Executive functions are the mental processes that students and adults use to manage tasks and achieve goals. These include goal setting, organization, cognitive flexibility, working memory, self-monitoring, attention, and inhibition. Executive functions play an important role in supporting proficient reading and writing across all grades. By grade 5, however, students’ success in reading and writing becomes increasing dependent on their ability to apply these executive function processes (M...| Keys to Literacy
A sentence is a collection of words that come together to express a complete thought. Some sentences are short, and some are quite long, depending on how many ideas are included in the sentence. To comprehend a sentence, a reader must process, store in working memory, and integrate a variety of syntactic and word meaning information. A writer must be able to manipulate and add words to write a high-quality, elaborated sentence. Many students who have difficulty with reading and writing benefi...| Keys to Literacy
There are several key teaching principles that help educators address a wide range of learning styles and student needs across all grade levels when teaching reading and writing. These core instructional practices are emphasized in every Keys to Literacy professional development course. This post explains the following principles: Explicit and Systematic Instruction, Gradual Release of Responsibility, Models and Think Aloud, Differentiated Instruction and Scaffolds, Automaticity Through Pract...| Keys to Literacy
This is the third of a three-part series of posts focused on using discussion to support learning. Simply getting students to talk out loud or talk to one another does not necessarily lead to learning. Effective, academic talk and classroom discussions should be productive, meaning students share their own thinking and reasoning and listen with a purpose to other people’s thinking. Productive discussion is sometimes called dialogic teaching, dialogic pedagogy, argumentation, accountable t...| Keys to Literacy