Today’s Literacy Headlines

Self-regulated learning, or SRL, is much more than just learning strategies to regulate emotions. It also taps into the often-missing component of teaching and learning, the metacognitive aspects of learning, or learning how to learn for different contexts. SRL is knowing how to learn and being aware of your progression of learning toward specific goals. In the classroom, explicit direct instruction of SRL means the students are aware that they are learning study strategies and how to learn. They learn which strategies are best for different contexts and the reasoning for those benefits. Two quick tips for explicit direct teaching of SRL: explain the usefulness and importance of self-regulated learning skills to students; and support students to identify when and where they can use self-regulated learning skills.

Imagine, if you will, the inner life of a student who’s just returned to the classroom after a year of remote learning. The pandemic has made physical isolation routine, and while being back in school is a welcome change, it’s also disorienting. These challenges, whether related to racial injustice, family struggles, difficulty accessing online learning, or simply the sadness of being separated from peers, weigh heavily on students and educators as they reintegrate into the school environment. For schools, it’s a critically important time to adopt strategies that consider students’ emotional well-being and help them achieve social connectedness and belonging. At the same time, however, schools also need to mitigate pandemic-related interruptions in learning and continue to demonstrate academic growth. School leaders may feel they’re in a bind: Do they focus on social emotional learning or academic rigor? We feel that this is a false choice. It’s not an either/or proposition—it’s both/and. We can’t uncouple social and emotional learning from academics, because they are deeply intertwined.

Outdoor classrooms brought me hope this year—hope that for many of us was very difficult to find. As a first-grade teacher who lives in a rural community, I’ve seen firsthand how transformative teaching in the outdoors can be: It can help build community and breathe new life into instruction, all while keeping teachers and students safe. The school where I teach serves 125 students in grades K–6. Before Covid-19 struck, outdoor learning in my classroom was confined to a few walks outdoors to visit the local pond and the stream running in the woods behind our school. Now, it’s not only an integrated part of our day but also the most engaging part of our instruction—and I’ll continue to rely on it after the pandemic is over. Here’s the path I took to making outdoor learning a key and permanent component of my teaching.

With schools across the nation increasingly eyeing a return to normalcy, federal education officials are further clarifying what that should mean for students with disabilities. In a 23-page question-and-answer document, the U.S. Department of Education is laying out how the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act and other civil rights laws apply as schools return to in-person learning. The guidance addresses schools’ responsibilities to students with disabilities in remote, hybrid and in-person situations, touching on everything from the right to a free appropriate public education to handling children who are unable to wear masks or maintain social distance.

“Oh, that’s one of your students, isn’t it”? Even typing that sentence out, I cringe a little—but I cringe even more when I hear it. As a special education teacher, whose students tend to need more support and supervision, I understand the struggle that comes with working with students who have learning disabilities. Yet when I hear that question from a colleague, it makes me wonder, “Why are we treating them like my students or your students? Why do we not work as a team when the success of all students is ultimately our responsibility?” At the start of this year, I decided to change a few things with one of my co-teachers, and we came up with a few simple ideas that have created very positive impacts in our classroom.

Two-thirds of Philly third graders are behind in reading. Will a new program the District is launching in September change that? The answer may lie in Bethlehem, PA. In the fall of 2016, Bethlehem implemented the Science of Reading, known as Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling (LETRS), a comprehensive program developed by two veteran literacy experts, Louisa Moats and Carol Tolman. And the change was dramatic. By the following June, 88 percent of the district’s kindergarteners were reading at grade level, up from 46 percent when school started in September, and up from 71 percent the prior year. That progress continued over the next several years.

New work from Satoshi Kitamura, Lynne Rae Perkins, Shawn Harris, Bruce Handy, Hyewon Yum, Nikki Grimes, Elizabeth Zunon, Micha Archer, Julie Flett and Vera Brosgol. In the Museum of Everything, when the world feels too big and busy, a girl thinks up imaginary museums where she can look at “little pieces of it, one at a time”: museums of islands, hiding places, shadows. Perkins — a Newbery Medal-winning novelist as well as acclaimed picture book creator — alternates her familiar watercolor art with photographed miniatures made from materials such as sand, stones, twigs, moss, modeling clay and lights. Near the end of the book, the girl notices “the Sky Museum,” which is “already there”: It’s “open all the time” and “different every day”; “usually there are birds, and sometimes airplanes.”

Don’t call it summer school. That has a stigma. It’s not really summer camp either, since math and English will be taught every day. The Cleveland Municipal School District’s “Summer Learning Experience,” an eight-week program launching next month, instead uses a strategy districts across the country are testing to help students rebound after a year of COVID disrupting their education and lives. Schools are avoiding strict academics, betting instead on getting students back to class after a year away with a mix of fun activities and learning. The hope is that a softer tone will rekindle students’ joy for learning not just this summer, but for years to come, helping them recover socially and emotionally, not just academically. In Cleveland, academics and a menu of fun afternoon activities like music, sports, art or neighborhood improvement projects will be braided together.

“Independent reading is not about a number of minutes or the level of the book. It is not a program,” write literacy experts and middle and high school teachers, Kylene Beers and Robert E. Probst in Literacy Today. “It is about creating independent thinkers who think with compassion, logic, and curiosity, and without manipulation from others. They think—and from those thoughts, they become more than they were. They become independent.” Paired with regular guided reading instruction, independent reading should provide students with the opportunity to read widely, exploring high-interest and diverse texts across genres, bringing to the reading their own unique “perceptions, values, and thoughts,” write Beers and Probst. Here are a few ways to help promote what Beers and Probst describe as the sometimes messy, noisy process of independent reading in the classroom.

While teaching during a pandemic has presented extraordinary challenges for all teachers, educators working with the visually impaired have had the especially difficult task of adapting a curriculum based largely on physical interactions—like teaching a student how to read braille by touch or how to walk with a cane—to the two-dimensional environment of online learning. Although technology plays a significant role in many special education programs for the blind and deaf, there’s little precedent for a completely virtual education for the visually impaired, and certainly no rule book.

A new study conducted by researchers at Georgia State University and Istanbul Bilgi University suggests that twins undergo language acquisition at a slightly different rate from their single-birth counterparts. The team of psychologists and linguists found that twins tend to use fewer physical gestures and lag behind single children in terms of language development, findings which could expand our understanding of early language acquisition as we currently know it.

According to the National Institute For Early Childhood Research, nearly half of all 3-year-olds and a third of all 4-year-olds in the United States were not enrolled in preschool in 2019. That’s in large part because many parents can’t afford it. Imagine a future where we changed that. A future where every American child had access to two years of preschool during a critical period of their mental development. How would their lives change? How would society change? If President Biden gets his way, and Congress agrees to spend $200 billion on his proposal for universal preschool, then we may begin to find out. But it turns out, we kind of already know. In fact, a new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research gives us a glimpse of what that world could look like. It adds to a burgeoning amount of high-quality research that shows just how valuable preschool is — and maybe not for the reasons you might think.

The crucial process of learning to read was made even more complicated this year by remote learning and wide-ranging inconsistency in how Chicago schools teach reading. To address some of the gaps in reading and other subjects under remote learning, the district suggested curricular areas that teachers should prioritize, held training on teaching remotely, and told families about the district’s virtual library book system. To assess students, the district pointed teachers to an online tool called Amplify Reading literacy, which relies on teachers listening to students read. They also introduced a district-run assessment system that allows teachers to create their own tests. But those efforts ran up against a decentralized reading education system rooted in an approach that experts criticize and the vastly varied learning environments of students during the pandemic.

Before the pandemic, eighth graders’ reading comprehension declined substantially. Since then, scholars have been trying to figure out why their scores dropped so much between 2017 and 2019 on a highly regarded national test known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress or NAEP. Researchers at the American Institutes for Research, a nonprofit research organization, are digging into whether kids are reading less — perhaps distracted by their digital devices. The emerging answer is that yes, young teens seem to be reading less and enjoying reading less. But the decline in book reading might not be the main culprit in our national comprehension problem. And separate international studies of 15-year-olds and fourth graders indicate that eighth grade reading habits aren’t telling the whole story.

In order to respond to the intense challenges facing MLLs, schools across the nation, including teachers, deans, principals, and librarians, have implemented targeted intervention, innovative tech approaches, and social-emotional support, while enlisting parental cooperation. For starters, making sure students know how to log on remotely has been vital. For many MLLs’ families, parents may not possess the lingual or digital literacy to follow school instructions, log children on to platforms, fill out forms, or perform other administrative functions, like converting a document to a PDF for a homework submission. To reach out to families, the New York City Department of Education has partnered with the Child Mind Institute to run family workshops on social-emotional topics. Origins will be participating with workshops in English, Russian, and Arabic. The school also paired each student with an older student fluent in their language, as well as a teacher, to help them log on to the weekly virtual meetings via Google Meet.

It’s been a year since teachers were handed an unprecedented request: educate students in entirely new ways amid the backdrop of a pandemic. In this comic series, we’ll illustrate one educator’s story each week from now until the end of the school year. Episode 8: Daven Oglesby, a special education teacher for kindergartners to fourth-graders in Nashville, Tenn., explains what a typical day in the pandemic is like for his atypical classroom.