Today’s Literacy Headlines

Educators across the country say their top priority right now isn’t doubling down on math or reading — it’s helping students manage all of this pandemic-driven stress. “If kids don’t return to school and get a lot of attention paid to security, safety, predictability and re-establishing of strong, secure relationships, [they] are not gonna be able to make up ground academically,” says Matt Biel, a child psychiatrist at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital. To reestablish relationships in the classroom — and help kids cope with the stress and trauma of the past year — mental health experts say educators can start by building in time every day, for every student, in every classroom to share their feelings and learn the basics of naming and managing their emotions. Think morning circle time or, for older students, homeroom.

There’s no better way to kick off Earth Day 2021 on April 22 than with books that celebrate kids’ budding environmentalism. Last year’s Caldecott-winning picture book, “We Are Water Protectors,” is a luminous tale of an Ojibwe girl who rises up to protect the Earth’s water from harm, inspired by many Indigenous-led movements across North America. We asked the book’s author Carole Lindstrom and illustrator Michaela Goade to suggest children’s books for Earth Day 2021 for kids of all ages.

In a recent survey from the EdWeek Research Center, about a third of school and district leaders said that they’re planning to start the 2021-22 school year with some form of hybrid instruction. And most of these lessons, teachers said, will inform their practice even once they return to the physical classroom. Being forced to slow down, to think creatively about how to reach all students in a new format, and to adjust based on student feedback built new skills that teachers want to continue using post-pandemic. By facing the challenges of remote and hybrid learning, teachers say they’ve been able to find some successes. Education Week spoke with six teachers about the important lessons they learned during this time, distilling eight of them here.

As schools approach the end of a full year of pandemic learning, summer school is being reimagined and broadened into what is likely to be the most expansive — and expensive — summer programming in modern history. Education leaders see it as a desperately needed remedy for a calamitous school year that left many students across the country struggling and falling behind. School districts are exploring classes that go beyond addressing learning loss and remedial work to provide social interactions and emotional support for students of every age group. Some districts are even envisioning a robust summer school program as part of an experiment in a move to year-round learning.

Literacy is the bedrock of every elementary school and should be the number-one priority for post-pandemic educational recovery. A high-quality elementary curriculum imparts essential foundational skills in early reading and uses rich, engaging, and culturally responsive literary and informational texts. In the discussion bhere, we focus on three considerations for elementary ELA curriculum selection and implementation: the science of reading, standards alignment, and design that gives all students access to grade-level content. We explore how this can be done, and these high-impact elements play out in an exemplar curriculum from EL Education.

Many teachers want to implement independent reading in the classroom, but the perennial challenge of student accountability is a concern. To tackle accountability means to think about what matters to students and what makes reading relevant. Many middle and high school students are interested in social media, and teachers can tap into that to promote enthusiasm for reading.

Going remote but delivering physical materials is one solution to a problem that has plagued after-school providers across the country — how to continue providing their enrichment and child care solutions during a pandemic. After-school programs across the country were hit with the twin catastrophes of plummeting enrollment and the loss of their physical space. Many simply went out of business. Others, with the funding to do so, went online. Still others were left with the overwhelming task of providing emergency child care that they were not set up to offer. And a year into the pandemic, federal financial support has only now begun to arrive in the form of public education dollars set aside for enrichment.

The federal economic stimulus package passed last month achieves something progressives have dreamed of for decades: monthly assistance for families in poverty with no application process, work requirements, nor restrictions on how the money is spent. This should result in an enormous improvement in educational outcomes for our most disadvantaged children as long as it reaches those most in need and is made permanent. The link between child poverty and educational success is undeniable. In the U.S., about 30% of children raised in poverty do not finish high school. The correlation between poverty and low literacy levels is even more disturbing—82% of students eligible for free or reduced lunches are not reading at or above proficient levels by fourth grade.

At least twenty states have passed or are considering measures related to the science of reading. I’m generally not keen to impose my preferred flavors of curriculum and instruction on schools, despite some well-defined opinions on such matters. But if there’s an exception, it’s early childhood literacy with curriculum and instruction grounded in the science of reading. The foundational role of proficient decoding and comprehension in academic success suggests that, while it might make sense to let a thousand flowers bloom in curriculum, instruction, and school models—vive la différence!—we have no more important shared task than getting kids to the starting line of basic literacy from the first days of school. So if I have any lingering technocratic impulses left, they’re limited to early childhood literacy and the “science of reading.” But the open question is whether literacy laws—from mandating phonics to third grade retention policies—can have a beneficial effect on classroom practice.

If I had to name the most important institution in American life, and the one with the most potential for changing the course of our country, it would be the humble elementary school. Especially the 20,000 or so high-poverty elementary schools in the nation’s cities and inner-ring suburbs, educating millions of kids growing up in poor or working-class families. Yes, of course, we also need to dramatically improve the other parts of our education system if we’re to help all young Americans fulfill their God-given potential. That includes making high-quality pre-K more widely accessible to those who need it most, upping the quality of our middle schools, and rethinking and improving our high schools. Not to mention revamping our post-secondary education system and overhauling our workforce training programs. Still, if I were king for a day, or even just superintendent of a large district, I would spend at least twenty-three of my twenty-four hours in charge obsessing about elementary schools. And that’s for four big reasons.

[We may be looking at] a uniquely challenging situation this fall, as children enroll in kindergarten in potentially record numbers. Problematically, many of those children may lack the school readiness that their older peers were afforded in kindergarten, due to the pandemic’s impact on social interactions, structured learning experiences, and consistent, high-quality instruction. During a recent virtual event, the Hunt Institute, an education nonprofit affiliated with Duke University, led a conversation around the difficulties and opportunities that families and educators face as they look to transition a new class of children into kindergarten after more than a year of the pandemic. What follows are some of the highlights of that discussion.

Reading isn’t just a set of skills. The most important factor in helping middle schoolers overcome literacy issues is creating strong relationships with students and families. If we can identify struggling readers and keep them motivated, we can turn them around in life-changing ways. They might not be reading Faulkner or Shakespeare, but they can read their high school textbooks and graduate from high school. The challenge for our educators is that, by 7th grade, students might be hiding their challenges behind coping mechanisms that keep them from being discovered. Here’s how we find and help our middle schoolers who have trouble with reading.

Andrea Wang, Jason Chin, Travis Jonker, Grant Snider, Juana Martinez-Neal, Corinna Luyken and more depict our symbiotic relationship with the environment.

Children’s books are commonly used in home, school, and community contexts to promote awareness of complex social issues at the earliest stages of development. Children and their caregivers encounter cultural models for, and may appropriate sociocultural values and norms about, the screen time dilemma through their experiences with texts that contain narratives about screens. The dilemma centers on the question of how much screen time—oftentimes measured in the number of minutes—is too much? Also considered is the types of interactions children have with devices. More and more frequently, picture books contain representations of screens, media, and technologies. How might these texts be leveraged to help children understand their relationships with screens in a more nuanced way?

As the esteemed multicultural children’s literature scholar Rudine Sims Bishop explained, books can be “windows and mirrors.” As “windows,” books can offer children a view into a real or imagined world different from their own that can be gently explored, understood, and appreciated. We have compiled a list of exceptional children’s picture books about and by the Asian American community. The books on this list do not portray Asian Americans as exotic, foreign, or “other.” Books about holidays, food, or immigration are important, but—in order to avoid inadvertently “othering” Asian Americans—we also need to expose young people to narratives of kids (like the ones below) that don’t center identity as the main story.

In 2020, New America embarked on a year-long initiative with librarians in children’s and youth services across three library systems in Illinois. The aim was to build staff members’ skills and confidence in media mentorship—the act of mentoring and providing tailored guidance to students and families in selecting, analyzing, and using media to support learning.1 As media environments become increasingly complicated, this kind of mentorship is crucial to helping families and students get the non-commercial guidance they need to build skills and choose media (including books, videos, apps, and podcasts) that match their needs. Librarians are often well-positioned to do this kind of mentoring. Media mentorship is, after all, aligned with what many staff members are taught in schools of library and information science. But they need their own support and training on new techniques and programming innovations to keep up with the ever-changing media landscape.

Maryville University developed this visual guide to help with initial assessment of language development in pre-K children and determine what type of intervention may be appropriate.

A new study published in Cognition suggests that infants may have more advanced linguistic understanding than previously believed. Conducted by a team of researchers at the University of Edinburgh and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the study looks at how children aged 11-12 months old processed multi-word sequences—phrases like “clap your hands,” for instance. The results showed that children are indeed sensitive to multi-word utterances, thus challenging the commonly held understanding of language acquisition that children progress from understanding and producing single words to phrases and then to sentences.

Alternative note-taking practices like mind-mapping and sketchnoting prompt students to organize their thoughts visually, boosting comprehension and retention.

Attorney Warren Binford started a nonprofit dedicated to strengthening legal protections for children in custody. On its website, visitors can read sworn testimony from dozens of children and teenagers. But Binford ran into a problem: She says the children’s stories were just too harrowing to hold an audience. Her solution: a picture book. Hear My Voice/Escucha Mi Voz, published in both English and Spanish, features excerpts of the testimonies, paired with art by award-winning illustrators who are Latinx. Binford is hoping that Hear My Voice/Escucha Mi Voz will be suitable for families to read and talk about together. “The children’s book allows it to be a little kinder and gentler accounting of the children,” she explains. “And by creating this mosaic from different declarations [it] helps to give a sense of who these children are collectively.”

National Poetry Month inspires us to delve into poetry with our students; to read, write, and listen. The creativity and intimacy of audio can connect kids with poets, past and present, from across the globe. This playlist includes shows that use a range of audio methods to appeal to children’s ears, including a delightful Scottish host reading a musical poem; a how-to for writing haiku; an immersive biography of poet Dorothea MacKellar; an interview with poet and verse writer Elizabeth Acevedo; and a meditative show featuring the work of poet Amanda Gorman. And, if you still want Shel Silverstein, then there’s that too.

Over the past year, Deprece Bonilla, a mother of five in Oakland, Calif., has gotten creative about helping her children thrive in a world largely mediated by screens. It all sometimes feels like too much to bear. Still, when her fifth-grade son’s public-school teacher told her he was years behind in reading, she was in disbelief. Ms. Bonilla’s experience illustrates a roiling debate in education, about how and even whether to measure the academic impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the nation’s children — and how to describe learning gaps without stigmatizing or discouraging students and families. [Some] are pushing back against the concept of “learning loss,” especially on behalf of the Black, Hispanic and low-income children who, research shows, have fallen further behind over the past year. They fear that a focus on what’s been lost could incite a moral panic that paints an entire generation as broken, and say that relatively simple, common-sense solutions can help students get back up to speed.

In Transylvania, the district started training its elementary teachers in the science of reading in December. Since then, third-grade teacher Samantha Osteen says, she feels more hopeful. “It’s a relief for me to hear this and see this,” she said. “This is exactly what my kids need. I don’t have to guess. I can see, this is what they need if I need them to learn how to read, point blank. It’s not impossible. It’s manageable.” Transylvania County Schools plans more training. Already, teachers completed a one-day training with the North Carolina Center for the Advancement of Teaching, and some received another four-day training through The Reading League. Plans to start training in Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling (LETRS) are on hold, as the district waits to see what happens with proposed legislation that could impact future district-level training.

How do we teach very young learners to appreciate each person’s unique story and background—especially those who are traditionally underrepresented? At Germantown Friends School (GFS), author studies offer an engaging opportunity for students to take a deep dive into the works of one author or illustrator of color at a time to learn what their books reveal about different backgrounds, cultures, traditions, journeys, and families.

Rocks, even in kids’ books, such as William Steig’s “Sylvester and the Magic Pebble,” bode bad things: hopelessness, stuckness, imprisonment. But in this beautiful, spare, funny book by Jon Klassen — the Caldecott Medal-winning author of “I Want My Hat Back,” “This Is Not My Hat” and “We Found a Hat” — the rock signals something different: doom. Yay. With its muted, desolate landscapes, “The Rock From the Sky” is hilariously dark, especially about social relations. It features three main characters in five stories — a hat-wearing turtle whose favorite spot happens to be right where (unbeknown to him) a giant boulder is about to drop, a hat-wearing armadillo who’s worried about standing with the turtle in this spot and a beret-wearing snake who joins the armadillo.

Despite an estimated $18 billion spent annually on professional learning, there’s very little evidence that it’s effective. A new initiative is taking up the challenge of reviewing and rating professional learning in a more rigorous way, centered on the adoption and use of “high-quality instructional materials” (HQIM), and with the ambition of becoming something like the EdReports.org of professional learning. Louisiana-based Rivet Education has quietly published a “Professional Learning Partner Guide” aimed at increasing states’ use of high-quality instructional materials (HQIM) and aligned professional development for teachers.

Children with disabilities are among the most vulnerable students, and this is especially true as coronavirus-safety measures have led to less classroom time and frequent closures. Parents of elementary school students with disabilities may be wondering how they can support their child’s special education at home. While schools continue to implement Individual Education Plans and mandated services regardless of the remote, hybrid, or at-school learning model, there are resources available to parents who would like to supplement learning at home. Here are the best resources to help with online learning for special education students.

“Sesame Street” is turning its attention to helping kids with autism cope with change. The venerable children’s show is introducing a new episode and a slate of online videos and activities featuring Julia, a 4-year-old muppet with autism. The collection of materials is designed to address challenges that families face adjusting to changes in routine and uncertainty generally, something that has become all too familiar during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

It’s been a year since teachers were handed an unprecedented request: Educate students in entirely new ways amid the backdrop of a pandemic. In this comic series, we’ll illustrate one teacher’s story each week from now until the end of the school year. Episode 2: Lori Chavez, a middle school social studies teacher in Kewa Pueblo, N.M., discusses the importance of staying connected to your community during lockdown.

Most elementary schools teach reading with either a basal reading program, a teacher-developed curriculum, or a balanced literacy program like Fountas & Pinnell or Teachers College Units of Study. But the Council of Chief State School Officers, in calling for a national improvement in reading instruction, has called upon all state superintendents and commissioners to encourage schools and districts to adopt the high-quality materials that have been developed in the last few years to line up with both Common Core state standards and with the science of reading. In this podcast, experts Carol Jago and David Liben talk with Ed Trust’s director of practice Tanji Reed Marshall and writer-in-residence Karin Chenoweth about the difference using high-quality materials at both the elementary and secondary levels could make in helping students learn to read.

Drawing from brain science and research about learning, we must reinvent school in ways that center relationships, allow educators to deeply understand what children know and have experienced so they can build on it and draw connections to new learning; lead with social and emotional supports and skills, fully integrated with academic learning; and enable children to see their strengths and what they do know — to feel competent and confident that they can learn. We also need to support educators in recognizing the effects of trauma, accessing resources for children, and supporting their attachment and healing, rather than unwittingly exacerbating the effects of trauma by using curriculum and rules that alienate, rather than reattach students to school.

If you’re an educator, therapist, or caregiver, it’s important to understand why a child might struggle with handwriting, including the underlying skills that can impact functional handwriting legibility. Gross motor skills, fine motor skills, attention, sensory processing, and visual motor skills all play a role. Over time, strategies that are concrete and routine can build on the underlying component skills connected to the physiological and cognitive mechanics of handwriting.

According to the most recent data from the National Assessment of Educational Performance (NAEP), two-thirds of K-12 students are not writing at levels expected for their grade level. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, writing had not received the same attention as math or reading. Now, as teachers struggle to manage a combination of remote and face-to-face instruction, it is difficult to imagine how students are being encouraged to write regularly. These unique times call for new approaches to writing instruction and assessment.

When the pandemic hit and public libraries closed, collection funds at many libraries diverted toward ebooks, including ebooks of board books and picture books. But are ebooks a good format for young children? The research is a mixed bag. A 2019 study showed that toddlers are less interested when reading tablet-based books with parents. A 2012 Joan Ganz Cooney Center report found that parents engaged more with children around story content when they used print or a straight ebook than when they used an enhanced ebook with animation, games, and other features. But some of these features, when smartly integrated, promoted children’s language and literacy skills—particularly dictionaries, text that highlights as narrators read, and interactive features that support comprehension.

It’s been a year since teachers were handed an unprecedented request: educate students in entirely new ways amid the backdrop of a pandemic. In this comic series, we’ll illustrate one teacher’s story each week from now until the end of the school year. Maria Lemire, a preschool teacher in the East Village, New York City, on the challenges of early childhood education during the pandemic.

Children, animals and, yes, a piece of toast try on other identities, and learn not to judge books by their covers.

Judy Blume opened up about one of her regrets in life: never meeting beloved author Beverly Cleary, who died last week at age 104. Blume, 83, took to Twitter Saturday to pay homage to the late Cleary, writing, “Beverly Cleary! My inspiration. I wanted to write books like yours.”

Beverly Cleary, whose death at 104 was announced Friday, first introduced Ramona as a minor character in a different children’s novel. But over the next 50 years and eight books, she became her own protagonist, a real girl suffering the real problems of childhood, in all of their smallness and their enormity.

Never mind that Beverly Cleary was beloved and popular, an icon. She was the kind of writer who answered her own phone.

Her funny stories about Henry Huggins and his dog Ribsy, the sisters Ramona and Beezus Quimby, and a motorcycling mouse named Ralph never talked down to readers.

The U.S. Department of Education is being asked to tell schools to direct significant funding from the recent COVID-19 relief law toward students with disabilities who have missed out on services they were entitled to during the pandemic. A broad coalition of parents, teachers unions and disability advocates filed an 80-page “petition for guidance” this week with the Education Department. The move comes as school districts are set to see a huge influx of cash from the new law known as the American Rescue Plan.

Four educators offer suggestions on helping students develop critical-thinking skills, including through the use of “evaluative praise.”

The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have significantly impacted school library budgets and spending this year, according to the results of the latest SLJ School Library Budget and Spending Survey. About 38 percent of librarians reported a decrease in their library budget from 2019–20. Many schools are looking for donations and other sources of funding to supplement their budget losses, while teachers are spending hundreds of dollars of their own money on items for the library and also searching for free and donated materials though sites such as DonorsChoose. The percentage of funding coming from book fairs decreased as well, from 17 percent in 2017-18 to 14 percent this year.

Everything was normal last spring up until the minute it wasn’t, as the world seemed to stop on a dime and schools found themselves transitioning overnight to remote instruction. But while the great COVID pivot may have felt instantaneous, it took far longer to begin to grasp the consequences for students and families of these long-run closures. Here at The 74, we’ve chronicled those consequences over the past 12 months via our new PANDEMIC hub. Now looking back through the seasons at which stories were most shared and widely circulated, a few obvious trends emerge about the evolving reality for students and readers’ top concerns. Here are a dozen of the key lessons we’ve learned over the past 12 months about the students most impacted by the public health crisis.

Only 35 percent of America’s 4th graders read proficiently, and access to educational opportunity and literacy in the United States remains overwhelmingly defined by ZIP code, race, socioeconomics, and ethnicity. In failing to set so many students up for future success, we have not only cheated our children, but we have failed our teachers. They have been fighting a constant battle to help their students thrive in a system set up to fail them, generation after generation. Teaching remotely for many months has not lightened those stress loads nor revised the necessary objectives ahead. Here’s an urgent two-point plan to fix what’s been fundamentally broken for generations as we think about what classrooms should look like in the 2021-22 school year ahead and beyond.

Whether a part of online or in-person classes, videos are a teaching tool that can enable students to learn new concepts and skills and engage in practice activities, all at their own pace. What actually happens when students watch instructional videos in class, however, doesn’t always lead to the expected outcome. From my own experience in a classroom and through my interactions with these teachers, I’ve discovered some strategies to help students learn from videos, regardless of the educational setting. It turns out that I had missed a huge step in the learning process. I had never taught my students how to learn from a video. First, think about your objectives for the video.

When the COVID-19 pandemic shut down schools and libraries last spring, nothing felt the same. But one thing that didn’t change was the curiosity of kids. Even as their lives were upended by the new virus, they wanted to know more about it, and more about the workers who kept the world spinning while the rest of us stayed home. Those who make books for kids felt the same curiosity. While many adults coped with the lockdown by taking up new hobbies or baking bread, some authors and illustrators found that leaning into the situation with creativity was a better fit. A year into the pandemic, those projects are beginning to hit bookshelves. They include everything from hopeful picture books and tributes to scientists and essential workers to historical perspectives on public health.

For many elementary school teachers, teaching students how to read is a central part of the job. But the majority of states don’t evaluate whether prospective teachers have the knowledge they’ll need to teach reading effectively before granting them certification, according to a new analysis from the National Council on Teacher Quality. According to NCTQ’s evaluation of state licensure tests for teachers, 20 states use assessments that fully measure candidates’ knowledge of the “science of reading,” referencing the body of research on the most effective methods for teaching young children how to decode text, read fluently, and understand what they’re reading. For special education teachers, a group that regularly works with students with reading difficulties, just 11 states’ certification tests meet this standard.

Digital picture books have been a godsend during the pandemic. With libraries shuttered and bookstores a nonessential trip, many parents have downloaded book after book on tablets and smartphones to keep their little ones reading. But when the pandemic is over, many parents will face a dilemma. Should they revert back to print or stick with e-books? Do kids absorb and learn to read more from one format versus the other? A new analysis of all the research on digital picture books, published in March 2021, helps to answer this question. The answer isn’t clear cut: paper generally has an edge over digital but there are exceptions. Digital books can be a better option with nonfiction texts and for building vocabulary. Some digital storybooks were better; researchers found that certain types of story-related extras seemed to boost a child’s comprehension but they were rare.

April has long been known as “Autism Awareness Month,” but advocates are pushing this time around for a federal designation of the month focused on acceptance instead. The Autism Society of America is spearheading an effort calling on local, state and federal leaders across the nation to name April “Autism Acceptance Month.” The group is seeking support from members of Congress and the White House for the designation. The Autism Society notes that advocates have been using the term “acceptance” over “awareness” for some time, but the government has been slow to adjust. Other groups including Easter Seals and the National Association of Councils on Developmental Disabilities are supporting the effort. “It’s not enough to know that someone has autism, we need to accept and push for inclusion so that individuals can fully participate in our social fabric,” said Christopher Banks, president and CEO of the Autism Society.

Marianne Carus, the German-born, Sorbonne-educated founder of Cricket, the lively and erudite monthly magazine often called “The New Yorker for kids,” died on March 3 at her home in Peru, Ill. She was 92. Ms. Carus began Cricket in 1973 after years of dismay over what she considered the sorry state of children’s reading material, including the books that her own three children brought home from school. “Good literature is literature you cannot put down,” she explained.. “And children for some reason did not get the best literature in the schools or in their homes.”

The history of vaccines is a deserving addition to Don Brown’s Big Ideas That Changed the World graphic nonfiction series, and the arrival of “A Shot in the Arm!” couldn’t be more timely. Narrated by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762), this fascinating and enlightening journey takes us around the world and introduces us to a range of scientific superstars of germ theory and vaccination development. One of the book’s shining moments is a clever infographic depiction of how vaccines help antigens more efficiently fight certain pathogens.

The right to be taught how to read is a birthright of all Americans, argues attorney Mark Rosenbaum. And schools have a responsibility to teach them, says reading expert Nell Duke. They are allies in a series of legal cases to try to establish the “right to read,” and they join podcast co-hosts Karin Chenoweth and Tanji Reed Marshall in this second installment of a series of podcasts about reading instruction. (The first was a conversation with reading researcher Alfred Tatum.) Among other things, they discussed the three legal cases Rosenbaum has brought.

After a dreary year spent largely at home in front of the computer, many U.S. children could be looking at summer school—and that’s just what many parents want. Although the last place most kids want to spend summer is in a classroom, experts say that after a year of interrupted study, it’s crucial to do at least some sort of learning over the break, even if it’s not in school and is incorporated into traditional camp offerings. Several governors, including in California, Kansas and Virginia, are pushing for more summer learning. And some states are considering extending their 2021-22 academic year or starting the fall semester early. Many cities, meanwhile, are talking about beefing up their summer school programs, including Los Angeles, Hartford, Connecticut and Atlanta—the latter of which considered making summer school compulsory before settling for strongly recommending that kids who are struggling take part.

As the nation continues to battle the COVID-19 pandemic and at-home learning continues, there will be a need to help students, especially the nation’s most vulnerable students, complete unfinished learning for weeks, months, and even years to come. Research shows targeted intensive tutoring can help historically underserved students to catch-up to meet high standards. District leaders should follow the research and invest in evidence-based methods to support students to get back on track. Targeted intensive tutoring, often referred to as high-dosage tutoring, consists of having the same tutor to work over an extended period of time (e.g., all year, every school day) on academic skills, such as math or reading.

After making a major shift to remote learning at the beginning of the pandemic, some teachers had to adjust to another unfamiliar environment when their school buildings reopened: teaching students online and in-person at the same time. Engaging, monitoring and supporting two sets of students with very different needs is a complex juggling act that some teachers have described as their biggest challenge ever. From the beginning, it was clear that teachers needed support. The Learning Accelerator interviewed educators around the country in order to develop concrete guidance on the subject and capture and share specific strategies that have helped teachers and students succeed. Here are three pieces of advice from teachers at Personalized Learning Prearatory at Sam Houston Elementary School in Dallas.

For some students, executive functioning challenges are present in school every day, even when there is a consistent and predictable routine. Now imagine the challenges that students with executive functioning deficits encounter when navigating the ever-changing schedule of hybrid learning. The thoughts and frustrations can pile on with inconsistent days, variable schedules, and flexible routines, possibly leading to withdrawal, maladaptive behaviors, and an increased risk of school failure. However, there are solutions and accommodations to decrease undesired behaviors and disorganized thoughts associated with executive functioning challenges in the hybrid learning model.

Book fairs at Lake George (NY) Elementary School are the social event of the year. But after the COVID-19 pandemic moved schools online last March, the Lake George Elementary book fair—like many across the country—was canceled. When the district reopened for in-person learning in the fall, school library media specialist Bridget Crossman wanted to re-create that community engagement. The school library was off-limits to visitors, so Crossman held the book fair outside. During the past year, both Follett and Scholastic Book Fairs were forced to reimagine their models. With Follett’s eFair program, librarians receive curated lists and an array of tools, such as social media posts, email templates, and mailers. Books are sorted and bagged for each student to minimize work for the librarian. Scholastic’s virtual fairs include interactive author and video content. Follett and Scholastic also now ship books directly to families.

As President Biden pushes to get students back in schools, there’s one crucial question: How much social distance is necessary in the classroom? The answer (to that question) has huge consequences for how many students can safely fit into classrooms. Public schools in particular are finding it difficult to accommodate a full return if 6 feet of social distancing is required — a key factor behind many schools offering hybrid schedules that bring students back to the classroom just a few days a week. The CDC’s current guidance for schools recommends seating or desks be “at least 6 feet apart when feasible.” But a new study published in Clinical Infectious Diseases suggests that 3 feet may be as safe as 6 feet, so long as everyone is masked. The authors compared infection rates at Massachusetts schools that required at least 3 feet of distancing with those that required at least 6 feet, and found no significant difference in the coronavirus case rates among students or staff in the two cohorts.

With the right support, students who cannot rely on natural speech to communicate can do well in integrated classrooms. Students who cannot rely on speech to be understood don’t have to be educated in segregated classrooms. And for educators who have students who require communication supports, training or preparation doesn’t have to be complex. With schools increasingly educating students with disabilities in inclusive classrooms, educators will likely come across people who need or use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) in their classroom as part of a co-teaching model or with assistance from a paraprofessional. Here are four ways educators can prepare for students who need AAC.