Heather Lattimer provides practical, classroom-tested approaches to helping students access and critically respond to content-based texts.
Reading for Learning: Using Discipline-Based Texts to Build Content Knowledge
Technology That Powers Up Learning
By designing lessons to activate prior knowledge and linking these activities to reading and writing, teachers found that students were more engaged, that they learned more material more quickly, and that they more willingly incorporated reading into their lives.
Finding the Thread: Character, Setting, and Theme
An annotated bibliography of books that exemplify the plot elements, character, setting, and theme. Includes guidelines on how to do a book talk.
Making Connections
In this strategy guide, you'll learn to model how students can make three different kinds of connections (text-to-text, text-to-self, text-to-world). Students then use this knowledge to find their own personal connections to a text.
Brainstorming and Reviewing Using the Carousel Strategy
This strategy guide introduces Carousel Brainstorming, also known as Rotating Review, and offers suggestions to implement this technique in your classroom for brainstorming about new topics or reviewing learned information.
Using the Think-Pair-Share Technique
In this strategy guide, you will learn how to organize students and classroom topics to encourage a high degree of classroom participation and assist students in developing a conceptual understanding of a topic through the use of the Think-Pair-Share technique.
Using the RAFT Writing Strategy
This strategy guide introduces the RAFT technique and offers practical ideas for using this technique to teach students to experiment with various perspectives in their writing.
Socratic Seminars
This strategy guide explains Socratic seminars and offers practical methods for applying the approach in your classroom to help students investigate multiple perspectives in a text.
Using the Jigsaw Cooperative Learning Technique
In this strategy guide, you will learn how to organize students and texts to allow for learning that meets the diverse needs of students but keeps student groups flexible.
Supporting Student Comprehension in Content Area Reading
In this strategy guide, you'll learn a few simple, yet powerful, techniques to encourage students to use peer talk and writing to enhance their understanding of content area texts.
Preparing Students for Success with Reading in the Content Areas
In this strategy guide, you'll learn how to determine the level and type of support you need to provide students based on careful preparation as a content area expert.
Reading with Purpose in the Content Areas
In this strategy guide, you'll learn how to organize students and instruction to establish a sense of purpose for reading authentic texts in the content areas.
Teaching Reading with YA Literature: Complex Texts, Complex Lives
This book is designed to help teachers develop their own version of YA pedagogy and a vision for teaching YA lit in the middle and secondary classroom.
Facilitating Participation with Silent Conversations
This guide introduces silent conversations, a collaborative learning technique that has students
thinking, sharing, and reflecting about important questions—but through writing rather than talk.
The Art of the Doodle: Writing with Imagination
Use independent, imaginative artwork and varied writing prompts to assess understanding of a given topic for a student body with differentiated needs.
Using Concept Circles to Develop Academic Vocabulary
In this guide, you will learn how to use the Concept Circles strategy to support vocabulary development and comprehension of complex text.
Using Word Walls to Develop and Maintain Academic Vocabulary
In this guide, you will learn how to use Word Walls to support vocabulary development and retention.
Using Generative Sentences to Apply Academic Vocabulary
In this guide, you will learn how to use generative sentences to give students opportunities to apply their knowledge of new words in writing.
Developing Evidence-Based Arguments from Texts
This strategy guide clarifies the difference between persuasion and argumentation, stressing the connection between close reading of text to gather evidence and formation of a strong argumentative claim about text.
Close Reading of Literary Texts
This guide provides strategies for choosing text that is appropriate for close reading and to plan for instruction.