Case Library Home

Welcome to the Project READI Case Library. The Library is intended to provide teachers and other educational practitioners, teacher educators, and the research community with a glimpse into the look and feel of the READI approach to engaging adolescents in developmentally appropriate inquiry-based instruction in three disciplinary areas – literature, history, and science. The “cases” in this library attempt to take you inside teachers’ thinking thus going beyond presenting curriculum. In fact, none of the materials constitute a curriculum per se. Rather, for each discipline, examples of modules, or segments of larger modules, illustrate how and why teachers orchestrated classroom instruction from selection of materials to issues posed for small group and whole class discussion to the discourse moves they made when guiding inquiry and discussion. You will see students being asked to engage with challenging texts to create evidence-based arguments that address issues appropriate to the driving questions of each discipline. For example, in science, students created explanatory models for homeostasis, stimulated by the question of why too much as well as too little water can result in death. In history, students grappled with making arguments about causes of historical events even in the absence of complete information, an inherent property of the historical record. In literature, students wrestled with the dilemmas and challenges of coming of age, gender and power and the rhetorical devices authors employ to weave perspectives on these issues into works of fiction. Throughout the case library teachers give voice to their thinking about what they chose, why they chose it, and the successes as well as the challenges they confronted.

Pick a discipline and get started. For each discipline, there is an introduction and overview of the principles and learning goals of the READI approach as instantiated in that discipline. (Click here for learning goals in each discipline: Literature, History, Science). Likewise, each case provides information on the knowledge, skills, and disciplinary practices that constituted the learning goals for that module. As well, for each case, teachers provide the texts, sequence and organization of instructional activities and the supports available to students for reading and interpreting text in light of the inquiry task and challenges they anticipated students would experience.