This article provides an inside look at two classrooms where focused assessment and tailored instruction are key to differentiation.

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Since 2000, there has been a steady decline in the reading comprehension performance on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) (OECD, 2017) for Icelandic adolescents (Directorate of Education, 2017; Ólafsdóttir & Sigurðsson, 2017). No participating country has demonstrated a sharper drop in mean scores on this measurement. Icelandic educators are concerned that the large number of adolescents who demonstrate poor performance are not mastering advanced Icelandic vocabulary, as that is a key variable that explains their low achievement (Birgisdóttir, 2016). Consistently, Icelandic vocabulary has emerged as a strong influencing factor on the rate of growth in reading comprehension over the middle school years among pupils with Icelandic as a first and as a second language (Ólafsdóttir, Birgisdóttir, Ragnarsdóttir, & Skúlason, 2016). Our goal was to provide high school pupils opportunities to enrich their academic vocabularies. Few research projects have focused on high school (versus younger) students' learning of vocabulary. We hope that the global context of this research will be of interest to many practitioners and scholars. This project, a collaboration among teachers and teacher educators, was initiated by Icelandic educators. The focus was to advance the pedagogy of high school teachers with the aim of advancing the vocabulary and reading comprehension of their students. We offered specific literacy professional development with Icelandic teachers from multiple disciplines. Research on effective professional development (PD) for teachers of reading (Laster & Finkelstein, 2016; Sailors, 2009) framed this project.

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