Today’s Literacy Headlines

When it comes to teaching children to read, Mississippi is a bright spot, one of three states whose gains in reading achievement put their schools ahead of where they were before the pandemic. California is one of ten states where reading scores continue to fall. California policymakers may be angered by the comparison, but they can’t ignore or dismiss the data. There are three things they could learn from Mississippi’s progress.

People with autism often face a stigma for stimming — a repetitive behavior to regulate emotions that can sometimes look like someone flapping their hands or wiggling their fingers. The children’s book “Flap Your Hands: A Celebration of Stimming” presents an opposing narrative; stimming is natural and wonderful, taking families through a colorful journey of acceptance and joy. Here & Now’s Deepa Fernandes speaks with author and illustrator Steve Asbell.

The Blueberry Award is the nation’s most prominent award for those children’s books produced in a given year that strengthen kids’ connections with nature and fosters action for the planet, created by the Evanston Public Library. In addition to the winners list, you can find a slew of resources for parents (including Best Nature Board Books of 2023, The 2023 Blueberry Educators Resources Booklist and Great Adult Books selected by the 2023 Blueberry Committee).

Simple, effective exercises can help elementary students develop the foundational writing skills they need for their academic journey. The 5 strategies include: handwriting in the early grades, dictated sentences, writing to read, reading to write, and writing about what they are learning and why it matters.

Gertrude Chandler Warner’s “The Boxcar Children,” celebrating its 100th year, depicts the delights of concocting scrumptious meals. It’s an unassuming yet captivating book, depicting a sort of fantasy world with no (or very few) adults, a secret hideaway and the delights of junior domesticity — playing “house” and concocting scrumptious meals. It’s like reading about a group of kids who’ve gone camping without counselors.

Experts say new curriculum, better instruction and tutoring are making a difference, but fall results from Amplify show recovery is slowing. The report recommends schools universally screen students for reading difficulties like dyslexia, assign staff to spend extra time with students who haven’t mastered foundational skills and ensure all teachers get training in research-backed methods.

An educator with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder shares simple strategies for supporting students with this learning difference. Before applying a potentially harmful label to a student, analyze the specific behavior(s) the student displays. Do they avoid starting tasks? Is it mostly in one subject (writing is a struggle for more than half of students with ADHD)? Do they start tasks but get easily frustrated and give up, or begin causing distractions? How long has the behavior been going on—weeks? months? years? Ask a lot of questions, and leave the emotion out of it. Be open to the possibility that there is more going on than you might think.

Is an average of 266 planning minutes per week what teachers might consider a good or sufficient amount? Not likely. At the very least, the current average adds up to an amount of planning time that hasn’t changed much over the past 10 years, according to data collected by the National Council on Teacher Quality. The same report found that teachers have consistently identified more planning and collaboration time as improvements to the job that would entice them to stay.

ReachWell and similar translation apps have become more common, and for some teachers, they’ve become crucial as educators work to communicate with the rising number of families that don’t speak English. The apps often allow the communications between parents and teachers to feel personal. Some teachers say it has helped parents open up about issues their child or family is having, which then helps teachers better engage with students.

The trailer at Colfax Elementary is one of Denver Public Schools’ six “community hubs,” and the English language classes are among the most popular offerings. Launched in 2022 by Superintendent Alex Marrero, the community hubs were meant to take a two-generation approach to improving students’ lives by helping both children and parents with everything from food and clothing to financial counseling and mobile medical appointments. Now, as more than 3,500 migrant students have enrolled in DPS since the beginning of the school year, the hubs are increasingly serving their families as they build new lives in Denver. 

Gen Zers, born between 1997 and 2012, spend a lot of time online, consuming and creating digital content. Ninety-two percent check social media daily. But they still like print, and they still like to go to the library, according to a survey of Gen Z and Millennial public library use and media consumption released by the American Library Association last fall. With Gen Z now making up a substantial portion of today’s college students, their attitudes toward libraries have implications for higher education.

A growing chorus of education researchers, pundits and “science of reading” advocates are calling for young children to be taught more about the world around them. It’s an indirect way of teaching reading comprehension. The theory is that what we grasp from what we read depends on whether we can hook it to concepts and topics that we already know. Natalie Wexler’s 2019 best-selling book, The Knowledge Gap, championed knowledge-building curricula and more schools around the country, from Baltimore to Michigan to Colorado, are adopting these content-filled lesson plans to teach geography, astronomy and even art history. 

In the world of K-12 education, school library leaders are uniquely positioned to foster a culture of reading, learning, and curiosity. However, many school library programs are overlooked or underappreciated. With the busy nature of the school environment and the digital age’s distractions, capturing and sustaining the attention and engagement of students and staff is an ongoing challenge. Leveraging “social proofs” can significantly enhance the impact of school libraries by encouraging participation and support from the school community. 

A program in Charlotte, N.C., ourBRIDGE for Kids, is working to reduce chronic absenteeism in a district with the state’s largest proportion of English language learners. In addition to running its afterschool program, staffers and volunteers started working with families to address the issues that prevented kids from logging into class online or showing up to school buildings. The school district noticed the impact: While other students in Charlotte were becoming chronically absent, children in ourBRIDGE were staying connected to school.  

Britain’s youngest code-breakers, brought to life in a new nonfiction book by Candace Fleming, were normal teenagers: playing pranks, attending dances. “This is the story of a handful of young women — teenagers really — who left their childhoods behind and walked into the unknown,” Candace Fleming writes in “The Enigma Girls,” her beguiling new account of their contributions. “For most of their lives, they never breathed a word about their war experiences.”

In Wisconsin, certified early care providers and early childhood educators are required to complete annual continuing education through the Wisconsin Registry. For many, it can be a challenge to find budget-friendly courses that fit into their schedules. To help bridge the gap between accessibility and high-quality professional learning, PBS Wisconsin Education offers free PBS KIDS self-paced learning courses. 

When students are stuck, breaking the brainstorming stage down into separate steps can help them get started writing. Writing requires many skills to work together at the same time: idea generation, hand strength and stamina, letter formation, spelling, sentence composition, grammar, editing, proofreading, and so forth. If any of those skills is weak, it makes writing significantly harder.

When a student reads a text several times, it’s called repeated reading. Repeated reading of short texts, sentences, and letter names or sounds can increase and assess fluency. Teachers can empower students by using repeated reading as an opportunity to offer feedback, act on the feedback, and chart their improvement. Below are some ideas I’ve used that new teachers may find helpful.

I don’t want to alarm you but 2024? A shockingly SHOCKINGLY strong year for poetry. I’ve read the entries and it’s just astounding. Folks are coming up with all kinds of innovative verse for young people in myriad ways. I mean, just take haiku alone! In 2024 we’re seeing books like Haiku, Ew! by Lynn Brunelle, illustrated by Julia Patton. Today, we’re talking with Lynn about poetry, the appeal of the gross and disgusting, and why she gets my 2024 Backmatter of the Year Award.

In her recent book, Partnering with Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Families in Special Education, Kristin Vogel-Campbell notes the difficulties that parents of students with disabilities face when there is a language barrier. Vogel-Campbell, a 20-year veteran of special education, has seen a higher level of agency, access and knowledge of the special education system among white and English-speaking parents of children with disabilities. Families that don’t fall into these identities often lack the social and cultural capital to effectively advocate for their children within a bureaucratic system. 

In Weymouth Public Schools, we’ve tapped state funds to help fund a new English Language Arts curriculum aligned with the best research, train teachers and hire literacy coaches, as well as pay a classroom teacher a stipend to work across all grade levels providing additional reading instruction to colleagues. Just as important, we ensured that the district’s principals, and I, also got science of reading instruction. Training leaders alongside teachers is somewhat uncommon. But it shouldn’t be. 

Tennessee’s top education policy board is urging Gov. Bill Lee and state lawmakers to refocus efforts to identify and help struggling readers on students in lower grades — as early as kindergarten — rather than waiting until third or fourth grade to intervene. In a rare action, the state Board of Education unanimously approved a resolution Monday asking elected officials to revisit the state’s 2021 literacy law, which targeted third and fourth graders and strengthened retention rules for students who score poorly on state tests.

Since so much of what students read is presented onscreen, it’s important to ensure that they slow down and really engage with the content. Slowing down is a skill that needs to be explicitly taught. For starters, simply pausing to highlight a passage or a word requires students to slow down and identify a key piece of information. It can also counteract readers’ tendency to overestimate how well they understood something that they quickly read on a screen. Annotating goes a step further to nudge students toward making meaning of what they read. 

A dance performance of “The Other Side” and a musical adaptation of “Show Way” head to the Brooklyn stage for young audiences. Jacqueline Woodson has always seen her books while she writes them, visualizing what the characters look like, how they might speak and move. “I imagine them line by line,” she said during a recent phone interview. “I see the pictures.” A prolific author of books for young people (and in later years, for adults), Woodson has won nearly every award possible for a children’s author: the Coretta Scott King award, a National Book award, many Newbery medals, a MacArthur grant. A few of those books have been staged, filmed or set to music. 

Rewarding good attendance, analyzing data and individualizing interventions are strategies being used to improve attendance, say administrators. Progress is mostly thanks to a focus on strengthening relationships with families and students through a variety of activities, a willingness to experiment, finding the best procedures to organize attendance data, collaborating with partners, and seeking out resources from organizations like Attendance Works.

There are a lot of great ways to use tech in the classroom, but challenging students to sometimes work without it has benefits for creativity, critical thinking, and engagement. Here are 6 ways to unplug, starting with “genius hour.”

An experienced educator offers practical tips to help English language learning specialists work effectively with classroom teachers. First, follow along with the classroom teacher’s plans until you develop a relationship that supports a balanced exchange of ideas. Other tips include: be flexible, identify daily goals, work one-on-one, and recognize TESOL pedagogy.

California could become the next state to make the shift toward a mandated science of reading approach. Dr. Wolf, the UCLA cognitive neuroscientist, has been urging people to think of it as more than just phonics. Done correctly, she says, the teaching method creates deep readers capable of not only decoding words but also mastering their meaning and usage.

School-community relationships can help support creative, relevant instruction and combat troubling trends in education such as academic disengagement, increased student absenteeism, declining test scores, and high teacher turnover rates. These relationships can boost student outcomes, invigorate instruction, and benefit the entire community. CommunityShare is an interesting nonprofit organization that has found a way to promote vibrant educational experiences by connecting students and educators to the skills, knowledge, and life experiences of community members.

Students in preschool through second grade can benefit from drawing or writing to explore their thoughts and feelings. This isn’t handwriting practice; it’s personal communication with a purpose. The process empowers our youngest authors with a voice and a platform to be heard using their strengths in a creative, impactful way. 

Deprioritizing science and other topics can be counterproductive to raising student-achievement test scores in reading and math in the long run, said Christine Royce, a professor of science education at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania. Studies have demonstrated that having a broader wealth of general background knowledge is linked to better reading-comprehension abilities. It’s easier for a reader to understand a book or an article if they already have some grounding in what it’s about. “Allowing students to explore, and engage, and investigate is going to give them a lot of prior experiences that they can connect to reading,” Royce said.

Here’s what happened when a city tried to rethink a “system of great schools” for every student. Examination of this period in Newark will raise critical questions about what policymakers and community leaders at all levels should do to foster a system holistic and flexible enough that it would address the needs of all children, especially those our current systems of education and social service have historically and consistently failed the most. I will outline four steps policymakers can take to catalyze change and center the students and families who face the most challenges.

There are three things Ca;ifornia policymakers could learn from Mississippi’s progress: First, Mississippi’s leaders, from governors to district superintendents, have articulated a common mission to improve reading achievement. Second, Mississippi has placed reading curriculum at the center of its reform efforts. Third, Mississippi has worked to strengthen the professional expertise of teachers. 

Teacher-led AI could provide every student with the individualized, explicit, structured, sequential instruction and expertise that is presently only available to the privileged few who can afford independent schools like mine. For public schools with scant resources, a 30-to-1 student-to-teacher ratio might finally make sense when every student is given an individualized, responsive curriculum powered by their teachers and AI.

Controversies are emerging about an important but less understood aspect of learning to read: phonemic awareness. Many schools have purchased scripted oral phonemic awareness lessons that do not include the visual display of letters. The oral lessons are popular because they are easy to teach and fun for students. And that’s the source of the current debate. Should kids in kindergarten or first grade be spending so much time on sounds without understanding how those sounds correspond to letters? A new meta-analysis confirms that the answer is no.

Dozens of states have passed new laws or launched initiatives to mandate that schools adopt an evidence-based approach to reading instruction. But on their own they won’t lead automatically to changes in the classroom, experts say. Shifting practice relies on the difficult, decidedly unglamorous work of implementation—ensuring that schools have a roadmap for enacting change and the resources to make it happen. Multifaceted approaches to reading improvement: offering new training, guiding curriculum selection and adoption, and collaborating with colleges and universities.

In “Ferris,” a girl and her grandmother are visited by a friendly ghost; in Erin Entrada Kelly’s “The First State of Being,” a boy is visited by a time traveler.

As leaders shared lessons they’ve learned, CCSSO released a state-by-state analysis of science of reading legislation and implementation efforts. States are making progress on science of reading initiatives, resulting in better access to high-quality literacy instructional materials, expanded professional development and dedicated funding streams to help students read at grade level or better. Success will require multiple years of sustained efforts, consistent monitoring to evaluate progress toward goals, and the struggle to modify other priorities to support states’ literacy goals. 

At the beginning of the 2023-24 school year, educators in the Portage schools outside of Kalamazoo, Mich., decided to overhaul how they taught reading comprehension. Instead of focusing on teaching skills and strategies—such as finding the main idea of a passage, or comparing and contrasting characters—they would structure units around topics in science, social studies, and world cultures. The idea would be to systematically build students’ knowledge of the world, ideally making it easier for them to make connections to new texts and write about what they knew. This “knowledge-building” approach to English/language arts instruction is gaining ground in the field, buoyed by research that shows a connection between students’ general background knowledge and their reading comprehension ability.

In Fatima Belouahi’s classroom in Copenhagen, Denmark, she uses a popular small group activity called role reading to help scaffold her ninth graders’ comprehension of challenging texts. Students are placed in groups of three, then assigned a task to do as they work through the material: One student reads aloud, another writes a summary, and a third comes up with a title for the paragraph. With this approach, students must demonstrate their understanding as they go, which helps bolster their grasp of the text — and the likelihood of getting lost goes down.

As a child, Blanca Rubio was given coloring books rather than reading lessons, because she didn’t speak English fluently. Now, she is spearheading an effort to require California school districts to teach all the basic skills needed for children to learn to read, based on research. How will reading instruction change if a new bill authored by Rubio becomes law? What obstacles might it face?

To address multi- or bilingual educator shortages, the U.S. Department of Education proposed the National Professional Development Program, which would prioritize grants to higher education institutions —  alongside partnering districts and state agencies — with professional development programs geared toward filling these needs. As often happens, some schools and colleges are ahead of the game while others are trying to catch up.

The effort in New York is an anomaly for even attempting to incorporate children younger than 5 in a meaningful way, said Susan B. Neuman, a professor of childhood education and literacy development at the Steinhardt School at New York University. “For the most part, early childhood education and literacy reform are seen as very separate entities, and it’s very discouraging to me, frankly,” Neuman said. In prekindergarten and at the start of kindergarten, the emphasis should be on encouraging kids to talk and develop their oral language skills, engaging teachers in responsive talking and listening to children and helping kids recognize letters and begin to understand the relationships between letters and sounds. 

Adding icons to a rubric can help early elementary students as they learn how to use tech tools in the classroom. “Adding these icons was essential—it linked what my students needed to navigate these digital learning environments to what they needed to do to demonstrate understanding of the instructional content shared.” This is a free strategy. You simply create a table with icons that students need to navigate the digital learning environment on the left with the criteria for success on the right.

School librarian Holly Whitt and her third grade classroom teacher colleague Lori Alexander had tried everything to get their students at Walnut Grove Elementary School in New Market, AL, to read more. Battle of the Books. Reading challenges. Rewards of pizza and ice cream. But nothing succeeded in sparking the students’ interest in reading or bettering their reading comprehension. And reading wasn’t the only struggle. “Our kids are really good at telling stories,” says Whitt. “They talk and tell stories all day long. But if you put a piece of paper in front of them, and you ask them to write a story for you, or write about something they learned about in class, they freeze, and they can’t do it. They won’t write more than a sentence or two.”

What sets these districts apart? Both have been influenced by the science of reading and created consistency across all aspects of teaching and learning. That is, they use high-quality curricula well matched to student assessments, and all professional learning trains teachers in how to use both well. Research by RAND finds this degree of consistency is not common in most states and districts. A large majority of teachers do not work in coherent systems.  

Focusing on activities such as summarizing, analyzing textual features, and paraphrasing drives deeper reading comprehension. Literacy expert Timothy Shanahan says that finding the main idea isn’t a problem in-and-of itself — teachers can continue to ask students to do that — but focusing too narrowly on the main idea limits the discussion of other critical textual features, like broader issues of narrative structure, information hierarchy, tone, and the use of figurative language.

Education Week consulted four teachers and two child-development experts on when K-12 students should start using AI-powered tech and for what purposes. They all agree on this central fact: There is no avoiding AI. Whether they are aware of it or not, students are already interacting with AI in their daily lives when they scroll on TikTok, ask a smart speaker a question, or use an adaptive-testing program in class. All this makes it essential that students learn about AI in school, experts say. But when, and how, exactly? We’ve got answers.

In Katherine Marsh’s new novel, the girl with the snaky curls loses neither her head nor her wits. Ava is a seventh grader coping with wild brown curls; an older brother, named Jaxon, who always seems to outshine her; childhood friends turned mean girls; and flares of anger her mother urges her to control. When a classmate pushes her too far, the intensity of Ava’s rage literally freezes the boy in place and sets in motion an unexpected journey for Ava and Jax.

Young people are changing up the ways they prepare for college, career, and the uncertainties of adult life. This collection explores through students’ eyes what’s possible when they get deeply involved in their learning and help shape their school experiences. Educators, parents, and community members in cities across the country also share why they’re reimagining the future of education.

For generations, school facilities have been designed for the average student, leaving neurodiverse individuals to struggle in environments that don’t meet their needs. Recently, however, the growing awareness of neurodiversity has started to shift the school design narrative for students with unique learning styles. Using the built environment to promote equity in the classroom starts with understanding each student’s needs, whether in the classroom or on the playground.

After years of disappointing results, the school district has turned to a method based on phonics that is said to show promise. One key problem the program addresses is a prior weakness in kindergarten through second grade instruction. Schools were so focused on state tests, which begin in third grade, there was no systematic way to make sure younger children acquired foundational skills.

By turns raw, thrilling and eye-opening, Joy Hakim’s writing offers young people a look at history that they rarely get between the covers of mass-produced textbooks. Her most well-known work, a 10-volume history of the United States that began appearing in the early 1990s, remains in print. Her newest series on biology debuted in September, continuing her tradition of wrestling with complicated ideas and difficult historical and scientific questions. 

A dozen college students are saying the word “pat” and jotting down notes about the sounds being made. “Puh - AH - tt.” Pay attention to the shapes your mouths make as you pronounce the word, instructs Robin Fuxa, their education professor at Oklahoma State University. She asks her students if they can feel the way the words sound as they speak. Fuxa is trying to get her students to pay attention to phonics, the reading method that links a sound to a letter. Extensive research has shown phonics is an effective way to teach kids to read.

While Indiana has made progress in civics education through new standards requiring a semester of civics in sixth grade, advocates say there’s still work to be done, especially as the state faces a “concerning” drop in voter participation, according to one report. House Bill 1137 and Senate Bill 211 would each establish a civics seal to recognize students, teachers, and schools for excellence in civics education — which could look like offering civics-minded lessons and field trips to students. The bills also seek to increase access to civics material in the earliest grades as part of the state’s push to provide young students with high-quality reading curriculum. And by introducing basic concepts of citizenship and fairness early, advocates hope to build a foundation for improved civic engagement later in life.

Back in 2000, the concentration of English learners was strongest in the Southwest and other Western states, where nearly one-in-four California students was classified as an English learner. By 2020, the English learner populations had shifted away from just border states and major cities. Delaware had the largest increase of any state in its proportion of English learners, growing from 1.8 percent to 10.7 percent over the 20-year period. The three states that lost the highest percentage of English learners were California, Arizona and New Mexico — though the number of English learners they serve is by no means small.

A reading block in an elementary school classroom can feel like a carefully choreographed 120-minute dance. Time is a finite resource, and it often falls to teachers to make decisions about how much instructional time to devote to the many interrelated components of reading. What’s the dosage of each that will ensure kids get it? A new study offers insight into that question for one key component of early reading development: phonemic awareness. It finds, in essence, that you can have too much of a good thing.

In “Something About the Sky,” the National Book Award-winning marine biologist brings her signature sense of wonder to the science of clouds in a picture book illustrated by Nikki McClure.