The primary goal of Explicit Comprehension is to provide students with tools, skills, and strategies to enhance their understanding, or comprehension, of texts. In this ten to fifteen minute block, teachers use previously visited texts to teach skills and strategies that support student mastery of on-grade level standards. The teacher explicitly models for students and invites students to actively engage in the process while the teacher formatively assesses their understanding of the task. At the conclusion of the mini-lesson, students independently apply the learned skill or strategy. Students build a toolbox of strategies to enhance comprehension when reading texts individually.

Interactive Read Aloud grants students with the opportunity to engage in concepts and construct meaning from texts they would not be able to access independently. During Interactive Read Aloud, the teacher reads aloud texts that are on or above the average level of the students in the class. As the teacher reads, he/she “thinks aloud” to model how he/she processes texts and poses scaffolded questions to students to facilitate discussion as students “turn and talk” to each other. The students play an active and significant role in processing the text as it is read and in developing their ability to think critically about complex text.

Guided Reading provides students with daily small group and one-on-one instruction at their instructional level as defined by the Fountas & Pinnell Benchmark Assessment. During Guided Reading, the teacher provides instruction in the grade level standards that correspond to the students’ instructional levels. This differentiated instructional time enables the teacher to provide explicit instruction that targets individual students’ identified strengths and needs as developing readers.

Writer’s Workshop is an innovative approach to teaching writing that centers on student choice and ownership. During Writer’s Workshop, the teacher begins with explicit instruction on the writing standards and then gives students an opportunity to “try out” the skill or strategy under the teacher’s supervision. As students write independently, the teacher works with small groups of students or individual students to provide differentiated instruction around a skill or strategy that students apply to their own writing. This workshop model allows students to develop, at their own pace, their writer’s craft.