This toolbox highlights thinking routines developed across a number of research projects at PZ. A thinking routine is a set of questions or a brief sequence of steps used to scaffold and support student thinking. PZ researchers designed thinking routines to deepen students’ thinking and to help make that thinking “visible.” Thinking routines help to reveal students’ thinking to the teacher and also help students themselves to notice and name particular “thinking moves,” making those moves more available and useful to them in other contexts.

Chapters 4 and 5 specially address the terms and how understanding the terms can improve writing instruction.

This resource is a collection of ideas for classroom arrangement, management systems, and classroom libraries.

An excerpt from the online open access source Writing and Critical Thinking Through Literature, this chapter explores how to conduct a literary analysis of creative nonfiction.

In this Voices from the Middle article, Kristen Robbins draws on her middle-school teaching experiences to share with teachers some strategies for responding to student writing throughout the writing process rather than waiting until the end to give grades to student writing products.

In this Writers Who Care blog post, Kara Douma shares how a K-W-L strategy for student learning can be deepened by thinking of how to activate meaningful reflection. Teachers may find this resource useful as they consider how to deepen reflective practices in their own classrooms.

A resource for students to read Romeo and Juliet with audio recordings, vocabulary, character descriptions, and more!

Provides some activities on teaching sentence fragments as intentional, rhetorically useful possibilities for writers.

This article provides both a rationale for vocabulary instruction to build reading comprehension and some specific strategies for choosing and teaching vocabulary connected to reading. It has a specific section on teaching vocabulary with word parts.

This text is a collection of over 300 strategies that teachers can integrate into a variety of approaches to reading instruction. The author includes clear descriptions of each strategy, as well as effective teaching tips when applying each strategy.

This article helps teachers consider what it means for a text to be culturally relevant. The author highlights three steps to cultural authenticity for teachers to consider in text selection.

In this English Journal article, Nicole Sieben offers secondary English teachers a series of research-based principles and implementation strategies for giving effective feedback to student writers.

In this text, the author discusses the principles of backwards design within the context of English language arts. Chapters address a variety of issues and challenges teachers will face, including decisions about unit planning, assessment, and text selection.

This blog post talks about options for mentor texts and how to choose them. At the end of the post are links to other posts about mentor texts, how to curate them and how to use them in a variety of ways.

This article focuses on the ways in which teachers can ensure that students’ speaking and listening skills are developed. It provides a review of effective classroom routines.

In this post, literacy stages for adolescent students are identified, along with the instructional needs and practices associated with them. It is important to acknowledge a learner’s place on a developmental continuum, but also imperative that adolescent learners are not held back from challenging and authentic texts and tasks because of their identified stage. Knowing how to equip intermediate and advanced stage readers with the tools necessary to unlock meaning on the word and text level is necessary as the demands of these texts and tasks shift in content, purpose, and context.

This resource gives a good definition of what it means to study words through morphology and several specific instructional practices teachers could use to teach word parts.

This video includes a video of a teacher leading a whole class discussion while reflecting on the lesson.

This set of lessons extends over a few days. Students read and annotate Ernie Pyle's "A Long Thin Line of Anguish." Students complete a SAYS/DOES graphic organizer, working on summarizing the text, noticing the choices the author makes about use of details, and describing the choices the author makes regarding the structure of the article.Students complete a SOAPStone handout, identifying subject, occasion, author, purpose, speaker and tone (SOAPStone is a pre-AP/AP strategy). Students develop claims about why Ernie Pyle makes the writing choices he makes. Students write an informal, free-response style assessment about the impact of Pyle's choices.