Social & Emotional Learning Must Include Issues of Cultural Diversity and Equity

In this visual strategy, students divide vocabulary words into parts and draw illustrations to represent the separate meaning of each part.

In this semantic feature analysis strategy, students use a grid to show how vocabulary words relate to one another and to conceptual frameworks (e.g., masculine versus feminine).

Students use this tool to identify a word’s meaning, its parts and its opposite. After organizing the information on an illustrated flashcard, students practice using the word in a sentence.

In reading against the grain students analyze the dominant reading of a text and engage in alternative or "resistant" readings. Resistant readings scrutinize the beliefs and attitudes that typically go unexamined in a text, drawing attention to the gaps, silences and contradictions.

This strategy exposes students to multiple short pieces of a text before they read it in its entirety. Students read selected quotes out of context and comment on both the selection and the comments of other students. The activity ends with students reflecting on their reactions to and predictions about the text.

Thinking notes are text annotations (highlights, underlines or symbols made on the text or in the margins) that document student thinking during reading. Depending on how you structure the task, these notes can indicate agreement, objection, confusion or other relevant reactions to the text.

A comprehension strategy that builds speaking and listening skills through structured text-based discussion. Students record sentences from a text and then discuss their responses in small groups.