Today’s Literacy Headlines

Many immigrants travel to new lands in hopes of a better life, but once they arrive they often feel small. Two new picture books show that the ways in which immigrants and people of color make themselves small — or are forced to minimize themselves — are myriad.

Author Meg Medina will be the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature for 2023-24, the Library of Congress (LOC) and Every Child a Reader announced. The 2019 Newbery Medal winner for Merci Suárez Changes Gears is Cuban-American and will become the first author of Latina heritage to serve in the role. Her platform will be “Cuéntame!: Let’s talk books,” an idea inspired by the Spanish phrase that friends and families use when catching up with one another. The goal is to encourage connection through books that offer mirrors of the readers’ lives as well as windows into new worlds and experiences.

Parents are influential in helping kids navigate the twists and turns that lead to literacy. I offer five teaching tenets to carry with you. Don’t worry, there are no scripted sequences, rigid rules, or worksheets forthcoming. These are principles any parent can remember and apply with ease during long, busy days with young children. Some of the five you may know instinctually. Others may have never crossed your mind. All deserve to be hallmarks of the way we approach raising readers.

At Kegonsa Elementary School, teachers try to demystify how different styles of writing are structured, down to the sentence level. They work with students on mastering the building blocks of paragraphs and essays, and they introduce tools students use to craft their own writing. All the while, kids are writing about the texts that they’re reading—linking together these two core components of English/language arts instruction. These components are hallmarks of a specific approach to writing instruction, one that favors explicit instruction and lots of modeling.

As literacy experts strongly suggest, encoding is often underrepresented in early literacy instruction, even in programs that claim to be steeped in evidence-based practices. Education Week spoke to literacy experts, researchers, and educators to find out why and what students miss when their exposure to encoding is irregular or minimal. We also culled strategies from structured-literacy advocates on how to embed encoding into daily classroom instruction.

A recent book provides valuable information about what kinds of teaching strategies are likely to be effective, but many teachers will need more explicit guidance in how and when to implement them. The book, whose lead authors are Bryan Goodwin and Kristin Rouleau, is called The New Classroom Instruction That Works: The Best Research-Based Strategies for Increasing Student Achievement. As the title suggests, its purpose is to inform teachers about research on education and enable them to apply it in their classrooms.

A new study shows that adding parent support programs to regular well check visits at pediatricians’ offices can improve the health and well-being of children and their parents. The program Smart Beginnings “significantly promoted” parents engaging in cognitively stimulating activities with their children, leading to an increase in talking to children, reading with children and the use of rich language — deliberately exposing children to a broad vocabulary throughout their daily activities.

This is the final guest post by Jason Reynolds, who is concluding his third term as the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. SEE YOU SOON. This is not the same as, See you later. I repeat, this is not the same as, See you later. “See you later” lacks urgency. It lacks seriousness and commitment. But my time as your National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature was certainly very serious to me and I was relentlessly committed. So to walk away from it, to bow out with a cavalier, See you later, is like throwing my hand up and waving goodbye while already turned away. Instead, I’ll say, See you soon. Because soon implies effort. That I’ll work to still be a light, partially to shine on the next ambassador, and always to shine on you.

Colorado State University’s teacher preparation program won the state’s seal of approval Wednesday and a nod to recent changes in how the university trains future educators to teach young students how to read. The decision is the latest development in an ongoing state effort to hold Colorado’s teacher preparation programs accountable for how they train prospective teachers on reading instruction.

The education community has been abuzz with the rise of ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence tool that can write anything with just a simple prompt. Most of the conversation has been centered on the extent to which students will use the chat bot—but ChatGPT could also fundamentally change the nature of teachers’ jobs. So far, teachers have used—or considered using—the chat bot to plan lessons, put together rubrics, offer students feedback on assignments, respond to parent emails, and write letters of recommendation, among other tasks. While some educators worry about the implications of automating these parts of teaching, others say that the tool can save them hours of work, freeing up time for student interactions or their personal life.

Murfreesboro City Schools prioritized high quality curriculum and professional learning. Over this past year, we’ve focused heavily on deepening our understanding around foundational skills instruction. The Tennessee Department of Education has led a statewide effort to provide all teachers with sounds-first instruction aligned with the science of reading, and 99% of our district’s primary teachers and academic interventionists have completed this training.

Students in New Mexico’s Title I schools, including those in tribally controlled areas, will have access to 1:1 online tutoring services through a nearly $3.3 million investment funded with federal COVID-19 Governor’s Emergency Education Relief funds. Up to 20 hours of free and virtual tutoring services are available to students in grades pre-K through 8.

Elementary students need rich content knowledge to become better readers and to be able to engage in project-based learning (PBL). Within rigorous PBL, students need content knowledge development to effectively learn how to read, write, and talk. Without surface-level knowledge, students are unable to access deep and transfer learning within and across subjects. Studies have shown that skills don’t transfer without a rich content basis in which these skills can link.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded a five-year $20 million grant to the University of Buffalo for the establishment of an artificial intelligence (AI) institute that will focus on the speech-language pathology needs of young children. The new AI Institute for Exceptional Education will aim to develop advanced AI technologies leading to new speech-language pathology assessments, interventions and services.

The skill sets of visual thinkers are essential to finding real-world solutions to society’s many problems. I am often invited to give talks at corporations and government agencies, and the first thing I tell managers is that they need a neurodiverse work force. Complementary skills are the key to successful teams. We need the people who can build our trains and planes and internet, and the people who can make them run. Studies have shown that diverse teams will outperform homogeneous teams.

For the past 25 years, U.S. policy has urged schools to keep students with disabilities in the same classrooms with their general education peers unless severe disabilities prevent it. But a recent international analysis of all the available research on special education inclusion found inconsistent results. Some children thrived while others did very badly in regular classrooms. Overall, students didn’t benefit academically, psychologically or socially from the practice. Analysis unable to disentangle which students benefit from being taught alongside general education peers.

Debbie Pettid and Pete Cowdin, owners of the now-closed children’s bookstore Reading Reptile, set out to create a building and experience unlike any other in the world. A fully immersive space celebrating picture books by allowing kids to physically enter into them. Not a standard museum. Not an exploratorium. An “Explor-a-Storium.” The idea is that a child will enter “an immersive literary experience, both preserving and celebrating children’s literature,” says author Jon Scieszka, who serves on the governing board.

Economics lessons are all around us – at the grocery store, in the library, in the way you give gifts. And they’re even in… picture books! To understand how children’s literature like the Frog and Toad books and Where the Sidewalk Ends can foster future economists, host Erika Beras joined a third grade class as a guest reader. She and her eight and nine-year old students-for-the-day explored concepts like credible commitment, exponential growth bias, and the labor market matching process through a range of childrens’ classics.

Missouri education leaders are pushing for a big change in the way children are taught to read. They’re leaning into something called the science of reading, a blanket term for research-backed teaching methods that have been gaining in popularity in recent years. Multiple new laws are part of this push, including one that takes effect this week. At the same time, the state is in the middle of an effort to train elementary English teachers to completely rethink their approach in the classroom.

Endpapers — the pages fixed to the insides of a book’s front and back covers — are an undersung glory of contemporary children’s publishing. What illustrator or designer worthy of the name can resist such a pair of prominent blank pages? Thus a once purely decorative form is now full of wit, surprise, even feeling. Here is a selection of recent favorites.

Picture books can help teach concepts and skills across grade levels and subject areas. Browse these diverse picture books for preschool through grade 3, including three nonfiction selections — you’ll find a brief summary as well as a few suggestions for how you might use the book in your classroom.

Community organization offers volunteer mentors in East St. Louis, neighboring districts the opportunity to become full-time, paid classroom aides.

As we enter into a new year, we remember those lost to us in 2022. So many of these creators’ books touched the minds and hearts of children everywhere. Their works will outlive us all. We celebrate their lives and works.

It’s been a big year for reading instruction. States have passed—or begun enacting—laws requiring evidence-based teaching for early learners. Hundreds of thousands of teachers have gone through new training. A popular curriculum program was re-released with changes designed to bring it more in line with reading research, to mixed reviews. These shifts all stem from the movement around the “science of reading”—an effort to align practice with methods that research shows are most effective for students. Read on for a guide to some of the biggest moments this year.

Cartoonist and children’s book author Jerry Craft published the Newbery award-winning graphic novel New Kid in 2019. New Kid also won the Coretta Scott King Author Award and the Kirkus Prize. New Kid focuses on the experience of being Black and the “new kid” at a predominantly white school. It follows Jordan, a seventh grader and aspiring artist from Washington Heights, New York. Jordan’s parents send him to a private school to invest in his academic future. As he navigates the differing environments in his neighborhood and his new school, he attempts to stay true to himself. The book has been challenged in some school districts including in Texas and Pennsylvania, citing the teaching of critical race theory.

Pre-K teachers Jairia Cathey and Lisa Patterson are part of a mobilization across Memphis-Shelby County Schools to get early childhood learning in the district back on track. The effort is focused on the classroom, but it’s also counting on community groups, advertising, family engagement specialists, and multiple offices within district headquarters, with the goal of getting more students enrolled in early childhood programs and making sure they are kindergarten-ready. The bigger objective: Containing the pandemic’s long-term impact on children and their education in Tennessee’s largest school district, where most students are Black and come from low-income families who were hit hardest by COVID-19.

In children’s publishing, the term “list book” refers to an expository literature title with a list text structure. The book’s main idea is presented at the beginning of the book, and then each subsequent spread offers one or more examples that support that idea. In many cases, a list book has a concluding spread that links back to the opening or offers a fun twist on the topic, leaving readers with a sense of satisfaction. A list text structure works well for books that focus on plant or animal characteristics, adaptations, or behaviors, but it can also be the perfect choice for some social studies topics.

For much of his life, Roderick, a high school junior, did not enjoy reading. As a boy, he trudged through picture books that his mother encouraged him to read. As a teenager, he has sometimes wrestled with complex texts at school. But recently, he said, he has made strides, in part because of an unusual and sweeping high school literacy curriculum in Memphis. The program focuses on expanding vocabulary and giving teenagers reading strategies — such as decoding words — that build upon fundamentals taught in elementary school. The curriculum is embedded not just in English, but also in math, science and social studies.

For years, the Fairfax County NAACP’s small education committee devoted itself mostly to fights over Confederate school names and acts of racism against individual students. By 2021, it had committed to its most ambitious goal yet: overhauling the way Fairfax County Public Schools teaches students to read and supports struggling readers. The gap in reading pass rates between Black and White students was nearly 20 percentage points — a discrepancy that has persisted since the district first made “minority achievement” a priority in 1984.

The federal spending package for fiscal 2023, passed this week by both houses of Congress, boasts increases in funding for high-need schools, students with disabilities, school meals, and civics education. But federal investment in many cases still falls well short of what schools and their supporters say they need. Federal spending on special education, through the Individuals With Disabilities in Education Act, rose from $13 billion to $15.5 billion. And federal funds to support English- learners will grow from $802 million to $890 million.

Jennifer Piper, a longtime home-based child care provider in Loveland, is brimming with questions about how Colorado’s new universal preschool program will work when it launches next fall. She recently sent a bulleted list of 14 questions to local officials, including basic ones about teacher qualification and curriculum requirements. The state needs to win over providers like Piper to meet its ambitious goal of quickly building a preschool program capable of serving every 4-year-old in the state as well as some 3-year-olds.

In most children’s books, old people exist only in counterpoint to young ones. A twinkly-eyed grandma dispenses wisdom and soup. A grandfather shows up specifically to die, thereby offering character-building insights into grief and loss. So it’s refreshing to read a young adult graphic novel and a picture book that focus squarely on the old folks themselves.

In Boston and countless other communities, Black and Latino families have a much harder time than their white peers accessing two key tools to literacy: an instructor trained in how best to teach struggling readers the connections between letters and sounds, or a private school focused on children with language disabilities. Nationally, these teachers and schools are scarce and coveted commodities, generally accessible only to those with time, money and experience navigating complicated, sometimes intransigent bureaucracies. In recent years, some dyslexia activists across the country have joined forces with Black and Latino leaders distraught over unequal access—jointly positioning “the right to read” as a revived civil rights movement.

Providing effective learning recovery requires a mix of instructional and managerial leadership—whether it’s adding a new tutoring program or adjusting the pacing of the curriculum—and some of it is brand new terrain for principals. But some districts and principals have found ways to carve out dedicated time on school days to help students recoup learning—or keep them from falling further behind. Here are ideas from three of them.

Boston is investing in an ambitious new initiative that promises every Boston Public School access to a school library program by 2026. It’s a major turnaround for the city, and a rare bright spot at a time when districts around the country are slashing library budgets and hemorrhaging staff. This year, BPS will see 25 new libraries along with 30 new librarians, with funding to ensure an opening day collection of new culturally sustaining books.

Will artificial intelligence, operating via “bots” and other non-human intermediaries, replace English composition and the need to teach and learn it? Why churn through those fussy, pesky precincts like grammar and spelling, especially when other technologies can fix it all up? Why take up good school time with this stuff, particularly considering how labor intensive it is for teachers and how irksome for many of their pupils? To me, three reasons are pretty compelling. First, writing helps you think better, more clearly, more cogently.

There are many ways schools can ensure a smooth transition for kindergartners and their families, experts say. That’s especially important for families whose children did not attend preschool or who are hesitant about enrolling their youngsters in kindergarten, perhaps due to fears over COVID-19, said Patricia Lozano, executive director of Early Edge California, which aims to expand high-quality early learning programs. The following six strategies can help smooth those transitions and set up kindergartners for the best results.

I reached out to a group of literacy experts and advocates to ask them what parents most need to know about early literacy given the national debate over how best to teach reading. What should parents do, especially if they notice their child is falling behind? I asked them all to answer this one question: If you could ensure that every parent in California knows one thing about how their child is being taught to read or what to look out for, what would it be? Here is their advice.

“People with learning differences are human,” wrote Deanna White, a neurodiversity advocate and parent learning coach in response to a question we posed on LinkedIn. “Unique individuals and wonderful humans that are better defined by their strengths. So stop focusing on the weakness.” We invited our social media followers across Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter to weigh in on the most effective way schools can better support students with learning differences. Responses ranged from shifting educators’ mindset—like highlighting student strengths—to more far-reaching changes that would require schoolwide or district support.

We can use rubrics before, during, and after a learning experience. When we utilize this common classroom tool more effectively and more extensively, the metacognitive strategy of planning, monitoring, and evaluating will become embedded in the learning process.

California’s efforts to help children with dyslexia come amid a national push to change how reading is being taught to all children, especially to the youngest learners. The efforts have repeatedly stalled over the past few years because of deep disagreements over the best way to teach reading. The California Teachers Association has been one of the strongest opponents of dyslexia screening, saying children learn to read at their own pace and flagging potential learning disorders could railroad some students, especially English learners, unnecessarily into special education.

Contentious rhetoric from a minority of people has put educators and experts on the defense about the long-established benefits of social-emotional learning. After months of political football on the topic, and with heightened national concern about student well-being and learning loss, it’s time to get back to the discussion about what states, districts and schools should do to ensure students are developing the competencies necessary to promote learning and development. Here are four actionable steps we believe are critical to ensuring efforts to implement SEL in schools are done with maximum benefit.

Last month, Education Week published an opinion essay in print and online by Lucy Calkins, the Richard Robinson Professor of Literacy at Teachers College and the founding director of the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project. A lightning rod for controversy in the literacy field, Calkins defended her recent revisions to her Units of Study in Reading curriculum. But many readers were deeply skeptical and took to social media to share their thoughts. The criticisms of the essay and her approach were robust and prolific, as was the condemnation of Education Week for publishing her essay.

We asked and your pets answered. NPR poet-in-residence Kwame Alexander shares his latest community crowd sourced poem from pet owners around the country, from ages six to 86. We heard from over 700 of you, sharing the words of what your pets might be thinking about you, their next meals, their next adventures, their next cuddles and more. Read Alexander’s poem, titled Dear Captor: You Talk, I Wonder.

A policy brief from the Migration Policy Institute’s National Center on Immigrant Integration Policy finds that despite requirements under federal civil rights law to overcome language barriers, the country’s major early childhood education and care (ECEC) programs often fail to require collection of relevant data and/or adopt accountability measures that would allow them to ensure meaningful and equitable access to services for DLL children and their families.

It’s important for multilingual students to feel that their first language is valuable, seen as an asset, and a welcome part of their identity. Someone who can communicate in many languages has mental flexibility, an expansive vocabulary, and more. Students in our classrooms with languages other than English in their linguistic repertoires have advantages. The question for us educators is how we tap into that linguistic capital—especially if we do not speak or understand the languages that our students know. How and why do other languages fit into the mainstream classroom?

Some ambassadors handle multilateral negotiations and host elaborate events at embassies. But author Jason Reynolds spent his ambassadorship talking to young people about literature. The mandate of Reynolds’ position was clear: to be the ambassador for reading and writing for young people in the U.S. “The way that I decided to interpret that, though, is: How could I convince young people who may not like to read that they have a story of their own, and that their story is as important as everything that their teachers and parents are trying to get them to read,” he says.

When you’re looking for a friend, there are things that matter, and things that don’t. Julie Fogliano’s I Don’t Care is about what’s not important (“I really don’t care what you think of my hair, or my eyes or my toes or my nose”) as well as what is (“I care if you wish, and I care if you sing, and I care if you like to lean back when you swing.”) I Don’t Care started out as a freewriting exercise a couple of years ago. It came from a jumble of childhood memories, but it wasn’t about anyone in particular. “I just wrote, like, a whole bunch of pages of pretty much nonsense,” says Fogliano. But then, the story ended up on the desk of illustrator Molly Idle, who read the first line and immediately knew what the story was about.

It’s no surprise that loud, unwanted sounds can be disruptive and even damaging to ears. However, even background noise like the air conditioning running, the refrigerator humming and delivery vans idling outside can be cause for concern. According to Nina Kraus, a neurobiology professor at Northwestern University who studies sound, ongoing noises that people claim to “tune out” are unlikely to harm ears, but they can still have a profound effect on the brain. Repeated exposure to noisy environments has many negative impacts including increased stress, problems with memory and difficulty concentrating, writes Kraus in her book “Of Sound Mind: How Our Brain Constructs a Meaningful Sonic World.”

Children in kindergarten when the pandemic broke out in the spring of 2020 are now roughly eight years old and in third grade this 2022-23 school year. A new report by the nonprofit educational assessment maker NWEA documents that third graders are currently suffering the largest pandemic-related learning losses in reading, compared to older students in grades four to eight, and not readily recovering. Learning to read well in elementary school matters. After children learn to read, they read to learn. Poor reading ability in third grade can hobble their future academic achievement.

Researchers have known that oral storytelling has a unique and powerful influence on many academic repertoires for decades. In fact, storytelling abilities at age 5 is one of the best predictors of reading comprehension in the 2nd, 4th, and 8th grades. There is such a strong correlation because oral stories are made up of the same complex literate language typical of written stories. This complex type of language is often called academic language.

To boost long-term retention, research shows that retrieval practice—using quizzes and flash cards, for example—and spacing learning sessions over time can make a dramatic difference.

Kid lit authors have been speaking out against book banning and censorship long before the wave of censorship efforts became national news. As more books get pulled from the shelves, many have stepped up their efforts. For a few, that included traveling to a school board meeting in Duval County, FL to speak out against the censorship of books in the district, specifically the removal of the Essential Voices Collection, which promotes diversity and inclusion with 176 titles for students K-12.

Here are the most notable picture and middle grade books, selected by The Times’s children’s books editor.

Naomi Peña’s son Jonah was in first grade when he was diagnosed with dyslexia. It’s the most common learning disability — 20 percent of the U.S. population is dyslexic — but as Peña quickly discovered, getting dyslexic kids help with learning to read in the public school system is extraordinarily difficult. Now, she is part of a growing movement, led by the parents of dyslexic students, to change how all children are taught to read.

Candidates training to become teachers need experience working with students as part of their training. What’s more, many of these potential tutors are in college and seeking part-time employment. They can be trained and supervised by the programs they are already part of. It’s a win-win-win. Tutoring is one of the few federal education issues with bipartisan support in Congress. The proposed PATHS to Tutors Act would establish a $500 million program to support tutoring partnerships among educator-preparation programs, school districts and nonprofit organizations in underserved communities.

In our annual ritual, we pored over hundreds of educational studies and pulled out the most impactful—from a new study on the sneaky power of sketchnotes, to research that linked relationships and rigor.

Roughly 50% of city students are not proficient readers by the time they reach third grade. To help catch them up, P.S. 40 is leaning on an intensive strategy: individualized tutoring at least three times a week. The program pairs CUNY students studying education with New York City public school children who are struggling to master literacy skills. Known as the CUNY Reading Corps, the effort has grown into one of the largest tutoring initiatives involving pre-service teachers. This year, it’s projected to include more than 800 tutors and reach roughly 2,700 of the city’s public school children, primarily first and second graders.

In the aftermath of ‘Sold a Story,’ let’s also look at ways schools are failing students in comprehension and in writing. As scientists have long known, the key factor in comprehension is knowledge, either of the topic or of general academic vocabulary. The best way to build that knowledge, beginning in the early elementary grades, is to immerse children in social studies, science, and the arts. [And] …if students aren’t writing about the content of the core curriculum, they’re missing an opportunity to cement new knowledge — the kind of knowledge that fuels reading comprehension. Research has shown that writing about content in any subject boosts learning.

Students in grades 3-8 are closing reading and math achievement gaps caused by pandemic disruptions to learning. But for some students — particularly those in the lower and upper end of these grades — full progress could take five or more years. Black and Hispanic students, as well as students from high-poverty schools also have the most ground to cover on the road to recovery, according to an analysis of testing data by the nonprofit NWEA, which administers the MAP Growth assessments.