Professional Development for Classroom Reading Engagement

John T. Guthrie and Jennifer McPeake
University of Maryland

Engage your students more fully in learning.

Teachers learn engagement practices to improve students' motivations to read complex texts. Using these practices gives students the foundation for success in the Common Core Standards (CCS) in social studies, science, economics, reading/language arts, foreign language, mathematics, and more.

Classroom practices will enable teachers to:

  • Support motivation
  • Foster engagement with text
  • Sustain reading engagement across the year
  • Energize learning from information text
  • Connect Common Core Standards to motivation
  • Use research-based approaches

Motivation and engagement practices include:

  • Setting up partnerships, collaborations, and teams
  • Providing productive choices, large and small
  • Building relevance into reading and writing
  • Encouraging reading values
  • Enabling students to develop their identities
  • Increasing learning in Common Core Standards

Integrating cognitive strategy instruction includes guidance to:

  • Teach higher-order reading skills
  • Improve students' information text comprehension
  • Integrate reading in content domains
  • Provide strategy instruction in subject matters
  • Target digital literacies and traditional textbooks

Main ingredients in the professional development program

Intended for Grades 3 to 12 teachers, principals, administrators, and state leaders, the program consists of three modules and downloadable materials. Each module contains five workshops on teaching one reading strategy and one motivation support. The three modules are: (1) Inferencing/Relevance; (2) Summarizing/Collaboration (forthcoming); (3) Concept Mapping/Choice (forthcoming). Downloadable materials include PowerPoint slides, text copies, charts, and rubrics.

Teachers are encouraged to print out these materials to use them during viewing the modules. We recommend that teachers work in pairs or school-level teams. After viewing each module in its entirety, educators can successfully implement the engagement practices in their classrooms and schools.

For more information contact Ellen Kaplan at ekaplan1@umd.edu.