ABSTRACT
As former middle-school teachers, we recall vividly our desire for better ways of reaching and teaching our adolescent students. We note encouraging signs that educators are showing new attention to the needs of older readers, and we aim to contribute to the body of effective teaching strategies that meet these needs. This chapter shares approaches to content area lesson planning designed to combat the difficulties of content area texts while building on the experiential strengths of middle-school and secondary-school students. The approaches make use of instructional strategies from the field of literacy (such as engaging students in active learning by relating their prior knowledge about a topic to the material at hand) to help students grasp increasingly sophisticated content and practice new ways of thinking in the subject area disciplines.
