Teaching Literacy across Content Areas: Effective Strategies that Reach All K–12 Students in the Era of the Common Core State Standards

Lasisi Ajayi · Tamara Collins-Parks

Apr 2016 · Cambridge Scholars Publishing

About this ebook

This book is written primarily for pre-service and in-service teachers of Literacy/English Language Arts, school administrators, literacy graduate education students, and literacy education researchers, and addresses the myriad of questions regarding the implementation of the Common Core State Standards. Classroom teachers and pre-service teachers are currently confronting questions such as how they can teach the Common Core State Standards to make sure they are fully addressing them; how they can have the time to teach students to have deeper understandings of the skills and concepts addressed in the Standards; what they can do to meet the learning needs of diverse students such as English language learners and students with learning disabilities; whether teachers of content areas are required to add reading instruction to their teaching responsibilities; whether the Standards tell teachers what to teach; and whether the document tells teachers how to implement the Standards in the classroom, among others. This book is designed to answer these questions and many others. Each chapter contains instructional practices, examples, vignettes, and illustrations that connect the Common Core State Standards to classroom practices, and thereby provide pre-service and in-service teachers with meaningful, relevant, and practical teaching strategies to prepare culturally, academically, and linguistically diverse students in California and other states of the nation for both career and college. In this regard, readers of this book will find that the authors have provided a pathway to better understand the Common Core State Standards, and will be able to use what they learn in the pages of this book to provide more effective instruction for their students across the disciplines to read, analyse, and critique complex texts and apply knowledge to solve practical, real-life problems.

About the author

Dr Lasisi Ajayi is the Coordinator of the Graduate Reading/Language Arts program in the Department Teacher Education and Foundations at California State University, San Bernardino. Dr Ajayi has written extensively in the areas of English language arts instruction, multimodal/new media literacies, literacy teacher preparation, and innovative approaches in literacy instruction. His work has been published in prestigious professional and academic journals, including such as Journal of Literacy Research, Teacher Education Quarterly, Asia Pacific Journal of Education, The Teacher Educator, TESOL Quarterly, and Journal of Research on Technology in Education, among others.

Dr Tamara Collins-Parks teaches literacy, language acquisition, and multicultural education in the Department of Dual Language and English Learner Education at San Diego State University. She has taught English Language Development, and now coordinates the Master’s program in Critical Literacy and Social Justice. Dr Collins-Parks spent the last seven years supporting candidates in the Teacher Performance Assessment. Her previous publications include a chapter in the anthology Literacy Ideology, Teachers’ Beliefs, Language Policy and Parent Voice.