Your Role: You Are a Literature Teacher

Your job is to inspire your scholars to fall in love with reading and to make your scholars significantly better readers every month!

To do so, you must set clear goals for your scholars and push them to improve each and every day.

You are your scholars’ personal trainer when it comes to reading! However, you cannot do it alone. You will need to enlist the support of parents. At Success, we do not believe parents sit on the sidelines. We need and demand their support for all we do. You will receive support from almost all scholars’ parents, but you will need to work at it. Parental investment is one of your most critical deliverables!

Great readers, and teachers of reading, focus on five key tactics every time they read:

1. Great readers always make mind movies. In other words, readers always create pictures in their minds, envisioning the story happening as they read.
2. Great readers always notice vocabulary words whose meaning they don’t know. They use the context of the word in the sentence or the page to figure it out.
3. Great readers always read the title and think about the title as they read. They think about how the events or information in the text connects back to the title.
4. Great readers always look for the big idea and the evidence to support it. They think about what is happening or what they learned, and what this makes them think about the main point of the book or text, and they think about the details the author employs to support the big idea.
5. Great readers always notice interesting language and structures that support the big idea. Authors make purposeful choices when crafting their pieces. An author’s use of imagery, word choice, conventions, text features, or the way they structure the text ALL work to develop the big idea the author is conveying.

Great writers, and teachers of writing, focus on five key tactics every time they write:

1. Great writers always have a strong, key idea. They always have an idea they want to convey before putting pencil to paper.
2. Great writers always include evidence that develops, supports, or proves their idea. They know an idea isn’t enough—they must convince their readers.
3. Great writers always organize their writing so that it’s simple and clear and avoids redundancy. They understand that to make a point, quality is better than quantity.
4. Great writers always reread their writing and make it better by revising. They get rid of everything that isn’t doing something useful.
5. Great writers always check that their grammar, punctuation, and spelling are correct. They know that great writing will be ignored if it is riddled with errors.