Literacy Learning: Vocabulary, Context, and Comprehension

Literacy Learning: Vocabulary, Context, and Comprehension

Building Knowledge-Rich, Strategic, and Independent Readers

Course Details

Course Type:

• Self-Paced, Fully-Facilitated
• Cohort, Fully-Facilitated

Course Length: 10 Hours

Course Access:

• Self-Paced: Each course includes 45 days of interactive access. If you purchase multiple courses within a single concentration at the same time, your total access period will be extended (e.g., two courses = 90 days, three courses = 135 days, etc.).
  
  Upon enrollment, your dashboard will initially display 45 days per course. By the next business day, your end date will be adjusted to reflect the correct total access period based on the number of courses purchased.
  
  After your enrollment period ends, you will continue to have read-only access to your courses.
• Cohort: Participants will follow a set start and end date, determined by their school district.

Course Description

Strong reading comprehension doesn’t happen by accident—it grows from vocabulary knowledge, background understanding, and skillful meaning-making. This 10-hour professional development course helps educators unpack how these components work together and how to teach them in practical, classroom-ready ways. Participants will explore how comprehension develops, why vocabulary is foundational, and how to guide students toward becoming independent, strategic readers.

Through evidence-based practices, teachers will learn how to teach vocabulary in context, model comprehension thinking, and use flexible strategies across narrative and informational texts. The course emphasizes support for diverse learners, including multilingual students, and shows how targeted instructional shifts can make reading more accessible, engaging, and meaningful. Whether you are a classroom teacher, reading specialist, or instructional leader, this course provides actionable tools for deepening students’ comprehension and cultivating joyful, confident readers.

Course Objectives

Participants will be able to:

Understanding Comprehension & Assessment

• Explain what reading comprehension is and how it connects decoding, vocabulary, knowledge, and thinking.
• Describe multiple comprehension assessment strategies.
• Recognize how comprehension varies by genre and student needs.
• Reflect on how current instruction aligns with research-based reading models.

Vocabulary Knowledge & Instruction

• Explain how vocabulary knowledge supports comprehension.
• Explain levels of word knowledge and how students move from recognition to expressive use.
• Identify and apply effective strategies for teaching vocabulary.
• Use pre-reading strategies to teach key vocabulary from texts.
• Embed vocabulary instruction within reading, rather than treating it as isolated word lists.
• Explore multi-sensory and culturally responsive vocabulary practices.
• Reflect on current teaching practices related to vocabulary instruction.

Comprehension Instruction & Strategy Development

• Explain how the Gradual Release Model supports comprehension instruction.
• Design before-, during-, and after-reading activities that scaffold understanding.
• Use tools such as story maps, dramatization, and graphic organizers to teach comprehension.
• Differentiate comprehension strategies for diverse learners, including multilingual students.

Informational Texts & Content-Area Literacy

• Explain why students need early exposure to informational and expository texts.
• Use pre-, during-, and after-reading strategies for nonfiction texts.
• Teach students how to summarize, question, compare, and synthesize information.
• Connect comprehension instruction to content-area learning.