Helping students engage with complex texts has been a longstanding challenge, though teachers have received little guidance about practices that help students in engaging with texts. This paper provides a range of empirical evidence about a tool designed to provide formative insight into text-focused teaching, which we used to reliably score more…

This paper reports on a project that examined teachers' reading identities and explored ways in which those identities were manifested in reading pedagogy and were adopted by students. The paper focuses on one purposively selected teacher and his class. Tom Ziegler's personal and pedagogical practices were deeply aligned, and his…

Comprehension instruction for students with learning disabilities (LD) is explored from three perspectives, all within the framework of engaging students in meaningful conversations about text with their general education peers. First, excerpts from lesson transcripts are provided to illustrate one special educator's emphasis on student-generated…