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Students learn to read and write best when their teachers balance literacy instruction. But how do you strike the right balance of skills and knowledge, reading and writing, small and whole group instruction, and direct and dialogic instruction, so that all students can learn to their maximum potential? Watch this video with Douglas Fisher, Nancy Frey, and Nancy Akhavan, authors of This Is Balanced Literacy, Grades K-6, as they answer the question: What is balanced literacy? 

What factors come to mind when you hear the term “Balanced Literacy?” It is a term that has been used (and misused) for so long that it has lost meaning. Join the authors of This Is Balanced Literacy, Grades K-6, for as they outline the essential evidence-based approaches that define the balance for your students, lighting the path for you to implement true balanced literacy in your classroom.

Use this chart from Word Study That Sticks by Pamela Koutrakos to inspire ideas for getting your class to reflect on and celebrate their progress.

In this excerpt from Planning Powerful Instruction, Grades 6-12, the authors clearly define the difference between traditional or informational teaching and transformational teaching or the pedagogy of EMPOWERment.

This activity from Planning Powerful Instruction, Grades 6-12, primes and orients students through discussion of controversial concepts that they will explore in the unit. Students also practice complex processes like making claims, supporting reasoning with evidence, listening and mirroring, summarizing, and addressing opposing viewpoints and reservations to their own thinking.

In this activity from Planning Powerful Instruction, Grades 6-12, students will use a picture map to walk through the skills of (1) identifying key details and capturing the connections among them in order to (2) identify topics, then (3) identify patterns of key details in order to identify main ideas and make deeper meaning of the text.

This three-level questioning guide from Planning Powerful Instruction, Grades 6-12, moves learners through the levels of literal, inferential, and reflective evaluation and application questions.

Tiffanee Brown, co-author of Concept-Based Literacy Lessons, writes in this blog how, in a Concept-Based Literacy classroom, teaching skills is not the end goal in and of itself. Rather, the skills are taught to exemplify a bigger idea or Understanding about important literacy processes.

Instructional time is a precious commodity, so it’s worth thinking about ways to make transitions as efficient as possible. In this blog post from Every Child Can Write author Melanie Meehan, she explains that, when we teach explicit strategies for transitioning smoothly and efficiently, we unlock more time for instruction.

In this blog post from Pamela Koutrakos, author of Word Study That Sticks and The Word Study That Sticks Companion, she explains that, for word study to be an integral part of your classroom routine, you can't wait until the “perfect time” to get started. Read her tips to going right away. 

Teachers can serve as curators of texts in much the same way as museum curators. Julie Wright, author of What Are You Grouping For?, explains how we can make deliberate moves to pique interest, evoke emotion, and urge action in readers. And we can invite our students to be curators, too.

Read how you can enact a gradual release of responsibilty within your Balanced Literacy groups in this blog post from Nancy Akhavan, co-author of This Is Balanced Literacy.