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.

As part of the NCTE High School Literature Series, Tim O'Brien in the Classroom focuses on opportunities for classroom discussion and writing assignments, including lessons, open-ended prompts, and student writing samples.

This article discusses the imaginative activities and assignments that teachers often assign that violate the text around which the lesson is focused and that mislead students about its meaning.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Teachers need to create text-dependent questions to elicit close reading. When answering these questions, students learn to reread and think deeply about the text.

Complex texts promote deep thinking and critical analysis by students. Through close reading of a complex text, students' independent reading abilities also increase.

This guide provides strategies for choosing text that is appropriate for close reading and to plan for instruction.

In this Strategy Guide, learn how to prepare yourself and your students for reading and note-taking in mobile environments.

Close readings allow primary students to engage with complex texts. Through repeated reading, students build a deep understanding of the text and critical thinking skills.

Effective differentiation begins with purposeful assessment. In this strategy guide, you'll learn how to construct an authentic performance-based reading assessment that will give you access to students' thinking before, during, and after reading.

A Concept Sort is a vocabulary and comprehension strategy used with students to introduce new topics and/or familiarize students with new vocabulary.

Using Animoto, a free Web 2.0 tool, students can develop short digital videos that include music, photos, video clips, and text as well as share their creations electronically.