In order to help all students learn, teachers need a variety of One promising idea for helping teachers develop these strategies is a professional development model, the Primary Literacy Institute, which Ms. Peterson and Ms. VanDerWege describe here. MIRANDAH, a spunky 7-year-old getting ready to enter second grade, was deep into the session with her tutor. She was reading Ten Little Caterpillars with all the concentration an adult would give a major novel. As she read, she miscued on a word. She read on to the end of the sentence, stopped, and repeated the sentence, this time correcting her error. When Mirandah finished the book, Bobbie, her tutor, complimented her: Mirandah, I like the way you self-corrected on this page. How did you know to do Mirandah fastened her eyes thoughtfully on the ceiling, her hands pushing back the hair that had fallen in her face, and said, Well, I just thought . . . that doesn't make sense. What would make sense and start like that? And then I thought of a word that looked right, sounded right, and made sense. It's just like you told me - I used my strategies. Mirandah was having a metacognitive moment. She was thinking about her thought processes, and thinking about one's thinking is central to reading. Metacognition in reading involves a turning inward - at first purposefully and later automatically - to examine how we comprehend a text so that we can alter our interpretations of it and so elaborate and deepen our understanding.1 The Kenai Peninsula Borough School District, where Mirandah and her tutor were working together, spreads out over 25,600 square miles and includes 40 schools, four of which can be reached only by plane or boat. The population reflects both Alaska Native and Russian cultures. With a population so diverse, a single remedial reading program just won't work. In an attempt to avoid the one-size-fits-all view of remediation, the district employs a framework based on the First Steps Reading Developmental Continuum, a comprehensive literacy framework developed in Western Australia.2 First Steps offers many teaching strategies to support a child's reading development. In addition to following a developmental continuum, teachers in the district follow a comprehensive program. Teachers are encouraged to incorporate reading aloud, shared reading, guided reading, independent reading, interactive writing, shared writing, independent writing, and spelling in context as parts of the language arts block. And three cueing systems are emphasized: reading for meaning (What makes sense?), attention to syntax (What sounds right?), and graphophonic awareness (Do the letters match the sounds?). A low score on any standardized measure of reading can be the first red flag that a child is having trouble in reading, and teachers are encouraged to follow up with individual diagnostic tests.3 By analyzing the information gleaned from these assessments, teachers can determine the strengths of each child. A team composed of classroom teachers and specialists then decides in which area a child most needs help - for example, with motivation or comprehension or phonemic awareness - and chooses the best way to meet the most pressing needs. But in order to help all students learn, especially in a district as diverse as the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District, teachers need a variety of One promising idea for helping teachers develop these strategies is a professional development model called the Primary Literacy Institute, which was the brainchild of five Juneau teachers - Susan Hanson, Barbara Campbell, Luann McVey, Kathy Nielson, and Laurie Schoenberger. The first institute was held in Juneau in 1995, and the idea has since spread to many communities in Alaska. The institutes enroll both adult and child students: the adults are teachers who are learning how to improve their reading instruction, and the children are students identified as struggling readers. …