Today’s Literacy Headlines

Think back to the books you read as a child — there’s a good chance that some of them had to do with the environment, nature, or animals. Children’s books are so important — not only do they help little ones learn new words and concepts, but they can also help shape children’s perception of the world. So for any budding young environmentalists in your life, a children’s book about the environment would make a perfect gift.

Many children in the U.S. live their lives in two or more languages: A child of Guatemalan descent may read bedtime stories in Spanish with their parents and learn in English at school—and perhaps speak K’iche’ with their grandparents. Research has shown that these multilingual children may have strong math skills, conflict resolution skills, and executive function skills. By welcoming the whole multilingual child, including their linguistic practices, we send a powerful message that children from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds contribute to the vibrancy of our early childhood programs. Multilingualism is an asset to be nurtured in our classrooms, and the following five strategies can help teachers strategically and intentionally celebrate and extend multilingual children’s existing linguistic expertise as well as their participation in learning activities both in person and virtually.

It’s now official. Unless Congress pushes back on Secretary DeVos’s request—which seems unlikely—the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests of fourth and eighth grade reading and math that were scheduled for 2021 will be deferred at least a year. That means this vital source of data on student achievement won’t tell us anything between spring ‘19 and autumn ‘22, when we can reasonably expect the next results to appear. This means, in effect, that NAEP is AWOL for the pandemic and its school shutdowns, turning a blind eye to the learning losses that they’re causing. This also means that state testing in spring 2021 is now more important than ever—and that President Biden’s education secretary should resist all demands for another round of waivers from ESSA’s requirement that all students in grades three through eight should be assessed annually in reading and math. Absent such data, we’ll see both a collapse, perhaps permanently, of results-based school accountability and—more immediately—an appalling dearth of information about who is and isn’t learning what during these challenging times for K–12 education.

Children’s podcasting responded to the pandemic with episodes speaking to the moments children and families are experiencing, fortifying them with valuable information, and providing great storytelling, messages of empowerment, and off-screen learning. While adult podcast listening is down, with fewer people tuning in while commuting, children’s listening increased by 24 percent in March, and by August, one in four children were tuning in to podcasts. This playlist provides an overview of how children’s podcasters pivoted, responded, and engaged with their audiences in new and creative ways. We selected episodes that represent general trends, including growth of podcast programming into other children’s media, empowerment of student podcasting, expansion of topics for kids, and activism and civic engagement.

As protests against racial injustice spread to communities large and small in this year, many educators have been pushed to examine how systemic racism harms students. Some have publicly proclaimed the steps they will take to create anti-racist schools, including diversifying classroom and library bookshelves. That task may be easier than ever, thanks to six years of advocacy by the We Need Diverse Books campaignBuilding a classroom library that offers “windows, mirrors and sliding glass doors” to all children is more than a numbers game. It requires thoughtful curation of who is represented and how. Here are seven pitfalls to avoid when deciding what to leave in and out, accompanied by more than 50 title recommendations based on conversations in this piece to help kickstart the journey.

Preschool years are arguably among the most formative of a child’s life. A student who starts kindergarten without preschool is more likely to repeat a grade, require special-education services or drop out. “Unfortunately, for children, the impact of this pandemic will be felt for years,” said Dimitri Christakis, a pediatrician who directs the Seattle Children’s Hospital Center for Child Health, Behavior and Development. It’s hard to quantify how much the pandemic is undermining children’s readiness for kindergarten. Schools such as those in the Educare network are in the process of rolling out virtual assessments designed to measure students’ achievement levels, but experts warn that the findings from those evaluations will need to be taken with a grain of salt.

A sweeping new review of national test data suggests the pandemic-driven jump to online learning has had little impact on children’s reading growth and has only somewhat slowed gains in math. That positive news comes from the testing nonprofit NWEA and covers nearly 4.4 million U.S. students in grades three through eight. But the report also includes a worrying caveat: Many of the nation’s most vulnerable students are missing from the data. “Preliminary fall data suggests that, on average, students are faring better than we had feared,” says Beth Tarasawa, head of research at NWEA, in a news release accompanying the report. “While there’s some good news here, we want to stress that not all students are represented in the data, especially from our most marginalized communities.”

I write to request that you not approve the proposed replacement of NAEP’s assessment of reading comprehension, a change that could go into effect with the 2025 tests. In short, this well-meant proposal to replace the framework that governs NAEP’s reading assessment is not helpful and should be disapproved. It would not accurately report reading comprehension ability. It would not accurately expose the unfair gaps in reading between groups—gaps that we know how to close, that schools should be encouraged to close, and that their customers, the parents and guardians of these children, wish them to close to improve their life chances.

The need for media mentorship is gaining urgency under three rapidly evolving and interrelated developments: The Digital Age has brought a deluge of new types of content and tools, from apps to social media networks to video streams. Becoming an informed citizen now demands new skills in filtering out disinformation, understanding how the media works, and learning new mindsets that advance media literacy. And the COVID-19 pandemic has required that more and more learning and exploration be mediated by digital media and technology, putting questions of digital equity front and center. Media mentorship is part of building a more informed, discerning, and media-savvy citizenry, greater social cohesion in communities, and, ultimately, a stronger democracy. Download the full guide here.

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

Nell Duke, a professor of Literacy, Language, and Culture at the University of Michigan, says that the biggest difficulty lies in asynchronous time, specifically the lack of a “direct teacher presence.” Worksheets, instructions, books, and videos don’t adequately replace in-person teacher mediation, where a teacher adjusts or coaches in the moment. “We just don’t know how to move the needle substantially for children in early literacy without direct contact and interaction,” she says. But Duke believes that synchronous instruction can work well through videoconferencing. “You can still do phonics instruction by videoconference. You can still listen to children read and use information from that to plan future instruction. You can still work on more phonological awareness. You can still read to them and do an interactive read-aloud,” she says.

According to the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA), there is a common misconception that being bilingual contributes to speech or language delays in children. However, it is important to note this is a difference, not a delay or disorder. Bilingual children may present with common speech patterns and phenomena that make it appear they are delayed or confused. Rather, these are common processes that occur when children are learning multiple languages. These patterns are typically not indicative of a speech disorder. Rather, there are aspects of bilingualism that speech therapists should be aware of when evaluating or treating a child.

Browse this list of recommended titles, including upside-down fairy tales, a neon periodic table, the art of Ramona Quimby and more.

Written words are always processed in the left side of the brain (primarily in a small neural region known as the visual word form area, or VWFA). It is believed this part of the brain serves to break down words into phonological chunks so that they can later be built back up to derive meaning via frontal regions of the brain. In short, effective reading appears to require auditory discrimination: a significant tick in favor of the role of phonemic awareness in teaching children to read. This process of phonological decomposition makes sense for alphabetic scripts like English – but does it still occur with syllabic scripts (whereby each character represents a complete syllable) or logographic scripts (whereby each character represents a complete word)? It turns out, yes. Interestingly, dyslexia supplies another line of evidence in favor of phonologic training.

Many new children’s books offer something especially useful this year: an opportunity for kids to understand the perspective of someone who’s not just like them. That may come from a friendship story, a head-on look at racism or even a picture book about eating lunch. But it’s not a coincidence that books for young readers have become more diverse in the past several years. It has been an organized push for change. Children’s author Ellen Oh and a half-dozen other authors, illustrators and book industry professionals, started the nonprofit We Need Diverse Books with the aim to shake up the industry. The organization has done so with a dizzying array of programs.

A year ago, mother and daughter taught in classrooms one room apart at Bushnell Way Elementary School in Highland Park — Mrs. Carter with 4-year-olds, Ms. Tai in a mixed group of children ages 4 and 5. Many of the felt puppets and linking cubes they shared there are the same ones Karen Carter used when her daughter was a student in her classroom. Now, the pair teach their pint-size students from home, keeping L.A.’s youngest learners engaged online even as kindergarten enrollment has plummeted and online attendance has slumped. “I’ve been an early educator for 35 years and it’s really hard for young children to learn on Zoom,” said Mrs. Carter, who re-created her kindergarten classroom around her dining table. “Especially with everything they’re dealing with at home.

Essay writing and math class might seem like oil and water, two things that don’t mix easily. But there’s increasing evidence that students who are asked to write about what they are learning master the material better — even in number-filled subjects like math and science. Education experts call it “writing to learn,” in contrast to “learning to write,” which is usually taught in an English class. The theory is decades old. The act of writing clarifies thoughts and improves understanding, similar to talking over an idea with a friend. Putting pencil to paper also creates and reinforces memory, helping a student to recall information later during a test. Many experiments have documented the power of writing outside of English classes but others haven’t found it to be so beneficial. Steve Graham, a national expert in writing research at Arizona State University, along with two researchers at the University of Utah, decided to review all the studies and found that the writing-to-learn theory is solid.

When students are learning how to write, mentor texts can be a valuable tool. These published pieces provide students with a road map as they’re trying to find their own voices as writers. Author Lynne Dorfman says mentor texts are designed to be “studied and imitated,” and they “help students to take risks and be different writers tomorrow than they are today.” What comes after mentor texts? How does this help me outside of class? Part of the response is the value of transfer of the learned concepts or information in new situations. Here are four routines for using mentor texts.

This summer, teachers rolled up their T-shirt sleeves and set out to make a plan for outdoor learning. A teacher in Wisconsin worked with her students to build a 12-sided outdoor classroom. A school in New York City held class on the roof. A district superintendent in Maine bought every Adirondack chair she could find. But now, less than a month from the winter solstice, it’s getting cold. Some days, it’s raining. Other days, there’s snow. And often, the elements pose a stiff challenge to outdoor learning. Many schools have not had the time, or the funding, to plan for contingencies, but folks have been getting creative. Here are some strategies that might work to keep students in nature for longer.

It’s always important to help children develop oral language, in any languages they speak. Oral language includes vocabulary, listening comprehension, asking and answering questions – really anything that helps students speak and listen in meaningful ways. When children have opportunities to develop strong oral language, they will be better prepared for learning how to read. Literacy can be improved by improving their comprehension and knowledge of language as a whole. Along with reading to children, podcasts, audiobooks and educational television can be great tools for building oral language.

COVID-19 has blown the doors off our schools and the walls off our classrooms. It has Zoomed educators into homes and parents into classrooms, providing the transparency that parents have long deserved. No longer are our practices hidden behind doors or buried in the pages of policy and collective bargaining agreements; they are now in full view on a screen. And our parents are watching. Parents in every community and ZIP code have always cared deeply about their children’s education. The difference now is that we are seeing it in both more intimate and more public ways. No longer can we dust off the welcome mats for back-to-school nights and parent-teacher conferences and then swiftly roll them back up, shooing parents away and telling them, “Trust us.” We are now guests in their homes. For the first time ever, parents can see what exactly we’re giving their children— and what we’re not. They are hearing how we talk to students. They are coming to know, through all that we do, what we believe about their children.

Accessing education during the nation’s COVID-19-related school closures was often an uphill battle for the combined 12 million students who are English-language learners and students with disabilities. A new report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office outlined the factors that complicated the delivery of special education services and shut off access to learning for English-learners. Under federal law, these students are eligible for tailored, specialized education services designed to help them succeed in school. But those services are not always easily transferable to distance learning. To adapt to the schooling limitations created by the pandemic, some schools adjusted students’ learning goals and service plans with mixed results, the study found. For students with disabilities, schools were often unable to deliver services, such as speech, occupational, and physical therapy, that were guaranteed in students’ Individualized Education Programs. In districts that provided virtual therapy, parents were pressed into duty, forced to try to replicate the therapy that trained specialists would normally provide in school.

Though few public schools have the budget to hire a full-time mindfulness teacher, many have been introducing mindfulness in the classroom since the coronavirus pandemic shuttered buildings and thrust children into their at times stressful and chaotic home environments. Mindfulness school programs have been shown to improve young people’s emotional well-being, academic performance and relationships. For schools that want to offer mindfulness but don’t have the money or resources to hire someone or provide training, digital programs with recordings may be helpful, and can offer customization for students. Some apps ask the students a series of questions about how they’re feeling and what they want to focus on, for example, and provide a specific meditation based on their responses.

When schools and districts shut down abruptly in the spring, principals jumped into action. They knocked on doors to find students, packed meals for families, scrambled to set up remote learning programs, and, in some cases, even provided money to families struggling to make ends meet. Their experiences in those early chaotic days as the coronavirus pandemic swept across the country, and their preparation for the new school year, are captured in a series of five recently published briefs by the Consortium for Policy Research in Education, at the University of Pennsylvania. The briefs, based on interviews with 120 principals in 19 states, show principals’ raw reactions as they and their districts struggled to make plans amid a fog of uncertainty and the challenges they faced. The analyses also include takeaways for schools and districts to prepare for the next emergency.

The question of how to authentically and fairly assess distance learners is one that educators, administrators, and school districts have been struggling with since the spring. In my district, a list of suggested methods of online assessment was released after significant pressure from teachers, but few of them were very specific or plausible. My guess is that many teachers are in the same boat regarding a lack of direction in regard to assessment and have been left to work it out on their own. Below are four assessment strategies that I’ve tested in my digital/physical classroom. Although every subject area has unique assessment needs, I think most teachers will be able to find something in this list that could work for them, whether they are teaching in person, online, or in a hybrid format.

In celebration of book 15 in Jeff Kinney’s mega-bestselling Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, the author took an innovative approach that followed pandemic protocol. Kinney embarked on The Deep End Drive-Thru Pool Party, a socially distanced tour along the East Coast. The tour, which kicked off on October 27 and ended on November 13, featured a number of interactive book-themed stations for kids and their families to experience from the safety of their vehicles. At the end of each visit, Kinney posed for photos with fans. We’ve gathered highlights from the festivities.

In this era of junior chef competitions and Instagram food influencers, it’s no surprise that middle grade and young adult books are more food-focused than ever. But what’s refreshing is that the food isn’t as exclusively Anglo-American as it used to be. Four new books featuring Taiwanese, Pakistani, Indian and Chinese families might spark the curiosity of kids who’ve grown up eating plain old “regular” American food. And for immigrant kids grappling with the weird lunches their moms pack, they just might inspire a bit of pride.

At the tail end of a recent symposium titled “Why children can’t read—and what we can do about it” hosted by American Enterprise Institute, Margaret Goldberg, a California first grade teacher and founder of the Right to Read Project, made a simple and surprising observation. As a teacher, she feels that her most important job is to teach reading. But that’s not the message she and other elementary educators are hearing. If you’ve never been in the classroom, hearing a first grade teacher say she’s told that her success is judged on things other than teaching reading must sound like telling an air traffic controller she has things to do that are no less important than safely landing planes. If we’re serious about raising reading achievement (is there anything more important for early childhood education?) the best place to start is by clearing away the weeds and signaling to pre-K and elementary school teachers that their primary job is to teach reading. Since nearly every bad outcome in education has its roots in early reading struggles, everything else matters less.

At its core, librarians say the limitations imposed by COVID-19 have not fundamentally changed their roles. But how they execute their vision undoubtedly has. They are reimagining how to build a culture of reading for students who can no longer peruse the stacks or—in some cases—even set foot on campus. “We can’t have kids pluck books off the shelves,” says Michelle Luhtala, the library department chair at New Canaan High School in Connecticut, and an expert in emerging library technology. “Typically droves of kids come down and get fresh books, and it’s a whole time for exchange and fun and conversation about what they read, and having to do that virtually is not nearly as fun as it is in person.”

To not only adapt during this time of great disruption but design something new and better, we have to start with an unwavering commitment to creating the conditions where all students are seen, heard and truly belong. For me, an essential piece of that vision is positioning afterschool staff and culture as a critical component of the thriving education ecosystem of the future. The afterschool and expanded learning community is built for this type of scenario. California’s publicly funded afterschool programs have diverse staff; 74 percent live in the communities they serve, and they often share the same ethnic, socioeconomic and class background as the students they work with. Afterschool programs are often located in communities with three-quarters of students eligible for Free or Reduced Price Meals and more than double the proportion of English learners as schools without expanded learning programs.

When teaching students with dyslexia through online learning platforms, educators should assess their existing resources. Technology help is often available through school specialists or online webinars hosted by the creators of the software. Using any existing strategies that can easily transition to distance learning will maintain consistency. It’s also important to reach out to parents who may not know the best way to help their dyslexic child succeed. The Orton-Gillingham approach — which teaches students how to decode words — converts well into a remote setting. For example, when using the phonogram card drill, instructors can hold the cards up to the camera. By using the mirror setting, they can also see what the students are seeing and be sure it reads correctly to the student. Instructors can use a document camera to conduct the blending drill.

When students at Anser Charter School in Garden City, Idaho returned to in-person classes Sept. 28, everything about school looked different than six months ago. Anser is an EL Education school, meaning it focuses on learning through projects and expeditions that regularly take students outside the school’s walls. Learning away from the classroom is nothing new for veteran Anser students. What is new, for at least part of many days, is that the classroom itself will be outside the school walls as well. It’s an accommodation designed to decrease risk of COVID-19 transmission at the 375-student, K-8 school. Across the country, schools — some charter, some private, some district-run public — are figuring out ways to minimize the spread of COVID-19. Since studies increasingly show that the virus transmits less readily outdoors than in, creative leaders and teachers are figuring out ways to get their students into the fresh air.

Parent-teacher interactions are tougher in this remote or hybrid learning setup so many of us are working through. Without the face-to-face interactions at dropoff or pickup, or traditional parent-teacher conferences, some parents are feeling disconnected from their children’s teachers. Teachers are struggling to build relationships, too. I’m an administrator at an elementary school in Camden, New Jersey, where schools are still all-online or operating with a hybrid model. I’ve seen firsthand that there are no shortcuts or easy ways out of the communication challenges that make a year like this one so hard. Even veteran teachers are anxious. But developing strong ties between schools and families has never been more important — and the basics are still the same. Here are a few of the lessons I’ve learned.

Kids, this comic is for you. You’ve been living through this pandemic for months – and you might be feeling sad, frustrated or upset. But there are lots of different ways to deal with your worries – and make yourself feel better. Here’s some tips and advice to help you through. Print and fold a zine version of this comic here. Here are directions on how to fold it. This comic is based on interviews conducted by NPR’s Cory Turner with Tara Powell at the University of Illinois School of Social Work, Joy Osofsky at the LSU Health Sciences Center in New Orleans, Krystal Lewis at the National Institute of Mental Health, Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of Brown’s School of Public Health and Rosemarie Truglio, senior vice president of curriculum and content at Sesame Workshop.

At the beginning of the school year, students’ existing reading preferences provide starting points for connecting them with books. Valuing their tastes shows students we trust them to make their own decisions about what they read. We can build their confidence by offering books that match their interests. As the year progresses, deeper knowledge of students’ preferences and abilities helps us challenge them beyond their comfort zones and offer books that expand their reading experiences. While we do not want students to miss the expansive joys of reading and the increased social comprehension reading widely provides, adults must recognize that children who read a lot, and express strong reading preferences, have highly developed reading identities already. Yes, we have a responsibility to encourage them to read widely, but don’t despair if your most avid readers don’t choose to read a poetry book this year. t. Continue offering books that stretch them, but don’t take it personally if they push back on your suggestions.

Four educators share strategies for encouraging students to WANT to read, including by illustrating that it makes them smarter and that it makes them better writers.

To support kids with ADHD in elementary and middle school, the educators we spoke with said they’re focusing on the fundamentals of smart online teaching: brain and body breaks, chunking lessons into shorter units, and connecting with and soliciting feedback from their students—but especially those with ADHD—as often as possible. “In regular classrooms, the whole first quarter is about understanding students’ learning styles and creating partnerships with them to learn what I might do to help them,” says New Orleans elementary school educator Sari Levy. “We can’t forget that point when we’re teaching digitally.” Here’s a breakdown of what we found teachers are doing for their kids with ADHD.

We Need Diverse Books, AKA WNDB, is a non-profit, grassroots organization of children’s book lovers that advocates for es­sential changes in the publishing industry. Our aim is to create a world in which every child can see themselves in the pages of a book. WNDB offers a range of dynamic initiatives for writers, illustrators, educators, librarians, publishing professionals, and anyone looking for the next great children’s book. People who work in publishing, library services, or education can advocate for the inclusion of diverse books at their school, workplace, and community. Their voice can ensure that literature and texts featuring diverse characters are reflected in curricula and available for free in public libraries. Learn more in this Q&A with Locus Magazine.

When the squirming third graders sitting six feet apart in her classroom tried to get Abigail Boyett’s attention, she pointed to the pair of leopard ears sitting on her head. Months into the school year at San Antonio’s Northside Independent School District, the Lewis Elementary School third graders knew the fuzzy headband meant their teacher was focused on the other half of the class, the students sitting at home tuning into the lesson through Zoom. Both “roomies” and “zoomies” were supposed to be working independently on multiplication assignments, while Boyett pulled aside two who had struggled to grasp the concept. Teachers across the country are struggling to adapt to hybrid classroom approaches cobbled together in response to the enduring pandemic. Many say they’re having trouble reaching the students who need their help the most.

5th grade teacher Denice Garrett is working to keep her students engaged when they’re not working on class or homework. Because access to books has been limited by the pandemic, she started a Donors Choose project to purchase books for her students’ home libraries. “I want to have an opportunity to give my students books at home that they can share as well as their families to engage in a home library,” said Garrett. “I want to give back to my students and provide them with opportunities so they can have the resources that they need.”

Close to two-thirds of district leaders said their school systems are doing “hybrid learning”— a mix of in-person and online instruction. The precise nature of that mix, though, varies greatly from school to school. The ongoing chaos of the pandemic sometimes obscures the lessons schools are learning and the strategies they’re employing to overcome steep challenges. Education Week talked to educators from school districts across the country about how they developed their hybrid learning models, how they’re working so far, and what they have planned for the months ahead. Here is a look at hybrid models in six school districts and the challenges of making those approaches work.

What are ways to help students develop intrinsic motivation to read? The late Ken Robinson talked about the importance of creating conditions where intrinsic motivation can be developed and nurtured. He compared it to a farmer, who doesn’t force crops to grow. No, the farmer creates favorable conditions where they develop. This series will be discussing how to create those kinds of favorable conditions where an intrinsic desire to read can grow within our students. Creating the conditions that develop an intrinsic interest in reading is a longstanding challenge that is exacerbated by distance learning. In this episode, we explore ways to encourage students to read in traditional and online classes.

Like most American children, I grew up reading fairy tales. As a person of color, I accepted that the characters in the stories often didn’t look like me or reflect my experience. That’s just how they were. Yet one of the enduring features of fairy tales is how easily they can be adapted to the times and perspectives of their readership. Two new books — “The Magic Fish,” by Trung Le Nguyen, and “The Little Mermaid,” by Jerry Pinkney — open up the possibilities by recasting fairy tales, including a Hans Christian Andersen classic, for a more diverse generation. In doing so, they ruminate on the ways imaginary tales help children of all experiences shape their own personal narratives and how stories give us hope.

Many students in Jessica Everett’s kindergarten class don’t yet know how to hold a pencil. It’s one of those foundational skills of literacy — like turning pages, following the left-to-right direction of sentences — that many forget they once had to learn. It’s a starting point, and from there, Everett will dive into phonics: teaching the sounds associated with every letter, writing them down, practicing sight-reading and putting words together. This year, she’s doing it all from behind a computer screen. Everett said she’s taken to calling parents her “co-teachers” and explaining each lesson to them as she goes, emphasizing the reading and research behind the multisensory approach to teaching reading. Communication is constant, she said.

Before the coronavirus came into our collective lives, I was largely unaware of what my kids and their teachers did in school all day — and vice versa. Dylann Gold, a clinical assistant professor in the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Hassenfeld Children’s Hospital at N.Y.U. Langone, said that the pandemic has dissolved social boundaries. To establish more boundaries and to keep your kids focused during the day, Dr. Gold advised creating a visual schedule — with picture cues for younger kids and task lists for older ones — that clearly lays out all of the things they need to do before, during and after the school day.

If your student or child had to rapidly transition to an at-home learning environment as a struggling reader, an English language learner, or one with dyslexia, there are many ways that the support they were receiving in school can transfer to their home. Creating authentic learning experiences such as having your child help prepare meals, shop, and participate in outings to parks or museums can improve literacy. Simply engaging in conversation in the language spoken at home around shared experiences, explaining your thinking, and asking open-ended questions so your child can share their thoughts, facilitates a deeper level of communication. This builds metacognition, which is key for comprehension and reading success. There are many ways parents and educators can further support their readers, whatever their need. We broke down specific strategies you can use to make learning at home as effective as possible.

Should teachers spend the precious time they have helping students dig deeply into a specific issue, problem, or question? Or should they teach more broadly about a wide variety of topics? The argument for the former approach—called “deep learning”—is that it improves student engagement and prepares kids to be better problem solvers in a world with increasingly complex challenges around health, economics, social justice, and climate change. A broader approach, the counter argument goes, introduces students to a greater mix of topics, giving them a better sense of all the issues and problems society is facing. Taking that “deep learning” approach is now more difficult than ever, as students are stuck at home learning remotely either full time or part time, or in socially distanced classrooms where collaboration, project-based learning, and lab experiments are hard, if not impossible, to do. That doesn’t mean teachers aren’t trying.

Voters around the country supported measures to strengthen ECE. States and localities have significant sway when it comes to designing and funding ECE programs, and these programs were on the ballot in a handful of places. There was already public support for investing more in ECE prior to 2020, but the pandemic has shined a glaring spotlight on our country’s child care crisis and brought urgency to this issue. Much of the action around ECE in this election was at the local level. For example, voters in Multnomah County,OR, which includes Portland, passed Measure 26-214 to create a universal pre-K program for three- and four-year-olds. Voters in San Antonio, TX overwhelmingly voted in favor of Proposition A to expand the city’s Pre-K for SA program, which provides high-quality pre-K in four centers and offers professional development and grants to other pre-K providers.

With remote learning looking like the state of play this fall, publishers have extended permissions for read alouds of their titles. To help educators and librarians engaged in online learning and storytimes held via Zoom and other virtual means, many publishers relaxed copyright restriction on their works at the start of the pandemic. The new Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster policies appear in this article, in addition to updates from Boyds Mills Kane, Enchanted Lion, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Sourcebooks, and TeachingBooks. These are included in SLJ’s full COVID-19 Publisher Information Directory.

Four teachers offer several suggestions for online tools to promote interactive learning, and many others offer readers’ comments about their favorites. Some of the tools discussed are Google slides, Padlet, and Nearpod.

Over the last decade, and certainly since March, when the pandemic shut down our schools, educators have become increasingly aware of the necessity to help students build social and emotional learning (SEL) competencies. In Meriden Public Schools in Connecticut, 77 percent of students are eligible for free and reduced-price meals, and the strains of poverty have increased significantly since the pandemic. As educators, we recognize that meeting the needs of the whole child requires us to start early to avoid having disengaged and disenfranchised students in middle and high school. In response, Meriden has created a district-wide SEL program across our eight elementary schools.

In 1988, Katherine Paterson wrote in the Book Review that children need not only the happily-ever-after of fairy tales, but also “proper endings” in which “hope is a yearning, rooted in reality.” She says, “I know children need and deserve the kind of satisfaction they may get only from the old fairy tales. Children need all kinds of stories. Other people will write theirs, and I will write the ones I can. As a writer I have a responsibility always to come humbly and childlike to the empty page — a responsibility always to be ready to be surprised by truth, ready to be taught, even to be changed. It is a joy to write for the young, for most often they will come to my story eager to be surprised, to be taught, to be changed and to give their unique vision to the filling out of my imperfect one. And in this exchange of life and vision, of heart and mind, we come to know that we belong to one another.”

On Election Day, Multnomah County, which includes Portland, Ore., passed one of the most progressive universal preschool policies in the nation. The measure, to be paid for by a large tax on high earners, will provide free preschool for all children ages 3 and 4, in public schools and in existing and new private preschools and home-based child care centers. It will also significantly raise teachers’ wages so they are equivalent to those of kindergarten teachers. It seeks to overcome the central problem in early childhood care and education: It is unaffordable for many families, yet teachers are underpaid. The solution, Multnomah County voters decided, is to finance preschool with public funding instead of private tuition, and to pay teachers much more. It also seeks to overcome some of the pitfalls of universal preschool policies in places like New York and Washington, D.C. In doing so, early childhood researchers say the policy could serve as a blueprint for the rest of the country.

The coronavirus pandemic has allowed a long-standing educational myth to take on new force. Educators often claim that their efforts to serve some groups of children, primarily Black, Latino, and Native American, are hindered by things their families fail to do—things like supervise homework, comply with school requests, and communicate with teachers. During pandemic-initiated distance learning, these family contributions may be even more important than during normal classroom learning and even less possible, given that COVID-19 has hit families in these groups particularly hard. Concerned for their students, many educators fear that the pandemic will exacerbate the “family-disengagement problem.” We take a different view. Family disengagement is not inevitable during the pandemic or at other times. Our team of researchers and practitioners working toward school improvement in the Forest Grove, Ore., district believes that families of every background are ready to partner with schools when schools speak the right cultural language.

Texas has failed to prove it did enough to overhaul a system that illegally left thousands of public school students who have disabilities without needed special education services, according to a letter federal officials sent the state last month. A 2018 federal investigation found the state had been effectively denying students with disabilities the tools and services they need in order to learn, in violation of federal law. After visiting 12 Texas public schools in May 2019, the U.S. Department of Education did not find sufficient evidence Texas had done what was necessary to reach all the students who were previously denied special education services.

Strengthening students’ grasp of language and knowledge takes more than merely learning a weekly list of core words, contended Dr. Elfrieda “Freddy” Hiebert, author of Scholastic W.O.R.D., in a recent edWebinar sponsored by Scholastic Digital Solutions. The webinar explored a more strategic approach to vocabulary acquisition. Words should be taught in the service of knowledge: Learners build their vocabulary and knowledge through knowledge-centered text. To do this, she advised clustering English language arts reading around informational and narrative texts that share topics. But repeated core vocabulary, with a focus on the 2,500 more frequent morphological families across texts (particularly for beginning and struggling readers), reinforces learners’ grasp of words and their contextual changes. This approach helps students acquire a richer bank of words while developing knowledge. They are also engaged in a deeper level of reading that adds more complex words to their vocabulary.

Growing up disabled, I could not find much representation of experiences like my own. Neurodiverse and mentally ill, I struggled to find positive and uplifting books that showed hopeful outcomes to living with my symptoms and conditions. Fortunately, today’s kid lit doesn’t shy away from disability but embraces it. Now more than ever, disabled younger readers have books that offer better representation of the diverse spectrum of disability. In the best children’s books about disabilities, you’ll find picture books and middle grade novels that showcase unforgettable characters navigating disability and life in an abled world.

A 2019 state law toughened up rules on how Colorado schools teach reading — establishing new training requirements for teachers and placing guardrails on the kind of curriculum schools can use in kindergarten through third grade. But for the average parent, figuring out if schools are using proven approaches to reading instruction and following the new state rules still isn’t easy. That’s why a statewide dyslexia advocacy group, in partnership with a local school improvement consulting firm, created a free online guide that parents and caregivers can use during discussions with teachers, principals or other school staff. The eight-page guide, Colorado Literacy Dialogue Tool for Parents/Caregivers, walks parents through key questions they should ask about reading instruction. In addition to listing words and phrases that indicate a school is using scientifically based materials and strategies, the guide also cites names and phrases that may raise red flags about a school’s approach.

For nearly all of our students in today’s COVID-19 pandemic, book access remains severely restricted or largely digital. Across the United States, teachers, librarians, school leaders, and nonprofits have gone to great lengths to get books into the hands of young readers particularly during this pandemic. We all play a role in the collective work to increase book access; these trying times are bringing out creative solutions. Here are just a few ideas on how to flood students with books, as we muddle our way through a school year unlike any other.

Paul Tough is the author of “Helping Children Succeed: What Works and Why,” the October selection for the NewsHour-New York Times book club, Now Read This. The coronavirus pandemic has upended American life. What are its consequences for the education realm, which is already characterized by major inequalities? Tough joins PBS NewsHour to discuss troubling trends in K-12 and higher education.