Middle Grades Resources

This article includes 30 high-quality lesson plans for middle school teachers that can be taught in core math classes as well as special education classrooms.

This short post from Iris Center explains explicit instruction in math.

Explicit instruction is systematic, direct, engaging, and success oriented--and has been shown to promote achievement for all students. This highly practical and accessible resource gives special and general education teachers the tools to implement explicit instruction in any grade level or content area.

Load Reduction Instruction (LRI) is an umbrella term referring to instructional approaches that seek to reduce cognitive load in order to optimise students’ learning and achievement. This article shows how instructional practices that unambiguously emphasise the role of the teacher are in fact predominantly student-centered and student-salient.

Teaching reading comprehension and teaching close reading overlap in important ways but they are not the same thing. This blog post examines what close reading is really about.

Learn about the strengths and weaknesses of Direct Instruction, a promising reading intervention program evaluated by the American Federation of Teachers in their series “Building on the Best, Learning from What Works.”

This article from the National Science Teaching Association offers a deeper look at direct instruction in the science classroom.

This comprehensive guide from the Smithsonian is designed to highlight the benefits of using primary source materials in any classroom and to provide the teacher with practical suggestions and examples of how to do this.

This article from EdWeek goes in-depth to examine ways to have students learn about—and use—primary sources.