California Adolescent Literacy Initiative

CALI Reads

The availability of seven free Adolescent Literacy E-Learning courses is a wonderful opportunity for professional learning. These courses focus on research-based literacy practices proven to be effective with adolescent learners across content area instruction (ELA, social studies, science, math, etc.).

Each course takes approximately 2-3 hours to complete, making it a manageable commitment for educators, administrators, and individuals interested in enhancing their knowledge and skills in supporting adolescent literacy. The flexibility to launch the full e-Learning course or complete it section by section allows educators to tailor their learning experience to their personal schedule and preferences.

Taking advantage of these free e-Learning Courses is an excellent way to invest in professional development that will enhance instructional practices, create engaging learning environments, and make a profound impact on student growth and achievement. Get started today on your professional learning journey!

Anticipation Reaction Guides Course

The ARG routine uses an advanced organizer to prompt students to think about key topics before reading, to record related text evidence during reading, and to reconsider their opinions of key topics after reading based on text evidence. This course demonstrates how to plan and implement instruction of the ARG to support students’ reading comprehension.

Anticipation Reaction Guides has 2 sections:

Get The Gist Course

Morphology Course

The Morphology course demonstrates how to deliver effective morphology instruction that fosters morphological knowledge and word consciousness through five critical components:

  1. Explicit instruction of roots,
  2. Generative morphology,
  3. Morphological problem solving,
  4. Use of contextual information, and
  5. Word etymology.

The Morphology course has 4 sections:

Reciprocal Teaching Course

The Reciprocal Teaching (RT) course demonstrates how to support student reading comprehension through cooperative group discussion focused on four, high leverage reading comprehension strategies: Predicting, Questioning, Clarifying, and Summarizing (Palinscar & Brown, 1984). This course illustrates a 5-week sample schedule for building cooperative groups and folding in the four RT strategies one at a time. This course also provides teacher opportunity for practice, sample teacher scripts, teacher tips, and suggestions for student warm-up and group activities.

The RT Course includes 6 sections:

Self-Generated Questions Course

This course will teach you how to use the Self-Generated Questions (SGQs) strategy as a tool to support adolescent reading comprehension. The SGQ strategy teaches students how to self-generate three levels of questions while reading in order to help build and monitor their comprehension of text.

The SGQ Course contains 5 sections:

Vocabulary Maps Course

Wordbuilder Intervention Course

WordBuilder Intervention is an instructional tool to help adolescent struggling readers break down multisyllabic words.

The WordBuilder Intervention course demonstrates how to effectively and systematically deliver teacher-led, small group instruction using this tool to teach struggling readers how to break down, build, and spell multisyllabic words.

The WordBuilder Intervention course has 4 sections: