Lesson Plans and Narratives

The goal of the sample lesson plans is to show content-area high school teachers how they can use literacy strategies to help high school students learn core content and concepts. Each lesson incorporates the use of one or more literacy strategies and is designed to support students through the reading/learning process by providing instruction before, during, and after reading/learning. Each lesson also incorporates the gradual release of responsibility model. When this model is used within a single lesson and over several lessons, students are provided with enough instruction and guidance to eventually use the literacy strategies on their own.

The lessons are accompanied by narrative explanations that describe the lesson in action. As teachers read the lesson narratives, they should consider the following questions:

• What does the teacher do to support students’ literacy development and content learning before, during, and after reading/learning?
• What challenges do you anticipate if you were to implement this lesson in your own classroom? How would you prepare to meet these challenges?
• How would you make improvements to this lesson?

Teachers may find it useful to discuss the lesson plans and their narratives in teams or departments as a way to think about their own literacy instruction, learn from each other’s best practices, and identify potential professional development opportunities that could benefit the entire team.

Most of the literacy instructional strategies used in the lesson plans are described in Part II of the Content Area Literacy Guide. Others are described in the document below.

Additional Instructional Strategies

Click on one of the icons to the right to access the lesson plans and narratives for that subject area.