aariAdolescent Accelerated Reading Initiative – AARI is an accelerated county–wide initiative focused on academic literacy designed to bring Elementary, Middle, and High School students to grade level quickly. AARI is based on fifty years of state of the art literacy research and focuses on critical thinking with  expository text to help students access content from texts.  The pedagogical approach emphasizes small group instruction that meets students where they are and accelerates their reading through instruction built around community, text-based inferencing and critical thinking, text structure, text talk, and questioning the author.             Contact: Jill Jessen-Maneice