Mirrors & Windows

Help your students fall in love with literature.

 

Mirrors & Windows works alongside you to extend understanding to your students beyond the walls of your classroom. It is the only program that offers a true hardcover anthology featuring a diverse selection of classic and contemporary literature. Students will read texts that mirror their experiences and provide windows into the lives of others, opening doors to the diverse world around them.

Get an Inside Look

Powerful Resources for Literacy

We provide high-quality, flexible resources developed by ELA teaching experts so you can focus on what you do best—supporting your students as they build curiosity and a love of literature that will last a lifetime.

Creating a Context for Students

Mirrors & Windows helps students make connections to literature through their own knowledge and experience, making learning meaningful and purposeful. A diverse selection of literary, informational, and primary-source texts challenge students to make comparisons and extend critical thinking beyond themselves and into the world.

Practicing and Assessing Skills

The Mirrors & Windows curriculum provides rigorous and balanced instruction for reading, writing, speaking, listening, and language skills. The Gradual Release of Responsibility model (I do, we do, you do) leads students to independent learning, and Integrated Performance Assessments help you understand exactly where they are. Prompts guide students to think deeply about texts, and a range of activities allow for a variety of response types.

Connecting Reading and Writing

Integrated writing workshops provide students with opportunities to develop their writer's voice, and each unit contains contextual grammar and vocabulary skills and practice.

Social Learning

Collaborative learning activities, projects, and tools encourage students to build community in the class, and diversity of content provides opportunities to self-reflect and nurture empathy. Mirrors & Windows also offers correlations to social-emotional learning competencies for both middle and high school students.

Key Features


Online Learning Environment

Mirrors & Windows provides an online language arts curriculum with flexibility like no other. Students enjoy the immersive, innovative learning environment they can access whenever, wherever. With all the resources at your fingertips, you can teach the way you want and spend your time nurturing student growth-not endlessly prepping.


Collaborative Learning

Students understand even more when they learn from each other. eReaders allow students to experience reading and work through selections collectively using social annotations and highlighting. Microsoft Flip allows students to record video responses and share them to a class discussion board, providing exciting opportunities to build a classroom community with teacher prompts, student posts, and responses.


Comprehensive, Rich Materials

Cover every genre, theme, and skill you want. Our robust collection of diversely authored canonical literature and informational texts supports a truly integrated reading, writing, listening, speaking, and critical thinking environment. Integrated literacy and language resources provide explicit and systematic developmental instruction and practice for all English Language Arts strands.


Scaffolded Structure

Set students up to succeed by building on their strengths. Each unit in the Mirrors & Windows program provides a gradual release of responsibility, moving from Guided Reading (I do), to Directed Reading (we do), to Independent Reading (you do). This method enables students to read, understand, and reflect on literature confidently and independently.


Differentiated Instruction

Meet your students where they are with the ability to access and assign content from the full program. Differentiated Instruction and Unit Resources offer additional support to address the needs of individual students.

Why Educators Love Mirrors & Windows

“Our teachers love Mirrors & Windows–it is resource-rich, and they like the diversity and ability to give students texts based on their interests and reading levels. It’s a breath of fresh air for both our teachers and students.”


- Kelly McCoig, English Supervisor, Newport News Public Schools, Virginia