A new session of each course opens each month, allowing you to enroll whenever your busy schedule permits!
How does it work? Once a session starts, two lessons will be released each week, for the six-week duration of your course. You will have access to all previously released lessons until the course ends.
Keep in mind that the interactive discussion area for each lesson automatically closes 2 weeks after each lesson is released, so you’re encouraged to complete each lesson within two weeks of its release.
The Final Exam will be released on the same day as the last lesson. Once the Final Exam has been released, you will have 2 weeks plus 10 days to complete the Final and finish any remaining lessons in your course. No further extensions can be provided beyond these 10 days.
Week One
Lesson 01 - Building a Balanced Literary Framework
Wednesday
If you have you ever wished you had a good way to reach your struggling readers, you're ready to transform reading instruction with differentiated instruction and guided reading. In this lesson, you will discover how blending these techniques will help you build a balanced literary framework.
Lesson 02 - Getting to Know Your Readers
Friday
The first step in helping your students is getting to know who they are and how their minds work. In this lesson, you will learn how to evaluate your students' readiness, interests, learning profiles, and social elements.
Week Two
Lesson 03 - Planning Assessments
Wednesday
Assessment is at the heart of differentiated instruction. In this lesson, learn how to plan quality pre-, ongoing, and summative assessments that will give you a clear picture of student learning. The best part of assessing students at multiple intervals is that you can tell what is working and what isn't.
Lesson 04 - Grouping Students
Friday
In this lesson, you will discuss flexible groups. These are a mainstay in the differentiated classroom because they allow you to combine students for different reasons on different days. Sometimes you will combine students based on interests and other times based on readiness or learning profile.
Week Three
Lesson 05 - Selecting Texts
Wednesday
There are thousands of options when it comes to selecting the texts you will teach. This lesson will teach you how narrow down your options by understanding the criteria of good fiction and nonfiction texts.
Lesson 06 - Framing Your Prereading
Friday
Did you know that a lot of the learning process hinges on what you do to prepare students before they start reading? It's easy to just introduce a text and let students have at it, but if you plan the time before reading with activities that build anticipation, you will be amazed by the results.
Week Four
Lesson 07 - Reading the Text
Wednesday
How students read a text is a highly personal matter, but in the classroom, you must direct their reading to get the greatest results. In this lesson, you will learn how to teach students the right way to read, to comprehend what they've just read, and to make inferences.
Lesson 08 - Navigating the After Reading Framework
Friday
This lesson covers the after-reading framework, where you will teach students to turn information into ideas as they go beyond the text and into the world.
Week Five
Lesson 09 - Tiering With Ease
Wednesday
If you think of your classroom as a ladder, you will realize that you have a lot of students on a lot of different rungs. In this lesson you will explore tiering, which helps you separate students based on their readiness, interests, or learning profiles.
Lesson 10 - Anchoring Your Students to Extra Learning
Friday
What do you do with those extra 10 or 15 minutes at the end of a lesson or a school day? An increasingly popular strategy is to anchor your students to the material they've learned by extending learning in new avenues.
Week Six
Lesson 11 - Crafting Independent Reading Projects
Wednesday
The ultimate goal of the balanced literary framework is to create independent readers. In this lesson, you will learn the basics of curriculum compacting, learning contracts, and individual projects, all of which will help your students transition to independence.
Lesson 12 - Putting the Puzzle Together
Friday
This lesson wraps up the course by reviewing the foundation that you build for classroom learning. Your attitude is everything. Beyond that, you need to be able to encourage struggling readers and help parents extend the learning at home.