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CORE CURRICULUM
Reading and writing come alive for students
Watch how students engage with and respond to Collections texts.
Create Captivated Readers
Collections is proven effective at creating thoughtful, passionate readers in the classroom. Teachers put the learning in their students’ hands. Collections presents materials and activities in a variety of ways, allowing students to interact with different types of content.
Students have the tools they need to think critically, expand their curiosity, and tackle challenging concepts—which helps them learn to close read selections and prepare for high-stakes assessments.
Improve reading and analyzing complex texts.
Hone ability to determine evidence and reason critically.
Learn to communicate more effectively in a variety of ways.
Overview
Teachers and students love Collections. Collections inspires teachers’ creative instructional choices by providing a plethora of unique resources—fully supported by point-of-use scaffolding—that make teaching exciting. Collections creates passionate student readers with texts that matter to them, and their engagement with the texts inspires them to become critical readers, writers, and thinkers.
Student Experience
Beginning with reading that draws students in and makes them want to respond, Collections goes on to teach students the skills required to craft those responses—orally and in writing.
Collections' classrooms are current, creative, and challenging.
Dramatic historical stories, contemporary events, and multi-genre and leveled texts ensure that content is age appropriate and always engaging for students.
Instruction facilitates meaningful conversations about the texts to promote inquiry and active learning, helping students with annotation, analysis, and creative thinking.
Online tools help students revise, evaluate, and incorporate text evidence and foster both peer and teacher feedback.
Performance tasks and mentor texts offer practice and support to hone listening, articulate speaking, and writing skills.
Technology that engages and inspires
Watch students’ and teachers’ enthusiastic responses to Collections’ technology
Teacher Experience
Collections gives teachers a clear teaching path but doesn’t dictate how they teach. It gives teachers multiple ways to work with texts and point-of-use support for fine-tuning them to use with different kinds of students and situations.
Whole-Class
Work with a whole class to puzzle out answers to a Close Read and Raised Hand questions.
Small-Group
Tackle challenging Worksheet questions and Performance tasks collaboratively in pairs or small groups.
Individual
Encourage individual students to read more and dig deeper using Guided Reading questions and Level Up tutorials.
The close reading questions alongside the text in my teacher edition are lifesavers.
Barstow Unified School District, CA
Flexible materials let you customize your lessons.
- Personalization
Teachers have the the option to choose from teacher resources or select personal favorites.
- Differentiation
Full support makes instruction adaptable to a variety of proficiency levels, including English learners.
- High Interest Texts
Scaffold text analysis with the leveled high-interest texts in Xplor eMagazine for Grades 6-8 to build content knowledge and fluency.
- Assessments
Assessments included in Collections work with teachers to check progress, past and present, while helping to inform, monitor, and prepare.
Putting Collections resources to work
Watch two teachers describe how Collections’ flexible resources work for them.
Writable + Collections
When you combine Writable with Collections, you can strengthen and streamline your writing lessons. Writable includes mentor texts, prompts, rubrics, and stored comments that reinforce the writing process for students while supporting teachers.
Writable's online writing tools meet Collection's world-class literature allowing students to directly access the best mentor texts available during all steps in the writing process. Student friendly-rubrics always guide drafting and revision, including optional anonymous peer reviews. You will have access to grading filters to streamline how you evaluate your students' work. When writing and reading are joined together, growth happens!
Discover how Writable can help you grow your students into great writers.
PROFESSIONAL LEARNING
Professional learning ensures success with Collections.
- Getting Started
To help teachers with implementation, we offer Getting Started courses to walk through how to use the numerous resources and texts.
- Follow-Up Courses
Additional courses go deeper into the program pedagogy and instructional practices, as well as help teachers use and interpret data to drive instruction.
- In-Classroom Coaching
Our coaches work side by side teachers to model lessons and tailor instruction to classroom needs.
OUTCOMES
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Read and analyze complex texts
With features such as Close Read Screencasts and Text in Focus videos, students will learn the skill that’s the most important predictor of success in college and careers.
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Determine evidence
With the ability to annotate text and return to it when making arguments, students will learn how to use evidence to back up their ideas.
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Reason critically
As students encounter different viewpoints in Collections’ rich texts and in-class discussions, they will learn to weigh one argument against another.
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Communicate effectively
Because Collections requires students to respond, orally and in writing, to what they’re reading and hearing in class, they will continually hone their communication skills.
Research & Results
For more than three school years, Collections has been rigorously tested, demonstrating that both pre-test high-scoring and low-scoring students improved their language skills—the latter most of all.
FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
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Learn more about the pedagogy and effectiveness of Collections.
EFFICACY RESEARCH
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Overview of how Collections meets ESSA evidence criteria for “DEMONSTRATES A RATIONALE.”
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Grades 7 and 10 during the 2016-2017 academic year
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Grades 7 and 9 during the 2014-2015 academic year
Authors & Advisors
Our program authors and advisors know literacy instruction must be as relevant as it is rigorous.
They work together to choose rich, engaging, and complex texts to anchor Collections. They design materials that challenge and support all students in the process of becoming critical close readers and effective writers, speakers, and listeners.
Past President, National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE)
National Consultant, Presenter, Researcher, and Author
HMH Author and Associate Director, California Reading & Literature Project at UCLA
RELATED SOLUTIONS
We know success doesn’t come from one solution, but from a network of support. When you select a program from HMH, it’s the start of a relationship—one that helps you implement and raise achievement in the ways that work best for your district, school or classroom.
Journeys
Guide young readers to new heights. Feel confident in our research-based approach to literacy instruction that starts in kindergarten.
Read 180®
Learn more about the premier reading intervention, proven to accelerate students’ reading comprehension.
News & Events
Stay connected to Collections
Carol Jago, HMH author and program consultant, makes the case for the seemingly bad habits avid readers possess.
HMH’s Kristi James shares what ideal literacy engagement in an early childhood classroom would look like and how teachers can realize this goal and promote it outside of their classrooms as well.
Our fall Literacy Leadership Talks featured insightful takeaways from thought leaders Kate Kinsella, Shane Templeton, David and Yvonne Freeman, David Dockterman, and Sheila Valencia. Read them here, and access the recorded webinars.
See how Collections could work in your classroom.