This book is about thinking. It describes a classroom-based program -- planned and executed by teachers -- to focus and guide students with serious reading problems to be goal-oriented, strategic, and self-assessing. Benchmark School (grades 1-8) provides students with success as an antidote for acting-out behavior and depression. Teaching students heuristics (informal methods of self-teaching) and cognitive strategies for dealing with such problems as letter reversal, miscalling words, and misunderstanding selections leads to increasingly better reading, an improved sense of self-worth, and a successful return to the mainstream.Written by teachers, this book is unique because it includes verbatim transcriptions of strategy use in Benchmark classrooms, showing how the teachers integrate and support the strategies in classroom instruction. It will be of interest to a wide range of readers, from primary and secondary school teachers in regular and special education, to undergraduate and graduatestudents, to researchers.
