Why Use Articles of the Week?
Part of the reason students struggle with reading is because they lack prior knowledge and background. They can decode the words, but the words remain meaningless without a foundation of knowledge. To help build students’ prior knowledge, try assigning an Article of the Week every Monday morning.
English Teacher Kelly Gallagher first popularized his Article of the Week assignment in his 2009 book Readicide: How Schools are Killing Reading and What You Can Do About It, where he argued that we need to “augment the curriculum with as much real-world text as possible” so that kids don’t come across words like “al-Qaeda” in life and ask “Who’s the Al guy?”
Articles of the Week are real-world writings taken straight from news stories, essays, editorials, blogs, and speeches. They are culled from newspapers, magazines, and websites. All the articles have one purpose—to broaden students’ knowledge of the world.
Stuart, D. "Article of the Week." Dave Stuart Jr., https://davestuartjr.com/r esources/article-of-the-week-aow/. Accessed 3 April 2020.
How Are Articles of the Week Structured?
Each Article of the Week has a box at the top of the article with the following instructions to students:
- Mark your confusion.
- Purposefully annotate the article (1-2 mature, thoughtful responses per page to what the author is saying)
- Write a 250+ word response to the article (see Response Options at the end of the article)
At the end of each article, there are 3 article-specific response options. For example, a recent article about the growing viral threat has the following response options:
- According to the article, why is the world at risk of a bad virus in a way that the world hasn’t been at risk in the past? What are the solutions proposed in the article?
- What new information do you learn in this article? What information were you already familiar with?
- Summarize any point made in the article and respond.
Where Do I Find Articles of the Week?
English teacher Kelly Gallagher was the original creator of the Article of the Week assignment and has extensive archives of articles for teachers going back to 2013-14.
Social studies teacher Dave Stuart, Jr. has built on Kelly Gallagher’s work and now offers his own set of articles, both time-sensitive and timeless, and has developed additional tools to help teachers use Articles of the Week in their classrooms.
Where Can I Find Help in Using Articles of the Week in Class?
What Kind of Scaffolding Might Students Need?
Where Can I Learn More?
Dave Stuart, Jr. has written extensively about his efforts to use and improve Kelly Gallagher’s Article of the Week assignment. Check out these two blog posts if you want to learn more about how to help students be successful with this curriculum.