LITERACY NEWS Student Motivation and Engagement in Literacy Learning Teachers can help students build confidence in their ability to comprehend content-area texts, by providing a supportive environment and offering information on how reading strategies can be modified to fit various tasks. We should also make literacy experiences more relevant to students' interests, everyday life, or important current events. Here are a few ways to increase student motivation and engagement. Establish meaningful and engaging content learning goals around the essential ideas of a discipline as well as the specific learning processes students use to access those ideas. Monitor students' progress over time as they read for comprehension and develop more control over their thinking processes relevant to the discipline. Provide explicit feedback to students about their progress. When teachers set goals to reach a certain standard, students are likely to sustain their efforts until they achieve that standard. However, if students set their own goals, they are more apt to be fully engaged in the activities required to achieve them. By: U.S. Department of Education From All About Adolescent Literacy (adlit.org) Provide a positive learning environment that promotes students' autonomy in learning. Allowing students some choice of complementary books and types of reading and writing activities has a positive impact on students' engagement and reading comprehension. Empowering students to make decisions about topics, forms of communication, and selections of materials encourages them to assume greater ownership and responsibility for their engagement in learning. FALL 2014 Make literacy experiences more relevant to students' interests, everyday life, or important current events. Look for opportunities to bridge the activities outside and inside the classroom. Tune into the lives of students to find out what they think is relevant and why, and then use this information to design instruction and learning opportunities that will be more relevant to students. Consider constructing an integrated approach to instruction that ties a rich conceptual theme to a real-world application. If you have any questions or would like assistance, please stop in room 121 or email one of your literacy coaches. Lauren Baier baiela@whsd.net Christyn Coles colechr@whsd.net LITERACY NEWS FALL 2014