Mentor:Guiding Students to Try New Ways of Reading (Focus: Guided Practice and Coaching)
Lessons and Units for Closer Reading, Grades K-2: Ready-to-Go Resources and Assessment Tools Galore by Nancy Boyles
With Lessons and Units for Closer Reading: K-2 you get 20 initial close reading lessons and 80 follow-up comprehension skill lessons that expertly scaffold young readers. What makes these lessons so spot-on is that Nancy combed through hundreds of standards and standardized assessments to arrive at the 12 skills that matter most at K–2.
The lessons are arranged into 5 units of study, providing you with instant standards-aligned curriculum.
Teachers in K-2: Nancy knows what an amazing feat you pull off each year, taking young learners from 0-60 in the space of the school year. With Lessons and Units for Closer Reading, she gives you the gift of time, with a treasure trove of at-the-ready materials.
This is Disciplinary Literacy: Reading, Writing, Thinking, and Doing… Content Area by Content Area by ReLeah Lent
Disciplinary Literacy is about to go from theory to game plan—taking students from superficial understanding to deep content expertise. And guess what? ReLeah Lent’s big secret lies in highlighting each content area’s differences—advancing a discipline-specific model in which literacy is used as a tool for strategic thinking, reading, writing, and doing within each field.
That’s right—no more reading strategies used uniformly across the curriculum. Instead, This Is Disciplinary Literacy helps content-area teachers put into action the key literacies of their specialties. Teaching science? Students must evaluate evidence and question as they read. History? Comparing and contrasting sources and interpreting the import of events are key. Writing in Math? Accuracy is favored over elaboration and craft. Reading fiction in ELA? Synthesizing and attuning to voice and figurative language reign supreme. Students fully own knowledge because your instruction zeroes in on the academic habits that matter most.
Content area by content area, ReLeah shows how to immediately incorporate these literacies into lessons, units, and project-based learning.
Rigorous Reading: 5 Access Points for Comprehending Complex Texts by Doug Fisher and Nancy Frey
What could Fern Arable, Jay Gatsby, and Winston Churchill possibly have in common? They all need masterful teachers to help students revel in their complexity. And Nancy Frey and Doug Fisher are just the two mentors to help you make that happen.
Call it close reading, call it deep reading, call it analytic reading—call it what you like. The point is, it’s a level of understanding that students of any age can achieve with the right kind of instruction. In Rigorous Reading, Nancy and Doug articulate an instructional plan so clearly, and so squarely built on research, that teachers, schools, and districts need look no further.
The 5 Access Points Toward Proficiency
- Purpose & Modeling:Teachers think aloud to demonstrate critical thinking and how good readers always know why they are reading.
- Close & Scaffolded Reading Instruction:Teachers engage students in repeated readings and discussions, with text-dependent questions, prompts, and cues to help students delve into an author’s ideas.
- Collaborative Conversations:Teachers orchestrate collaborative learning to get students in the habit of exercising their analytical thinking in the presence of their peers.
- An Independent Reading Staircase:Teachers artfully steer students to more challenging books, with strategic bursts of instruction and peer conferences to foster metacognitive awareness.
- Performance:Teachers offer feedback and assessments that help students demonstrate understanding of text in authentic ways and plan instruction based on student understanding.
Academic Moves for College & Career Readiness, Grades 6-12: 15 Must-Have Skills Every Student Needs to Achieve by Jim Burke
Analyze, argue, compare/contrast, describe, determine, develop, evaluate, explain, imagine, integrate, interpret, organize, summarize, support, and transform . . .
Can a mere fifteen words turn today’s youth into the innovative, ambitious thinkers we need? Yes, contend Jim Burke and Barry Gilmore, coauthors of Academic Moves for College and Career Readiness, because these are the moves that make the mind work and students must learn if they’re to achieve academically. It’s that simple.
Or is it? To arrive at these fifteen critical reading, writing, and thinking processes, Jim and Barry combed through the standards, research, and secondary curriculum—and that’s for starters. Then, for each of these powerhouse processes, they developed a lesson structure, assignments, and activities so you can teach with potency, right away, and immediately cultivate in students discipline-specific habits of mind.
Vocabulary is Comprehension: Getting to the Root of Text Complexity by Laura Robb
Here is a reading riddle: What knowledge always precedes high-level text comprehension and yet seldom is given sufficient instructional time?
The answer: Word knowledge.
Our students can’t understand texts without knowing what words mean. It’s that simple. Meanwhile, in our rush toward complex texts, somehow we forget to put a new systematic vocabulary plan in place. In Vocabulary Is Comprehension, Laura Robb provides the instructional plan. And just wait until you see the results!
Laura’s plan takes just 10 to 15 minutes, and much of it is spent in partner and independent work so this is no “add on” to squeeze in. Even better, all materials are included. Each lesson features a student reproducible along with 50+ pieces of short fiction, nonfiction, and poetry—or, if you prefer, use your own text.
Here’s how the plan works:
- Day 1:You read aloud the short text and students discuss the selected words in their context. Students work in pairs, rereading the text to understand words and phrases, and then share understandings as a class.
- Days 2 & 3: Students finish partner work and complete the reproducible.
