Today’s Literacy Headlines

The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, or CASEL, has selected a new president and CEO: Aaliyah A. Samuel, the deputy assistant secretary for local, state, and national engagement for the U.S. Department of Education. Samuel is taking the wheel at a time when there is an unprecedented surge of interest in social-emotional learning among educators and policymakers brought on by the pandemic and the trauma and disruptions it has caused for schoolchildren. But the spotlight also brings challenges—in particular whether the social-emotional learning field can deliver on the research that shows SEL can boost student academics and well-being. Samuel spoke with Education Week about the challenges and opportunities facing social emotional learning at this unique time.

No stranger to the spotlight, Marc Brown’s Arthur is having a particularly luminous moment in the sun. The affable aardvark’s eponymous book series from Little, Brown is celebrating 45 years in print this year, and PBS and WGBH-TV in Boston will air the 25th and final season of its animated Arthur series in spring 2022. In celebration of these milestones, and to share some nuggets of wisdom and wit that Arthur and his pals have dispensed over the decades, Brown has compiled Believe in Yourself: What We Learned from Arthur, due out on January 25.

Since 2008 the Sobrato Early Academic Language (SEAL) model, which started out in three elementary schools and feeder schools and now reaches 50,000 students in over a hundred preschool and elementary classrooms, has been working to address these gaps by providing a research-based approach to meeting English learners’(ELs) linguistic and academic needs by capitalizing on their assets. The model is grounded in four pillars that prioritize weaving both expressive and academic language into curricula, creating an affirming and enriching environment, aligning early education and elementary school systems, and building strong partnerships between families and schools. SEAL also focuses on professional development, curriculum support, and technical assistance to improve school systems.

School’s a little different this year, so art teachers are using their classes to help kids cope. After spending months trying to get used to remote learning, now kids are struggling to adjust to being in school in person again. Health experts recently declared the decline in children and adolescents’ mental health a “national emergency.” As schools grapple with the social and emotional effects of the pandemic on students, music, theater and other art teachers are trying to help.

Every Child a Reader, the charitable arm of the Children’s Book Council, has revealed the winners of its Kids’ Book Choice Awards. Launched in 2008 by the Children’s Book Council and Every Child a Reader, these are the only national book awards selected exclusively by young readers.

“The Snowy Day,” by Ezra Jack Keats, has long been a favorite, celebrated as one of the first mainstream children’s books to prominently feature a Black protagonist. This adaptation aims to help change perceptions about Black identity and attract new audiences to opera at a time when the art form faces serious financial pressures and questions about its future. “We are waking up to the idea that opera is for everyone,” said Andrea Davis Pinkney, a children’s book author who wrote the libretto. “We are waking up to the fact that, yes, this is your story, and your story, and my story, and our story.”

On Dream Street, anything is possible. “We really wanted to write a book where children could see themselves in it, as well as know that their dreams are important,” says author Tricia Elam Walker. “So this is a place where creativity abounds, and imagination and dreams are celebrated.” Dream Street was illustrated by Ekua Holmes. She and Elam Walker are cousins who grew up together in Roxbury, Mass. They based their first book together on their childhood neighborhood — a beautiful place full of parks, trees and gardens, full of all different kinds of houses, old and new.

We know that high-quality, systemic SEL can help students identify emotions from social cues, set goals, consider multiple perspectives, and problem solve. We also know that SEL can reduce bullying and school suspensions and improve academic performance and school climate. But what research hasn’t yet established is how—or even whether—universal school-based SEL programs serve students with disabilities and students of color, who are among the most impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Unfortunately, the evidence for SEL’s impact on racially- and ability-marginalized youth is murky at best and nonexistent at worst because we haven’t looked deeply enough. And that’s a big problem.

I spent much of the past year sharing a short draft of policy recommendations with more than 100 folks who know and care about English learners’ success — educators, researchers and advocates — to collect feedback and develop a slate of concrete reforms to significantly improve how the country and its schools serve these students. The result, A New Federal Equity Agenda for Dual Language Learners and English Learners, was published at The Century Foundation today. It provides a much-needed starting point for overhauling the Every Student Succeeds Act and other federal policies governing English learners’ education.

When the questioning process engages all students, it’s magical. The room is alive and full of energy. There’s active thinking taking place and a feeling of high expectations and a belief that all students can learn. Here are three ways to engage pre-K to second-grade students in the questioning process.

From hearing lullabies to the sing-song lilt of a parent’s voice, babies form strong connections with their caregivers through sound and song. Nina Kraus, a neuroscientist and author of the book “Of Sound Mind: How Our Brain Constructs a Meaningful Sonic World” says “Before babies learn the words, they learn the music,” said Kraus. “Why do we use the intonations and inflections that we do with babies? It’s because they respond to that and they learn.” Music, she notes, does an exceptional job activating our cognitive, motor, reward and sensory networks. And making music changes the brain for the better, said Kraus. “It strengthens your cognitive skills because it relies on memory and focused attention. And it strengthens the kinds of skills that we know are important for reading, for learning and for engaging with other people.”

Setting up project-based learning with young students can be a challenge, but it’s worth the work, according to first-grade teachers from across the U.S.

New study finds higher quality interactions between parents and young children while reading traditional books over digital apps. Parents talked more to their children – with children in turn responding to them more –while reading the print version, according to the study in Pediatrics. Children more prone to emotional outbursts also responded to their parents better when reading from a book.

While the nonfiction of our childhoods was less exciting, the variety in nonfiction these days is amazing. The ease with which we can create graphic- and photo-heavy, well-designed nonfiction means that children are gravitating to nonfiction books like never before. We’ve long assumed that kids have to be convinced that reading is pleasurable, especially when the task is learning about our world instead of a fictional one, like Narnia. Yet, researchers and librarians who have tracked the reading preferences of real, in-the-wild kids would disagree.

Reading Reimagined aims to reduce the reading gap by identifying effective curricula and teaching strategies for students in grades 4-8. Foundational and comprehension skills will be the focus of the research and development project, as will students’ self-efficacy and personal connections to literacy. The project aims to provide research-based curriculum and tools to help underserved students become successful readers.

Fewer than one in five Chicago third graders met or exceeded state standards in reading and math on a standardized exam given in the spring — when a majority of students were doing most of their learning at home. That’s compared to citywide proficiency rates closer to 40% in third grade reading and 33% in third grade math in 2019, underscoring the impact of COVID-19 on young learners in the nation’s third largest school district.

Identifying different layers of identity is particularly helpful for students transitioning into a new social and cultural context.

From a little suitcase that contains a towering cake to the ultimate shaggy dog story.

The most notable picture, middle grade and young adult books of the year, selected by The Times’s children’s books editor.

Tahlequah Public Schools recently received the Innovative Approaches to Literacy grant from the U.S. Department of Education, and the money will be distributed at all of its sites over the next four years. The grant is worth over $3 million, and the purpose is to enhance literacy among TPS students. The grant will allow the district to add literacy teachers, staff, media coordinators, and library offerings. With the money, students will also be able to take home two free books. “We are going to work with Cherokee Nation and Northeastern Health System to provide additional free books when they go to child wellness visits,” said Natalie Cloud, grants coordinator at TPS.

When I had my first child, the advice to me about how to raise a strong reader was simple: Read to her all the time and leave good books around. That guidance reflected the belief that learning to read was instinctual, much in the way that the acquisition of language is. But a deepening canon of brain research — dubbed the science of reading — has led to a concerted effort now to change how we teach reading. “Kids learn language just by being in an environment where language is spoken. Reading does not develop that way, a real critical distinction,” said reading expert Ryan Lee-James, director of the Rollins Center for Language and Literacy at the Atlanta Speech School. “In fact, those language areas of the brain have to be reorganized or programmed for children to be able to read.”

It can be difficult for immigrants in the U.S. who don’t speak English to support their children’s education. “It feels like immigrant parents are deliberately excluded and pushed to the margins,” said one mother regarding inadequate translation services. Philadelphia parents told The Associated Press about students being used as translators despite federal prohibitions, incorrect telephone translations, and poor communication about bullying. Experts say many other school districts have lagged in creating equitable systems for non-English speakers. Philadelphia school officials said there has been progress, including sending communication in parents’ languages and hiring dozens more in-school interpreters called bilingual cultural assistants.

Acclaimed children’s book author and photo-illustrator April Pulley Sayre, known for her many books spotlighting the wonders of science and nature, died on November 6 in South Bend, Indiana. She was 55. Sayre created more than 80 books for young readers, many of them praised for their rhythm and clever wordplay. Sayre and her husband Jeffrey Sayre, an author, naturalist, and conservationist, traveled to 27 countries during their years together., and Sayre visited with more than 17,000 students across the country each year. “I try to communicate the excitement I feel about nature and my fascination with the way scientists discover how nature works,” she told Something About the Author in 1997. “I also feel it’s important to write about the environmental problems our planet faces and what’s being done to solve those problems.” Andrea Welch, executive editor of Beach Lane Books and Sayre’s longtime editor there, shared this remembrance: “April was endlessly curious about nature and a poet and artist at heart, and this was reflected in each of the 12 picture books we made together. She loved to explore beneath the surface of things, and it was always so fun to be along for the ride. We had long conversations on topics ranging from leaves to lemurs to an especially charismatic frog living in her pond that she named Lemon. I’ll never forget the time she asked for an extension one spring because she had been distracted by ‘an excessive amount of cuteness going on in the yard.’ Though I will miss April tremendously, it’s comforting to know that her books will continue to give children the gift of seeing and appreciating the natural world from her inimitable point of view.”

In this audio interview, author and cartoonist Jeff Kinney discusses his career and book series Diary of a Wimpy Kid. Kinney talks about how he got a book deal at Comic-Con, how he utilizes systematic inventive thinking to help his writing process, how he balances both jokes and big ideas throughout his books, and what it’s like going on book tours for children.

Relationship skills, social awareness, and self-management are essential social and emotional learning (SEL) tools to add to our learners’ tool kit to help them navigate all their new experiences in life and in learning. Below are three SEL signature practices from the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning. Within each of these practices, we share methods specifically designed for early childhood.

Many schools rely on paraprofessionals to give specialized support to teachers. But Rehobeth Elementary School (located in southeast Alabama) says trained and experienced aides are key to recent success. The school recently led peer mid- to high-poverty schools in reading scores, and in closing racial and socioeconomic gaps. Now, as the school, like many around Alabama, wrestles with dips in achievement scores from the pandemic and considers the impact of a third-grade reading law, staff are doubling down on the presence of Title I aides. And they’re expanding that expertise in developing a team of trained reading educators as they work on afterschool tutoring and community support.

Instead of candy bars and bags of chips, a new vending machine at Manhattan’s Mosaic Preparatory Academy dispenses children’s books. Students can earn “coupons” for being good Samaritans, such as helping out a peer or cleaning up without being asked. Once they earn five coupons, they can exchange them for a token that unlocks a book from the machine for them to take home. The machine is one way that Lisette Caesar, Mosaic’s principal, is trying to boost literacy among her roughly 200 students after one and a half school years without full-time, in-person school.

After months of deliberation, the editors and our insightful reviewer committee members have selected 139 titles addressing topics—such as climate change, racism, and history—that are more relevant than ever. They also include a balance of fantasy, historical and realistic fiction, and, for the first time in years, a breakout list of poetry. There’s a nice sprinkle of story time picks and slice-of-life tales. We hope that these will be helpful resources to meet the needs (and wants) of the children in your libraries and classrooms.

A first-of-its-kind study from the University of Kansas (KU), examining three key cognitive functions and their role in learning to write, suggests that insufficient focus on bilingual education has hindered the progress of Hispanic English learners (ELs). The KU study showed specifically how important word retrieval skills, verbal language skills, and ability to store information in memory are to writing ability.

The National Council of Teachers of English has announced the winners of the 2022 Orbis Pictus and Charlotte Huck awards. The Orbis Pictus Award was established in 1989 to recognize excellence in nonfiction for children. The 2022 winner is Nina: A Story of Nina Simone by Traci N. Todd, illus. by Christian Robinson. The Charlotte Huck Award was established in 2014 to honor excellence in children’s fiction writing. The 2022 winner is Cece Rios and the Desert of Souls by Kaela Rivera.

From soul food on Sundays and tamales on Christmas Eve to wu gok on Dumpling Day. In Tomatoes for Neela, a twinkly-eyed Indian American girl makes tomato sauce with her amma every summer, when the juicy, plump fruits are in season. Lakshmi’s language infuses the ritual with magic — a cookbook from the girl’s paati looks “old and important,” as if it’s “full of spells.”

Around the country, school librarians have found themselves on the front lines of the culture wars. As states pass laws that restrict teaching of “controversial” or “divisive” subjects, school libraries have seen calls to remove books about issues like race, gender, and sexuality from their shelves.

Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell, two of the biggest names in literacy education, are breaking their silence in the debate over how best to teach kids to read, responding to criticism that their ideas don’t align with reading science. At the center of the controversy are teaching techniques that encourage children to use context, pictures and sentence structure, along with letters, to identify words. Fountas and Pinnell reiterated their allegiance to this approach in their blog.

When students make observations, they learn how to describe what they see, interpret the images, and then make deeper connections. When students are able to fully “read” images, they can understand beyond the text and delve deeply into the author’s message. Imagine close reading, but instead of text, they’re examining images. Visual literacy encompasses the ability to effectively find, interpret, evaluate, use, and create images and visual media. The beauty of visual literacy is that it opens the door for other language arts standards to be woven into your lessons, and it accommodates all learners from pre-K to fifth grade.

Reading, writing and math are often thought of as subjects that children learn in school. But as a psychologist who researches how families can help support learning at home, I have found that children can also learn those skills through everyday tasks and chores. One of these chores is preparing a meal – everything from grocery shopping and cooking to setting the table and enjoying the meal. Our research shows this is especially true for Latino families living in the U.S., many of whom are new to school systems in the U.S. but for whom family dinners are a central part of the day.

The new question-of-the-week is: What are your recommendations for how best to set up and organize small groups in classroom instruction? Assigning student roles, choosing the right number of members, and providing feedback are among the strategies teachers can use.

We have been effective in conveying that SEL helps young people develop the skills to succeed in school and life, enables educators to create safe and inclusive learning environments, and promotes the overall well-being of young people. Our next step is to help parents understand the different ways in which schools approach SEL instruction through a combination of direct instruction, integration into academics, creation of identity-safe communities within classrooms and schools, and provision of service-learning opportunities that deepen social and cognitive skill development. None of these strategies takes time away from academic learning; rather, they expedite and deepen academic learning.

In classrooms across the country, the first months of school this fall have laid bare what many in education feared: Students are way behind in skills they should have mastered already. Children in early elementary school have had their most formative first few years of education disrupted by the pandemic, years when they learn basic math and reading skills and important social-emotional skills, like how to get along with peers and follow routines in a classroom. While experts say it’s likely these students will catch up in many skills, the stakes are especially high around literacy.

Helping students grow their social and emotional skills has become a big part of school counselors’ jobs, particularly given the impact of the pandemic on student mental health and behavioral issues. But it’s also time-consuming, difficult work, and counselors need more support and resources, according to a report released this week by ACT and the American School Counselors Association, based on a survey done last year of counselors and district officials.

Cognitive scientists have long understood that you need to first have some knowledge—either of the topic or of general academic vocabulary—in order to gain knowledge from written text, especially as it gets more complex. To acquire academic vocabulary, many students need coherent, systematic instruction in a series of topics that give them repeated exposure to the same concepts and words in varied contexts over a period of weeks. That’s especially true for children from less educated families who are less likely to acquire academic vocabulary outside school. A half-dozen or so recently developed literacy curricula do a good job of building kids’ knowledge, but most of those in use—including Calkins’ and Fountas and Pinnell’s curricula—don’t.

The border guard steps over to the car and asks the woman inside to declare her citizenship. “Blackfoot,” she responds. Thus begins the impasse that defines Borders, a graphic novel adapted by Natasha Donovan from the short story by Thomas King. The narrator and his mother are traveling from Canada to the United States. When the mother refuses to declare any citizenship other than Blackfoot, the Americans turn her away, and when she returns to the Canadian border post, the same thing happens. She and her young son are trapped in the gray area between borders. The story is a meditation on citizenship and nationality, as well as a testament to the fact that before any European set foot in North America, hundreds of sovereign nations stretched from coast to coast—sovereign nations that still exist. Borders is one of a growing number of graphic novels by and about Native people depicting a wide range of experiences and cultures.

Keishia Thorpe immigrated to the U.S. as a child, hoping for a better life than the poverty she came from in Jamaica. She’s now a teacher in Maryland — and her devotion to preparing young immigrants to succeed just brought her international recognition and $1 million, via the Global Teacher Prize. “This recognition is not just about me, but about all the dreamers who worked so hard and dare to dream of ending generational poverty,” she said in Paris, where the award ceremony was held via video conference. “This is to encourage every little Black boy and girl that looks like me and every child in the world that feels marginalized and has a story like mine and felt they never mattered.

More than a dozen studies have documented that students, on average, made sluggish progress in reading during the pandemic. Mackenzie Woll, a second grade teacher at Abby Kelley Foster Charter Public Elementary School in Worcester, Massachusetts, said diagnostic tests at the start of the year revealed that most of her students were reading at a kindergarten or a first grade level. In previous years, some students would come in reading above grade level; this year, no one in her class did. Woll now reviews kindergarten-level phonics with her second graders. In a normal year, the exercise would have been scaled back by this point, Woll says. “But because of the pandemic, I’m still doing those letter sounds every day.”

The judges select the 10 winners purely on the basis of artistic merit. On the 2021 panel were Catherine Hong, a children’s literature critic; Jessica Agudelo, a youth collections librarian at the New York Public Library; and Paul O. Zelinsky, a Caldecott Medal-winning illustrator of many acclaimed picture books — most recently “Red and Green and Blue and White,” by Lee Wind — and a past winner of the award.

A look at the artists behind this year’s winning books, in their studios.

Parents and students gave emotional testimony on Tuesday about struggling to read in a hyper-literate society, kicking off a renewed effort by Michigan lawmakers to pass a package of bills designed to help struggling young readers. The bills require school districts to screen students for dyslexia characteristics and increase teacher training requirements so teachers are better able to identify and address reading problems.

Since focusing on reading interventions, Midlothian’s (TX) reading STAAR scores have beat the state and regional averages. While the district as a whole serves relatively low numbers of poor students, its highest poverty campus — Vitovsky — has stayed relatively in line with the state on standardized tests in recent years. And while the pandemic clearly caused setbacks among most students, initial results from Midlothian’s first screening assessment this year were promising, Becki Krsnak, Midlothian’s director of curriculum and instruction said. Teachers who have embraced the science of reading among lower grades are already seeing gains.

Two of the nation’s most popular early literacy programs that have been at the center of a debate over how to best teach reading both faced more new critiques in the past few weeks, receiving bottom marks on an outside evaluation of their materials. EdReports—a nonprofit organization that reviews K-12 instructional materials in English/language arts, math, and science—published its evaluation of Fountas and Pinnell Classroom Tuesday, finding that the program didn’t meet expectations for text quality or alignment to standards. The release comes on the heels of the group’s negative evaluation last month of the Units of Study from the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, another popular early reading program. Together, the two reports received the lowest ratings EdReports has given for K-2 curricula in English/language arts, and they’re among the three lowest for ELA in grades 3-8.

Teachers across the country are seeing more and more students struggle with reading this school year. Pandemic school closures and remote instruction made learning to read much harder, especially for young, low-income students who didn’t have adequate technology at home or an adult who could assist them during the day. Many older students lost the daily habit of reading. Even before the pandemic, nearly two-thirds of U.S. students were unable to read at grade level. Scores had been getting worse for several years. The pandemic made a bad situation worse.

November is Native American Heritage Month. As we celebrate and honor Native and Indigenous peoples and nations, here are 22 titles to share with children and teens.

In response to COVID protocols, many school librarians were forced from their space and reassigned as tech support, mobile services providers, and classroom teachers. This is Ohio media specialist Joseph Vernacotola’s story.

Multilingual learners possess a diverse array of experiences and skills that contribute to the dynamics of the learning environment and their own academic success. We can provide multilingual students with opportunities to actively engage in translanguaging, the practice of students having opportunities to engage in the learning process by using their linguistic repertoire to support linguistic growth in their target language.

The full impact of the pandemic on kids’ health and fitness won’t be known for some time. But it’s already caused at least a short-term spike in childhood obesity. Rates of overweight and obesity in 5- through 11-year-olds rose nearly 10 percentage points in the first few months of 2020. Now, as schools scramble to help kids catch up academically, there are signs that PE is taking a back seat to the core subjects yet again. Some PE teachers say their students’ social-emotional skills have suffered more than their gross motor skills. “They forgot how to share; how to be nice to each other; how to relate to each other,” said Donn Tobin, an elementary PE instructor in New York. PE has a key role to play in boosting those skills, which affect how kids interact in other classes, said Will Potter, an elementary PE teacher in California.

We are the first storytellers on this continent. But despite the increasing visibility of Native and First Nations today, many readers are still new to our ways of making sense of the world through literature. Our stories often feature distinct, Indigenous literary styles and cultural references. Joyfully, the community of Native and First Nations writers creating books for children and teens keeps growing. For those new to the Native literary conversation, we give the same advice we offer to beginning writers. Read. Broadly. Extensively. Frequently. Read a wide array of Native voices. Realize that while patterns will emerge, individual approaches vary.

At the Giselle Learning Academy in Clarkston, it’s midmorning and toddler energy is loosed in all the classrooms, from children galloping, counting and building with blocks. Their delight in their activities is obvious. Less obvious is how each of the activities advances language and literacy skills, from teachers repeating key words to the children to engaging them in conversation on the floor mats. “Play is the highest form of learning,” said Giselle director Alexandra Cesar. “It is important that learning and teaching are blended with play.”

Despite its drawbacks, the online encyclopedia has value, particularly for those just getting started with research. Wikipedia is far from a perfect platform, but if we encourage students to recognize its strengths and flaws as they participate in improving this collective chronicle of our species and our understanding of the universe, we can teach many valuable lessons: how to know what is true, that each student’s voice matters, and that together, we can accomplish great things.

School librarians hear the question all the time: Why do we need school libraries and school librarians when students have the internet? Meanwhile, the number of school librarians in the U.S. has dropped about 20% over the past decade, according to a July 2021. Here are four functions that school librarians carry out that I believe make their role more important now than ever: foster digital literacy, champion the joy of reading, help teachers enhance their lessons, and seek out creative, diverse materials.

From Paralympics to disability rights, these books highlight the stories of young people with disabilities achieving their dreams. They will serve to both empower and inspire young readers.

For students who learn or think differently, a strong network of support is key. That network includes two critical players: teachers and parents. During the pandemic, it’s been harder than ever to bridge the communication gap between families and schools, especially during remote learning. How can these two groups develop better strategies and avenues for effective communication? That’s the central question we invited our Twitter followers to answer during a Twitter chat last month. Here are 6 key lessons learned about facilitating better communication, as told by the chat participants.

New data on academic performance for 1st through 8th grade students this fall in reading and math show that across the board, students are not doing as well as their peers were before the pandemic. The declines were particularly bad in math. The report, from curriculum and assessment provider Curriculum Associates, found that fewer students are on grade level in early reading and in upper elementary and middle school math than in years past. The numbers are lowest in schools that serve majority Black and Latino students, and in schools in lower-income ZIP codes. The data confirm what other analyses have found about the pandemic’s effect on student learning.