Today’s Literacy Headlines

We knew in March that students wouldn’t learn much during lockdown, and they seem to be in for more of the same this fall. The problem isn’t just that teachers lack experience with remote instruction. For reasons scientists only partially understand, it’s demonstrably harder to learn via video than in person. The problem is dramatic in children younger than 4. In a typical experiment, a researcher is filmed using a new word or describing the location of a hidden object. A child who sees the experimenter live is more likely to learn than one who watches the video. One explanation for this phenomenon is that videos lack the social cues face-to-face interactions provide. Older children don’t show a learning deficit, implying that they’re somehow compensating for what the video lacks. But they can’t maintain the necessary attentional focus for an entire Zoom class, so learning suffers. How might teachers help?

Chicago families started the school year by logging onto online classes last week. All parents are struggling to navigate remote learning, childcare, and work. For parents of children with special needs, those issues are magnified. When school buildings were open, children with special needs were able to have a special education classroom assistant to help them stay on task in class. Students had critical sessions with a school psychologist, occupational therapist or speech-language pathologist. In the spring, those services vanished for some students for months, and some families didn’t regain them for the rest of the school year. Chicago Public Schools has pledged this year will be better for students in special education. But it’s still unclear how the district will provide some services virtually — and the burden on parents is huge. Many are already overwhelmed. Here are the experiences of three Chicago families as they navigated their first week of school.

In the past two years, as I traversed the country to report for The Atlantic’s “On Teaching” project, nearly every veteran educator I encountered shared success stories and reflected on what effective teaching actually involves. American public schools are going through a consequential transformation: The majority of Baby Boomer teaching veterans—who just over 15 years ago constituted more than half of the teaching force—have retired or will retire in the next few years. “On Teaching” aimed to collect the wisdom of some of the nation’s most accomplished veterans to find out what has helped them bring out the best in their students. The 15 teachers I got to know closely—from rural Oklahoma to Mississippi, subarctic Alaska to suburban Arizona, California, Texas, Kentucky, and Michigan—told me that effective teaching depends on paying attention to students as individuals, addressing their needs with cultural sensitivity, and seeking the active support of peers. But they also told me that their capacity to teach successfully has been weakened by misguided, top-down policies, chronic funding cuts to public education, and growing structural inequities. To do their jobs fully, they said, they need basic resources—and they should be viewed as experts on what their students need.

Marking what would have been his 86th birthday, family, friends, and colleagues honored the late author-illustrator Tomie dePaola during a digital memorial service on September 15. DePaola died on March 30 of complications from surgery following a fall. Those attending the virtual memorial learned more about some of the earliest sparks of dePaola’s creativity via memories shared by his sister, Judie Bobbi, the youngest of the four dePaola siblings. As a boy, she noted, “Tomie was always creative, whether it was making papier-mâché puppets of the cast of the Disney movie Cinderella, in all their costumes and then putting on a puppet show in the attic, making fudge, having a taffy pull, and popcorn on Friday nights when [friends] would come to watch prize fights or Gorgeous George wrestling.” A tribute website—rememberingtomie.com—had been created as a place where anyone can share their memories of Tomie and his books.

For English-language learners and students with physical or learning disabilities, the indefinite shift to distance learning poses additional challenges. Under federal law, these students are eligible for special education services designed to help them succeed in school. But those services are not always easily transferable to distance learning, or even in-person learning with social distancing.Here are some steps, developed by English-learner and special education advocacy groups, and state departments of education, school districts can take now to connect with their students doing distance learning.

John Sweller is one of the most influential learning science researchers, best known for his “cognitive load theory,” which suggests that educators should present information without extraneous details. Otherwise, the brains of students can literally overload with what amounts to intellectual clutter. Sweller’s latest line of research offers a new insight: the human brain may need regular breaks when learning to help it refresh its “working memory” capacity. At the heart of both lines of research is that the human brain has a pretty limited ability to hold thoughts in working memory. “If a student is having trouble understanding something, what we mean is that their working memory is overwhelmed,” Sweller said.

A new report from the Council of the Great City Schools suggests a wide range of actions that schools and districts can take to help English learners (ELs) make up for the educational opportunities lost during the first few months of school closures due to the pandemic. Supporting English Learners in the COVID-19 Crisis makes recommendations on all sorts of crucial decisions such as which technology to use when, how to assess what ELs missed during shutdown, how specific professional development for all educators who work with ELs can help, how to encourage family engagement, and how to deploy aides and English-learner specialists to help afford students one-to-one or small-group learning support during remote classes.

Many children around the world, Black children in particular, live in the shadow of death and violence. In America they’re all too soon turned into “dangerous” or “delinquent” adults in the eyes of those with the power to destroy them. For these children, lighthearted narratives that don’t acknowledge this reality can feel exclusionary. Two new novels, “Isaiah Dunn Is My Hero” and “Ikenga” raise thorny questions about the burden and nature of Black manhood and its relationship to Black boyhood.

Infants and young children have brains with a linguistic superpower, according to Georgetown University Medical Center neuroscientists, who found that unlike adults who use a specific areas in one or the other of their brain’s two hemispheres to process most discrete neural tasks, young children use both the right and left hemispheres to do the same task. This may explain why children generally recover from neural injury much better than adults.

How can I teach music if the kids aren’t allowed to sing indoors? How will lag time affect group singing online? How will I make students feel seen and heard via Zoom? Those were some of the questions that elementary music teacher Angela Carpenter spent her summer trying to figure out. Though she would be entering her 15th year of teaching, it was like being new to the job. “No one has done this before. Even the teaching that we’re doing now is so vastly different than what we did in the spring,” she said, “because that was panic teaching.” She’s not alone with that thought.

In the spring, Jessica Hughes, a K–6 STEAM Lab teacher at the Hyde Park School in the Cincinnati Public School District (CPS), quickly realized the connection between nonverbal signals and student engagement in her online meetings. By the end of the year, teachers across her building used agreed-upon signs, successfully making messages clearer and attention easier and more meaningful. Now, Hughes plans to shift to using ASL signs for “Thank you,” silent cheer, “Stop,” and “Happy” as learners continue to engage in an online environment. ASL provides Hughes’ students a common language and emphasis on delivery practices, such as strong, clear facial expressions that communicate or reinforce the intended meaning of a sign. This intentionality in visual online communication can support activities that require high-energy delivery to maintain attention and focus, including read-alouds, problem-solving steps, and other instruction. In ASL, facial expressions can significantly affect the meaning of a sign and need to be attended to. This intentionality in our expressions helps us and sends the right message of support, encouragement, confusion, or agreement to our students and encourages the same from them.

With so much of teaching now online, teachers everywhere are wondering how we can best support struggling readers. Here are some tips that can work with online teaching, based on the author’s 40 years of experience in the U.S. and throughout the world. Ideas include integrating American Sign Language, songs, Readers Theater, games, videos and engaging decodable books into the mix, taking virtual field trips, and to remember to take care of yourself and your students. Students who struggle with reading need warm, supportive, engaging interactions with a caring adult who understands the way children acquire the skills of reading.

Gary Koppelman dreamed of creating a science lab as soon as he began working at Blissfield Elementary, but for more than 20 years there weren’t any funds for it. Then, in 1999, the school received grants from a few local foundations and built a lab for the elementary grades. Today, the Environmental Life Lab is open to the more than 1,200 students in the district’s elementary, middle, and high schools. Over the years, teachers in all grades, working in subjects ranging from math to English to social studies, have developed lesson plans that incorporate the lab. Michigan’s long, harsh winters make it difficult for students to engage with the natural world throughout the school year, but thanks to the lab, students are able to learn about rain forests, deserts, and various other ecosystems in all seasons.

Special education has emerged as one of the most significant concerns for families and schools during the global pandemic, with much of the focus on the plight of students who are separated from the teachers and specialists that ensure they have equal opportunities to learn. But students with undiagnosed learning disabilities may also be missing out on services and supports during distance learning. To help families and caregivers who suspect that their children may have disabilities or developmental delays, Understood.org and the American Academy of Pediatrics have developed Take N.O.T.E., a digital guide available in English and Spanish. The guide walks parents and caregivers through four steps—Notice, Observe, Talk and Engage—to help them become aware of patterns in a child’s behavior, talk with teachers about what they’re seeing, and engage with pediatricians and school specialists who can help determine why their child is struggling.

Many of Jacqueline Woodson’s books tackle serious issues in a way that’s accessible for kids: Race, drugs, foster care, classism, intolerance. Her latest book does that, too. It’s called Before the Ever After and it’s written in the voice of a 12-year-old boy whose father is a professional football player, a big star both on TV and to the neighborhood kids. But his father is also suffering from chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, the degenerative brain disease that’s been diagnosed in many collision-sport athletes. Before the Ever After documents his father’s decline. But first we get to know his dad. How he loves playing football. How he loves his family. And how when his son and a group of his young friends pile laughingly on his back, he shakes them off “like feathers.”

For Chicago families, the start of the school year this week brought an often hectic return to supervising their children’s learning — but with markedly higher demands than last spring. After an uneven foray into remote learning, Chicago Public Schools called for a six to seven-hour school day this fall, with hours of live video instruction for most students. First graders are expected to spend three hours a day in live classes. The Chicago Teachers Union and some parents are pushing back against the changes, saying they saddle students with too much screen time and make for a draining school day, especially for younger children. District officials counter that these changes are needed to keep Chicago’s academic momentum going. Some parents said they feel torn: The first days of school have left them overwhelmed and sometimes at a loss for ways to keep students focused on their screens. But they balk at the idea of scaling back requirements.

Especially during remote learning, parents are discovering their kids struggle with writing. In many cases—but not all—parents can help. One parent who is an education journalist did a column about an assignment—”write a story about a realistic character”—that reduced her six-year-old to tears. Another told me her fourth-grader had a meltdown when he had to write an opinion essay about “manifest destiny.” No doubt similar scenes have been playing out across the country as parents get an unusually intimate view of this aspect of their children’s schooling. Here’s why so many kids struggle to write and what parents can and can’t do about that.

Tracy Murray has witnessed a lot of change in her 27 years of work in classrooms. But in her view, no shift has been as radical—or as positive—as the difference in the way children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are viewed by society. Murray’s kindergarten class is part of ASD Nest, a program run by New York City’s Education Department and New York University; it includes kids with and without ASD in the same classroom and helps them all develop social and emotional skills. When Murray started teaching with ASD Nest in 2003, many of her general-education students were pulled out of the classroom by their parents, who cited concerns that their five-year-olds would regress academically if they spent every day with children on the spectrum. Today, many parents request to be a part of the program.

Four educators suggest strategies for responding to racist comments from colleagues, including mirroring the person’s words and explaining that intent “does not lessen the blow.”

Rebecca Palacios became the first in her family to graduate from college, eventually earning a Ph.D. in education in 1996 from the University of Texas at Austin. She began teaching in 1976, at Lamar Elementary in Corpus Christi: the country’s first district to integrate Latino and white children. And she continued to teach preschool for 34 years until she retired in 2010, becoming one of the most distinguished bilingual early-childhood educators. In this interview, Palacios reflects on the most essential building blocks of a high-quality preschool program, including the importance of of building background knowledge, word knowledge, integrated learning themes, and parent engagement.

David Rosenblatt’s 8-year-old son Nico takes part in a virtual speech therapy session. Nico has complex developmental disabilities caused by a genetic condition called Angelman Syndrome, meaning he mainly communicates using an assistive device. A majority of Nico’s supports come through the Arlington Public School system. He attends class along children without disabilities, but has a dedicated aide to help with classwork, social interactions and personal needs. Being in that setting has been a huge boon to Nico, says Rosenblatt. “A huge thing that Nico gets out of school is being a part of a physical community,” he says. “For him, being in a space where you can’t touch people or share things with people or get their attention, is very, very challenging.” Those challenges became a reality earlier this spring when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, shuttering schools and sending kids home to learn on computers. Parents of kids with disabilities say virtual learning has been a particular burden; in some cases, children are falling behind or acting out as the educational supports they once relied on were yanked away.

Bilingual children and adolescents may grow up with more grey matter, according to a new study published in Brain Structure and Function, in which an international team of academics led by the UK’s University of Reading and the U.S. Georgetown University examined detailed scans of children’s and adolescents’ brains and found that bilingual participants had potential advantages of both grey and white matter than similarly-aged monolingual children. While bilingualism has previously been shown to positively affect brain structure and cognitive performance in adults, the paper is the most comprehensive analysis to date showing that the effect of speaking more than one language may have similar impacts on developing brains.

Jacqueline Woodson’s new novel, “Before the Ever After,” is not a work of horror (despite the haunting title), but a creeping, invisible force is upending ZJ’s world and slowly stealing away his father — known as “Zachariah 44,” for his jersey number — before his and his mother’s eyes. The father’s hands have begun to tremble uncontrollably. He stares vacantly. He forgets basic things, most achingly the name of the son who bears, and at times is burdened by, his name. He’s prone to angry outbursts, to the point that ZJ’s friends no longer want to come by the house. He is suffering the effects of a degenerative brain disease that, while not named, bears a strong resemblance to chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., which has been found in scores of former N.F.L. players.

For as long as Connie LuVenia Williams can remember, letters have been giving her trouble. Sure, she learned the ABCs, but making sense of how these symbols we call letters combine to form the sounds that make up the English language – that part stumped her. And from what she remembers nobody taught her those skills as a kid. Activists in Oakland, California, where Williams lives, have been pushing schools to focus on how students are being taught to read as a way to improve literacy. Members of the NAACP and an advocacy organization called Oakland REACH, started by Oakland parents whose kids attend the district’s lowest performing schools, have coalesced around a campaign for better reading instruction they’re calling Literacy for All. Williams is one of its most outspoken members.

This can’t be emphasized enough: Strong relationships will be essential to students’ academic success and well-being this coming school year. And now, the beginning of the semester, is a crucial time for developing the personal connections that students will need to sustain them through what is going to be an unpredictable school year, at best. But with schools either operating remotely, alternating online instruction with in-person classes, or closing due to an outbreak, developing meaningful relationships between teachers and students—and even among staff, students, and families—will be a challenge. How can educators, then, build these all-important connections with students, especially over physical distances? Following are four tips for how to make that work.

Micki Boas has been fighting for years for both of her sons, now ages 8 and 11, who have dyslexia, a type of learning disability that can lead to difficulty in reading comprehension and can impact the person’s interest in reading. For her 11-year-old, Boas said it took four years, four lawyers and four schools to finally get him a formal diagnosis of dyslexia and the support that’s mandated by law. To help other parents navigate the confusing waters of a dyslexia diagnosis, Boas quit her job and wrote, “One in Five: Fighting for Our Dyslexic Kids,” published in August. The book features the stories of 20 parents of children with dyslexia, the struggles they’ve faced, and shortcuts that parents can use to help their children now. Part of the problem, Boas said, is that children are being diagnosed with dyslexia too late. Oftentimes, they’re diagnosed around age 10, but the average child should be reading by age 7.

The U.S. Department of Education will allow flexibility within the 21st Century Community Learning Center program so that schools can use the funds during the regular school day. The waiver will accommodate districts’ efforts to provide learning hubs and centers for students during distance learning. The notice, published in the Federal Register Thursday, states that the department “requested an emergency clearance because schools are already opening or will be opening very soon, and the flexibility offered through a waiver will enable [state education agencies] and subgrantees to better meet the needs of students through more nimble” programs. While a 60-day comment period is still in place, states and districts can already apply for the waiver.

As many Michigan children return to online classes this fall, educators warn that online instruction — already challenging for most students — will be especially damaging for students who don’t speak English. In theory, this would be terrible news for the Hamtramck school district: 64% of the district’s students are classified as English learners, while another 14% are former English learners who have learned enough to leave the program. Instead, Hamtramck Public School’s pre-pandemic support systems for immigrant families have ensured that students don’t fall through the cracks. A team of bilingual parent liaisons, hired two years ago to support newcomers from other countries, worked through the summer to ensure that families had access to food, laptops, and an internet connection. An in-person orientation held weeks before the first day of online classes helped hundreds of U.S. newcomers navigate the challenges of remote instruction.

Across the country, whether your kids are learning remotely, doing some hybrid of online and in-person, or back fully in-person, with new protocols like masks, social distancing and staying in only one classroom, school will most likely not look anything like it did in February. I know how lucky I am that my kids used to enjoy school in the first place, but I really started to wonder: How do I keep their love of school alive in these unusual and unstable circumstances? So I asked a kindergarten teacher, a child psychologist and a learning specialist for their suggestions.

It is a misconception that learning sign language hinders spoken language development for implanted children. Research shows the opposite to be true. Deaf children of deaf parents, whose first language is sign language, end up having better spoken language skills once they are implanted than deaf children of hearing parents who did not learn sign language. Research also shows a relationship between sign language and spoken English in school-aged children with cochlear implants: The children who scored highly in sign language were the same ones who scored highly in English. And the children with weak sign language skills also struggled with spoken English. In fact, sign language is so good for the developing brain some hearing parents teach it to their hearing children to boost brain development and jump-start communication before speech.

School librarians are creating plans to greet their returning students, ease their anxieties, and address whatever learning gaps widened during the spring and summer. “Especially in this time of uncertainty, librarians have never been more critical to the nation’s schools,” says a new report from EveryLibrary Institute, “School Librarians and the COVID Slide.” “They are essential in helping teachers and students understand how to find and utilize high-quality digital tools and content.” More than 80 percent of respondents to that study said they provided curated resources for at-home activities, nearly as many shared community resources, and six out of 10 offered technical support. Almost half of librarians reported co-teaching a class, while slightly more than one in 10 offered students makerspace events and gaming.

Remote learning isn’t easy for anyone, but it’s especially challenging for children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and other learning disabilities. NPR’s Jon Hamilton reports on the challenges facing these students and their parents, who are often required to become educators to make it work. Not all parents have the privilege of being able to help their children with remote learning though. Many students also face the challenge of logging on for school without reliable Internet. NPR’s Anya Kamenetz and WWNO’s Aubri Juhasz report on “learning hubs” that offer free child care and additional learning resources — but only for a lucky few.

We asked you to tell us about your favorite kids’ books, from board books for babies to great read-alouds to early chapter books and even a few books for older readers. And thousands of you answered. As with all our summer polls, this one isn’t a straight-up popularity contest. (Otherwise it would have been nothing but 100 Mo Willems books — and we love Mo Willems, but that wouldn’t have been the most useful list.) Rather, it’s a curated list built from your recommendations and picks from our expert panel of judges — a fantastic group of authors, librarians, publishers and all-around book nerds. And instead of a ranked list, it’s grouped into categories that we hope will help you find just the right books for the kids in your life: Picture Perfect, Baby’s Bookshelf, Conversation Starters, Family Life, Animal (and Monster) Friends, Folktales and Fairy Tales, Fun to Read Out Loud, Nonfiction, Early Chapter Books, and Older Readers. Happy reading!

Research suggests a way to restructure remote learning to give students what they’ve been missing. Staff at the Policy Analysis for California Education at Stanford University have been reviewing research that can help guide districts as they think about this fall. We started from the premise, based in research, that whether in person or remotely, effective instruction provides students a mix of expository, active, and interactive learning opportunities. The best evidence for how to sequence expository, active, and interactive learning—and how to make the most use of the limited synchronous time in virtual classrooms—comes from the flipped-classroom model, which has shown small positive effects on student outcomes over 100 studies. Flipped classrooms first present students with new information asynchronously (by textbook or video, for example) and then require students to complete activities that help them process the basic information and practice new skills independently (via comprehension questions or practice problems, among other means).

Generations of Black children in Holmes County bear scars from the state’s underinvestment in their education. Now, the community is trying to regroup as a new school year begins. Covid-19 may be less likely to sicken kids, but there’s little guarantee they will come through the crisis unscathed. In Holmes County, it’s children who are bearing the brunt of the dual pandemics coming to a head as summer ends. Schools are struggling to keep learning going as buildings remain closed, federal help for the poor and hungry is shutting down, and desperate families have been left largely on their own to figure out how to avoid a deadly disease while also feeding, housing and educating their children.

In these strange times in the midst of a pandemic, nothing tells a student that you are invested in them personally more than a phone call. Even in a five-minute conversation, the teacher gets to intently listen to the student as if no one and nothing else matters, easily trumping group Zoom calls and prerecorded video messages. More important, I have been able to gather significant information about a student’s home life and how they’re engaging with my classes, and I’m confident that no survey could have produced this data. I have learned about time, motivation, and attention management issues, as well as network issues that force them to work from the terrace of their houses, overwhelm due to too many pending tasks, misunderstandings in the content, and a myriad of tech issues such as multiple Edmodo accounts and forgotten passwords. This data informed my subsequent lessons and improved my instruction delivery significantly.

Lately, I find myself thinking of my students and considering how I can nurture their independent reading within my virtual classroom. Here are some suggestions of how you can encourage independent reading: host a book show-and-tell, invite guest readers, match reading buddies, establish online book clubs, share your own reading life, Promote audiobooks, and encourage book talks.

When you teach a student who has a stutter, you are likely balancing two challenges: managing special considerations, and often an IEP, for a student who has a complex disorder that is not fully understood, and cultivating a classroom that is understanding and supportive. Tim Mackesey, a speech language pathologist who specializes in the evaluation and treatment of speech disorders (and himself a severe stutterer for over 20 years), shares these strategies, several of which are counterintuitive to people who are not familiar with stuttering.

COVID-19 forced Keriann Wilmot’s son to trade his classroom for a computer. It was a tough transition for a 10-year-old with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. “It was a different environment for him,” Wilmot says. “He wasn’t used to this kind of work from school coming in the format of an email in his Chromebook every single day.” Her son would avoid math and writing and instead go straight to his favorite subjects: science and social studies. But even then, online assignments could be a problem. Wilmot was much better prepared than most parents to help her son. She’d spent 20 years as an occupational therapist who specializes in helping children with ADHD and other learning disabilities. Even so, working with her own child was tough.

In the collection development department at the Fort Worth (TX) Public Library, we devote a lot of time and energy to building collections that are as diverse, equitable, and inclusive as possible. We have many discussions about topics including the Diversity in Children’s Books surveys put out by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center (CCBC), #OwnVoices, and how to create a catalog that will help staff and patrons find diverse materials. Building and maintaining inclusive collections is only one piece of the puzzle for libraries seeking to promote equity and inclusion. What happens if you build an inclusive collection but nobody knows it’s there or how to use it? This question led us to develop diversity, equity, and inclusion training throughout our system.

Melissa Malzkuhn is the founder and creative director of Gallaudet University’s Motion Light Lab. Since 2013 her team has worked with Deaf storytellers and artists to create bilingual stories for their VL2 ASL Storybook Apps. But with schools across the country closed amid the COVID-19 outbreak, Deaf children have less access to such stories. As schools across the country moved to distance learning, Malzkuhn’s team opened free access to their storybook apps. They weren’t alone in their efforts. Educators and advocates across the Deaf community have curated lessons, created storytime videos and organized events to support Deaf students’ literacy. Here are six ASL resources to help Deaf students engage with books and storytelling during distance learning.

Colorado students in kindergarten through third grade soon will have access to lessons in reading, math, science, and art through their television sets. Gov. Jared Polis announced the launch of “Colorado Classroom: Learn with Me at Home” on Monday. The programming airs for at least 15 weeks on Rocky Mountain PBS. Developed in partnership with the Colorado Department of Education and the Colorado Education Initiative, the programming for young students builds on a summer program focused on literacy. The lessons, with a different theme each week, will reach families even if they don’t have internet access. Every Friday will feature interactive science lessons developed with help from the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. The lessons will be broadcast in English with Spanish subtitles.

As education organizations and initiatives such as Teaching Tolerance, the Zinn Education Project, Black Lives Matter at School, the Pulitzer Center’s 1619 Project Curriculum and others strive to give educators the tools to teach anti-bias and antiracism, educators are grappling with how to implement these resources in early grades. For Katie Cryan Leary, the principal of the newly opened Magnolia Elementary in Seattle Public Schools, creating an antiracist, anti-bias school can be a messy, uncomfortable journey. That’s especially true in a district that, in the 19 years she’s been working there, has committed to racial equity but still struggles to serve the needs of a wide range of students. To her, antiracism education in elementary school starts with students’ awareness of themselves, of others and of how those interactions play out. She believes that social emotional learning — giving kids the tools to manage and express their feelings — is the heart of race and equity work.

When this fifth-grade teacher shifted his school newspaper online, he found that students were motivated to produce high-quality work for an authentic audience—and felt more connected as a community. Get do’s and don’ts for a virtual newspaper and how to get it launched.

Across the U.S., parents are weighing agonizing choices about in-person versus virtual schooling this fall. Many parents are struggling to support their children through remote learning while they themselves have full-time jobs or shift work with unpredictable schedules that can upend family lives. But once the question of how children will learn this year is answered, another equally pressing one arises: Where, exactly, will this learning take place? During this pandemic, Leah Dela Cruz has taken the idea of learning anywhere to heart. Ms. Dela Cruz lives with her husband and their two children, Lauren, 6, and Rocco, 16 months, in a two-bedroom, 750-square foot apartment in San Mateo, Calif. With the living room as her only option for a classroom, Ms. Dela Cruz gave away a big table and a bookshelf and created two tidy spaces, one on the left with a TV tray as a desk for Lauren and one on the right with a play area for Rocco. Lauren uses an old iPad for distance learning, and arts and crafts activities are done with simple materials like Popsicle sticks and colored pencils.

While intergenerational reading has always involved a valuable shared experience on many levels, the pandemic has drawn more people to all-ages book clubs and programs, many organized virtually by nonprofits and libraries. Virtual programming can involve a wider crowd, and the crushing events of 2020 have prompted meaningful explorations of books focusing on equity, racism, and family, historical or contemporary. The Reading into History program at the New York Historical Society (NYHS) is one example: it gives “kids and their parents equal footing to be interested in something,” says Alice Stevenson, vice president and director of the DiMenna Children’s History Museum at NYHS.

Student collaboration is critical. Partner reading builds fluency. Sharing manipulatives to retell a story strengthens language development and reading comprehension. The ability to share the pen with another, communicate clearly, and problem solve in teams has so many benefits. Students need collaborative work now more than ever. Social distancing is taking its toll on student learning, particularly the kind that comes when students work in groups. But how do we bring collaborative learning into a virtual setting this year? I’ve been meeting with teachers around the United States virtually this summer to support them with the implementation of a literacy curriculum that we use at my school, which calls for authentic collaborative work and rich student discourse. In the course of these meetings, I’ve come up with a few ideas for bringing collaboration into a virtual space.

Twenty-eight educators share their thoughts and ideas about what worked for them in the spring, what they’re doing this fall, what worries them, what heartens them and what helps them. We know that this post can’t begin to address all the issues. Some teachers in the United States are going back in person, others will be working with a hybrid model, and some still don’t know for sure. And though these tips focus on engaging middle and high school students online, most educators we know are chiefly worried about those students who don’t have reliable internet at all. Teachers, we hope you’ll help by posting your own comments, and sharing any experiences or tips you have. We hope it will be useful, too, to read the related Times articles that provide the illustrations throughout, such as the May piece “‘I’m Teaching Into a Vacuum’: 14 Educators on Quarantine Learning.”

Out September 1, Bookmarks highlights children’s books written by Black authors, about the Black experience. In each episode, a different celebrity reads one of the books aloud. Sometimes, they visit their own work—as in the case of Lupita Nyong’o, who brings her gorgeously illustrated book Sulwe to life. Then, they follow up the reading with a few thought-provoking questions. Think of it as a book club for parents and tots. With each episode clocking in at five minutes, Bookmarks lends itself to becoming your go-to bedtime story resource. The 12-episode series is designed to simultaneously cultivate young readers, and promote diverse voices in children’s literature—which is exactly the goal of its host, teenage activist Marley Dias.

A lot can happen in two years time, but when you are Marley Dias — founder and author of the social media campaign #1000BlackGirlBooks — somehow that’s on a whole different scale. The last time we talked to Dias, the West Orange, New Jersey, resident was promoting her book, “Marley Dias Gets It Done (And So Can You!).” In the book, she wrote about youth activism, social justice and using social media to make positive changes in communities. Today, the 15-year-old is talking about her new Netflix project, “Bookmarks: Celebrating Black Voices,” a collection of 12 five-minute episodes featuring Black celebrities and artists reading children’s books by Black authors that highlight the Black experience.

As students shift to remote learning, superintendents nationwide are laying off thousands of paraprofessionals, hourly, mostly low-paid workers often tasked to help students with disabilities. Paraprofessional groups, which have quickly organized protests to denounce the layoffs, have argued their members will be critical in the coming months to help students catch up academically and teachers manage oversized, virtual classrooms. They also argue that paraprofessionals are core elements of special education students’ Individualized Education Programs and that districts could now risk legal challenges from parent advocacy groups.

A mother-son duo is hoping you notice something a little different the next time you visit Little Free Library in Dallas. Rachel and Elliott Koppa launched an effort this summer to put 10 diverse books in Little Free Libraries across the city. “We are trying to hit all 97 of the registered Little Free Libraries in the city of Dallas,” Rachel Koppa said. “We need to see all kinds of different races, and cultures, and religions, and ethnicities so that it broadens our horizons and help us be more open and understanding to the world that we live in,” Rachel said. “I want Elliott to grow up in a kind world.

The language we use when communicating with families is more crucial than ever. As educators, we are doing ourselves and our families a huge disservice by alienating them with unfamiliar words, acronyms, and educational jargon. Since family involvement impacts school achievement, examining our communications is even more critical, as many reopening plans include some form of online learning. I thought about the endless supply of acronyms that educators use throughout the school year and how we might be alienating families by not being clear, explicit, and transparent in our language choices when communicating with them. Here are a few acronyms, words, and phrases I hear being used often, with examples of what we could say to improve communication with families as we dive into virtual learning.

New research shows that it often takes three years and visits to multiple providers before Black children are diagnosed with autism, denying them a critical opportunity for therapy when it’s likely to be most effective. Autism can be reliably diagnosed before age 2, but most children aren’t flagged until after age 4. Black children, however, are nearly 5½ years old, on average, before they receive an autism diagnosis, according to findings published online Monday in the journal Pediatrics. “This study reveals major roadblocks to receiving a diagnosis of autism, which has significant consequences for young children and their families,” said John N. Constantino, a professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at Washington University in St. Louis who led the research.

Staring at a blank page can be daunting for anyone with a writing assignment. As one writes, there are all kinds of rules to adhere to: grammar, spelling, punctuation, etc. In school, writing can feel like a chore if it’s part of a class assignment or a topic the student doesn’t care about. But for those who have experienced the thrill of writing fan fiction, there’s a certain flow that can feel liberating. Fan fiction is a type of writing that builds upon or takes liberties with existing stories. Writers can create alternate endings for stories, create parallel worlds, develop side characters more deeply or cross over characters from different stories. Some of the most popular fan fic subjects are Harry Potter, Sherlock Holmes and Marvel comics.

The challenges of getting students to participate have intensified during remote learning, we’ve heard from many teachers. Digital platforms can create added communication barriers by making it hard to know when to talk, for example, or how to read subtle but important elements of discourse like a person’s body language and facial expressions. Additionally, online discussions are often hindered by variability in students’ access to technology and by privacy concerns, and consequently many teachers have had to rely on students’ submitting work over isolated channels like email, which can leave back-and-forth between peers (and between students and the teacher) by the wayside. To find out how to improve student discussions and participation in online learning, we culled through hundreds of comments on social media and followed up with more than 20 educators to see how they tackled the challenge last spring. Teachers offered a range of smart strategies, both synchronous and asynchronous, to integrate the values and the voices of all kids—even the quietest or those with disrupted schedules—into their classes this fall.

As part of a legal settlement in a class action lawsuit, the state of Michigan plans to establish a $9 million special education fund to improve education for children affected by the Flint water crisis. The money, part of a $600 million settlement announced Thursday by the state, will be used to strengthen services and supports for Flint children who were harmed by lead poisoning and fund improvements for special education services to all students with disabilities in public schools in Flint and Genesee County. Research has linked lead toxicity to learning disabilities and poor classroom performance.

There are ways to mitigate the damage that will inevitably be done to students as the pandemic rages on. Many are rooted in centuries-old practices and common sense but require considerable planning and finesse to make them work.  All the approaches depend on having a few key elements already in place: a solid curriculum; a commitment to grade-level teaching; and strategies to engage students, including tracking them down and contacting them if they aren’t showing up for remote or hybrid learning. By far the most effective intervention for students who have fallen behind—intensive tutoring—has high start-up costs. While there are ways to lower some of them, severe budget cuts could put it out of reach for all but a fraction of districts. For this installment on how to address students’ learning losses, Education Week interviewed two dozen researchers, teachers, and principals, and reviewed hundreds of pages of empirical studies and planning documents to identify interventions that are well supported by research—and other approaches that are unlikely to move the needle. 

Rolling Wi-Fi-enabled school buses into neighborhoods and distributing personal hotspots to families were part of districts’ rapid responses to getting families online once schools closed in the spring. But such programs have limitations and don’t always provide students the high-speed connections they need for Zoom classes and completing assignments — especially if there are multiple students in the home. For example, the Louisa County Public Schools, located about halfway between the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., and Richmond, has received attention for its innovative Wireless on Wheels, or WOW, program — a small fleet of solar-powered hotspots on trailers, stationed in church parking lots and other open areas. Students will begin building the Wi-Fi carts in shop classes for some hands-on experience. Users, however, have to be within 150 feet to get online, and the district is still using buses to transport students to the hotspots. While the problem permeates much of rural America, the lack of broadband can even be an issue for students living in tech hubs.

Cory Streets, a special-education teacher outside Cleveland, created the type of space many remote workers crave these days: a fully-equipped, work-from-home haven. In his case, a classroom, in his backyard shed. Streets hoped he could produce something approaching normalcy for him and his students in the months of virtual learning that lie ahead. “I wanted it to feel like a classroom,” Streets said as he sat in the middle of his newly completed backyard creation. “So when the kids log onto Zoom it can feel like a real class. It can feel normal, as much as possible.” Streets is a Moderate-Intensive Intervention Specialist at Lakewood High School, with a focus on students with cognitive disabilities and autism spectrum disorder. This fall, he is set to teach math, science, English, social studies, music and reading.