Three policy innovations at the heart of this book - the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), new Annual Professional Performance Review (APPR), and data driven instruction (DDI) provide a timely opportunity to join school and district improvement and policy implementation research with improvement science. This book is not just a collection of findings about odds-beating schools (those with higher than predicted student performance trends and higher than average poverty and diversity) and their journeys to implement these innovations. It also provides timely perspectives regarding policy innovations and how they might disrupt practice in desirable or undesirable ways. This book offers readers insight into how educators at every boundary-classroom, school, and district interact to make meaning of innovations, both individually and collectively; and also how their meanings and values influence innovation implementation outcomes. The story includes details how policy innovations were tailored to school and district office priorities; the features of these schools' structures, climates, and routines that were conducive to implementation; and how these innovations were able to penetrate the classroom boundaries.

Three policy innovations at the heart of this book - the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), new Annual Professional Performance Review (APPR), and data driven instruction (DDI) provide a timely opportunity to join school and district improvement and policy implementation research with improvement science. This book is not just a collection of findings about odds-beating schools (those with higher than predicted student performance trends and higher than average poverty and diversity) and their journeys to implement these innovations. It also provides timely perspectives regarding policy innovations and how they might disrupt practice in desirable or undesirable ways. This book offers readers insight into how educators at every boundary-classroom, school, and district interact to make meaning of innovations, both individually and collectively; and also how their meanings and values influence innovation implementation outcomes. The story includes details how policy innovations were tailored to school and district office priorities; the features of these schools' structures, climates, and routines that were conducive to implementation; and how these innovations were able to penetrate the classroom boundaries.

This volume culls scholarship on both what high literacy is and how it is developed. It embraces the call put forth by Langer and Applebee (2016) that high literacy must continue to be our aim and to see more research analyzing and identifying how teachers might promote literacy practices that promote deep thinking around important content. The editors offer a conceptual framework for high literacy that explicates how each component (i.e. reading, writing, dialogic engagement, and epistemic cognition in literary reasoning) relates to the others and from what scholarly literature these concepts have been derived. Individual chapter authors provide in-depth examinations of the existing research base on particular related topics, focusing on the two important cross-cutting aims of the volume: (1) explicating the roles reading, writing, dialogic engagement, and epistemic cognition hold in high literacy development, and (2) providing examples of practices recommended to develop high literacy.