Today’s Literacy Headlines

Jacqueline Woodson, author of Brown Girl Dreaming, Harbor Me, and The Day You Begin, has been named a MacArthur Fellow for “redefining children’s and young adult literature to encompass more complex issues and reflect the lives of Black children, teenagers, and families.” The MacArthur Foundation announced the 21 members of its MacArthur Fellows Class of 2020 today. On her dedicated page of the MacArthur site, Woodson said, “I don’t want it to be overlooked that for me, it’s been about creating a road where, as a young reader, there wasn’t one. I wanted to see myself in books because I couldn’t believe the audacity of a “canon” of young people’s literature conjuring me invisible. I wanted to say to my young self ‘You’re loved. You’re beautiful. You’re complicated. You matter.’ I know that by saying this to myself with each book I write, I am saying it to every reader who has ever felt otherwise.”

Remote learning has been a struggle for teachers and is expected to set back the learning gains of a generation of students. But a small number of students have done unexpectedly well. In some cases, those students struggled with distractions in the classroom during in-person learning. In others, they had social challenges at school: They were anxious, easily drawn into conflicts with other students, or embarrassed to engage in front of their peers. Some educators are now wondering how the experiences of kids who have done better during remote learning can be applied to improve in-person learning in the future. Takeaways might include having more social and emotional check-ins with students, increased inclusion of students with disabilities in general education class activities, wider use of technology, and accommodating unconventional techniques that individual students have found helpful.

Louis Jansen Jr. is an eighth-grader at Monhagen Middle School; Jordan Jansen is a seventh-grader at Twin Towers Middle School; Leighann Jansen is a fourth-grader at Presidential Park Elementary School; and London Jansen is a second-grader at Maple Hill Elementary School. They all are learning from home five days a week. Antoinette Jansen is a stay-at-home mom who focuses on taking care of Luca (and keeping him out of the way sometimes) and helping each of her kids learn from home amid COVID-19. When the kids go back to in-person learning, she hopes to start a party-planning business. Louis Jansen Jr. is a landscaper, with help from Louis Jr. and Jordan, and bids on abandoned storage units on his off time, which becomes a whole-family activity.

Three prominent Black female authors in science fiction, young adult literature and essay writing are among the 21 winners of this year’s MacArthur Foundation “genius grants.” N.K. Jemisin, the speculative fiction writer of the “Broken Earth” trilogy; Jacqueline Woodson, the author of children’s and young adult books including “Brown Girl Dreaming” and “The Other Side”; and Tressie McMillan Cottom, the author of the essay collection “Thick” were all named as 2020 MacArthur fellows. Woodson, 57, has published nearly 30 works, including picture books, young adult novels and poetry, featuring the experiences of Black people, the foundation said. “I write books that I hope young people can see themselves inside of and see their experiences inside of,” Woodson said. “And if they can’t, hopefully they’ll see other experiences.” The MacArthur Foundation said they named her a fellow for “redefining children’s and young adult literature to encompass more complex issues and reflect the lives of Black children, teenagers, and families.”

When the pandemic has shuttered many school buildings, children are adding dozens of hours of screen time each week as they learn remotely. While some experts urge teachers to pay special attention to creating assignments that take children away from their computer screens, others are urging compassion and flexibility. Active engagement matters, too. Experts urge teachers to choose lively games or discussions rather than lecture, for instance. And in these times of isolation, screen time that lets students make good connections with their teachers and peers is important, too. See all 10 tips.

If schools across the United States return to “normal” in January, the average student will have lost nearly seven months of learning. But the low-income students among them will have lost more than a year. Parents must be part of the solution. But the yawning gap between rich and poor that existed even before the pandemic also affects parental involvement. The conventional wisdom in schools is that low-income parents don’t get involved. Now, they need to be super-involved. Here, we’ll look at two approaches to engaging parents — one used here in the United States by Springboard and one used in Botswana — that can help children learn in a few weeks what normally takes months or years of schooling.

Online education can be daunting. As many of us struggle to find a way to exist safely while returning to a version of working life, many children are learning virtually for the first time.Luckily, there is a lot of quality reading and writing–themed content being created to support families and keep kids interested and engaged. While there are many more options than just these five, most of these are new and my personal top choices.

It’s been more than six months since the coronavirus forced many schools to halt in-person classes. The immediate consequences of that disruption are obvious. Many parents can’t work. The typical social patterns for school kids have gone kaput. But what about long-term consequences? What could six months of disrupted education do to a kid six years from now? How about 16? Experts predict this absence will widen the achievement gap between high- and low-income students. The ripple effects, they warn, could last a lifetime for some children. A skill like reading helps explain how this unprecedented interruption of face-to-face instruction could cascade through the years and decades to come.

Among the many challenges of remote instruction is the lack of access some students have to supports they previously received in school, particularly accessibility tools and features that help them to overcome a variety of barriers. Many commonly used devices and software applications already have built-in features that students can use to mitigate any number of challenges, from dyslexia to hearing impairment—it’s just a matter of knowing which product offers what accessibility feature and how you and your students can make use of them. Note as well that these universal supports aren’t just for students with disabilities and learning differences—they can be helpful to any student as a support in distance learning. The following list includes popular accommodations and the Apple (iOS), Chrome, and Microsoft accessibility features that support them.

The Coalition for English Learner Equity (CELE), a group of national education leaders and organizations, working together to improve educational outcomes for linguistically and culturally diverse students, has launched a new national effort to help address the education disparities faced by English Learners across the nation. The COVID 19 pandemic exposed long-standing inequities and school systems are ill-equipped to meet the needs of EL students. This initiative addresses these challenges by providing guidance to district and state leaders as well as educator

Teaching the foundational skills of reading is often a lively and physical task: students clapping out the syllables in words and practicing letter sounds in chorus and teachers demonstrating the way that the mouth forms different shapes for different sounds. This year, though, it will likely look very different. According to Education Week’s database of more than 900 districts, which is not nationally representative, 48 percent are doing all of their instruction remotely. Young students at these schools as well as those doing a mix of in-person and virtual instruction will be learning to read through screens—in virtual classrooms with their teachers, working on computer programs and apps, or through some combination of the two.

Nell Duke, a professor of literacy, language, and culture at the University of Michigan School of Education, has been examining the literature and developing new instructional practices to meet the ever-shifting challenges of the pandemic and its effect on schools. Education Week asked her how teachers should adjust their practices and recalibrate their priorities to ensure students are gaining fundamental reading skills. “The synchronous context, I have a lot more optimism about. There are a lot of research-tested instructional techniques that can be used through videoconferencing. They need to be modified somewhat to make sense for that context, but versions of them are similar enough that they would still work. 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. It’s a little more awkward, it’s a little clunkier [than in-person instruction].”

Even though kids learn to read in school, many hate it. In this TED Talk, Educator Alvin Irby shares insights on inspiring children—especially Black boys—to discover books they enjoy and begin identifying as readers. Alvin Irby is an educator, author, comedian, and the founder of Barbershop Books, a nonprofit organization that creates child-friendly reading spaces in barbershops and provides early literacy training to barbers.

Pen-and-paper pop quizzes are no more: thumbs-up/thumbs-down, hand signals, online polls, discussion boards, and chat boxes have become the new mainstays of formative assessments in virtual classrooms. These quick pulse checks help teachers make sure that students are grasping key concepts—and identify holes in their understanding. Teachers don’t need to completely reinvent their traditional formative assessments, however, according to Mike Anderson, an educational consultant in Durham, New Hampshire. He recommends that teachers modify familiar practices—like exit tickets and think-pair-shares—so they work virtually. “Formative assessments might feel harder now in virtual classrooms—you can’t just walk around class and look over a kid’s shoulders—but I’m not sure they have to be harder.” In fact, many of the popular digital apps and sites like Nearpod, Flipgrid, Padlet, and Seesaw, can actually work in tandem with the tried-and-true assessments that teachers honed in their classes pre-pandemic.

Claudia Margaroli teaches 1st grade English, reading, and social studies to a mix of English-language learners and native speakers at Charlotte East Language Academy, a public bilingual school in Charlotte, N.C. In a typical school year, she will have one group of students one day, and another the next. But this is not a typical school year. All of Margaroli’s classes have moved online, due to COVID-19. Education Week talked to Margaroli about what it is like to teach reading to early-elementary students in a virtual environment.

The pandemic is forcing teachers of all types of students to rethink how they transmit language and the emotion necessary to make meaningful connections, and to create tactics for optimal learning in less-than-ideal conditions. When children are “learning to speak and read, they imitate letters by the sound the mouth makes,” says Cécile Viénot, a Paris-based child psychologist. Being able to see the motions of the mouth is “a learning tool, not just a vector of emotion.” Stacked at the back of Ms. Jarrosson’s classroom are the plexiglass barriers she places between herself and a student if she has to be in close proximity for a lesson. The seven-odd speech therapists on-site also use them during individual sessions to help students process verbal language and improve pronunciation, volume, and pitch. This tool, along with a stronger reliance on visual supplements to lip reading, like printed pictures, have become critical in the age of wearing masks, especially for the school’s youngest students who, at age 3, may not understand sign language yet.

For the first time in the history of America, almost every book being published fails, on some level, to speak to the times in which we live. As a result, back-to-school books are pretty much a bust. All those middle grade novels that culminate in a talent show? Archaic. If the bulk of the books written this year weren’t penned with a pandemic in mind, that doesn’t mean they haven’t anything to say to us. Take, for example, the latest chapter in the “Deckawoo Drive” series of early chapter books by Kate DiCamillo. Stella Endicott and the Anything-Is-Possible Poem doesn’t contain even a sniff of distance learning or temperature checks at the schoolhouse door, but it can still help us through trying times. “DiCamillo gives us this endearing tale of learning through coping with a (hilariously) bad day,” says Martha Meyer, a library assistant at Evanston Public Library. “Through this slight story, she’s actually showing us how to have quiet strength, emotional flexibility, growth and friendship while being open to the needs of other human beings—all the things you need internally to make it through the pandemic.”

At least 2,800 structures burned in the Almeda fire, which tore through the small towns of Talent and Phoenix, Ore. in one day. The day before, on what was meant to be the start of class, an estimated 40 percent of students in the Talent-Phoenix school district lost their homes, according to Brent Barry, the district superintendent. At Phoenix Elementary School, which serves the worst hit population, 80 percent of students are now homeless, according to Pam Marsh, the district representative for southern Jackson County. These families are once again preparing for the start of school. On Monday, September 28, students returned to their virtual classrooms, but families and teachers face a new challenge: How can they make distance learning work when students have no place to call home? In the aftermath of a disaster, community support acts like Bubble Wrap, buffering kids from symptoms of post-traumatic stress, such as trouble sleeping, flashbacks, jumpiness and anxiety. After a disaster, school is crucial to maintaining social structure, said Ann Masten, a professor of child development at the University of Minnesota.

Ready or not, the nation’s elementary school educators are staring down a daunting new challenge: teach hundreds of thousands of young children to read, without being able to interact with them in person, using instead digital tools and videoconferencing platforms in sweeping new ways that are mostly untested. With thousands of schools reopening virtually or using a mix of online and in-person instruction, even those teachers trying the kind of phonics instruction supported by cognitive science will be forced to do so remotely, in online environments they are still learning to navigate. Many more educators appear likely to try a hodgepodge of early-literacy software programs and digital apps—many of which have shown no evidence of effectiveness, and almost all of which are best suited as supplements to regular classroom teaching—as primary instructional tools.

In a post on the Right to Read Project, Margaret Goldberg points out that a love of reading is not something that can actually be taught, particularly when children are struggling with the most basic aspects of the task; rather, they must be taught to crack the code of reading so that they can begin to experience reading as a source of pleasure. As Goldberg points out, “[e]nthusiasm is a part of good teaching, but communicating a love of books isn’t the same thing as teaching reading.” Essentially, the standard narrative gets things exactly backwards: it is assumed that children must “discover” how to read and be taught to love, whereas in reality children must be taught to read so that they can discover a love of reading on their own. So allow me to make a radical proposition: The point of reading instruction is not to teach children to love reading. The point of reading instruction is to teach children to read. … although reading can involve great enjoyment, the consequences of knowing how to make sense out of marks on a page extend far beyond the ability to devour, say, Harry Potter. A child who cannot read below a basic level will almost certainly become an adult who struggles to decipher things like the instructions on a medication bottle, or articles in a newspaper written above a tabloid level.

As a result of the pandemic, many schools throughout the country are moving forward with the hybrid learning model, combining face-to-face instruction with both synchronous and asynchronous learning. The tricky part is during synchronous class time when some students are in class and the rest are at home. How can a teacher best manage in-person and at-home learning at once? One of the seven models of blended learning that stands out due to its ease of use is station rotation. To accurately reflect the station rotation model in our era of social distancing, students who are in person are grouped in squares so that all peers are only six feet apart and can easily turn to each other to talk. Students at home should be grouped together to easily shift into asynchronous instruction as the teacher decides how the learners will divide their time among stations. A station rotation setup uses small groups for the purpose of teacher-led instruction, online learning, collaborative activities, and offline learning. Here is a sample lesson plan template for a station rotation; this is a good way to begin to map out your stations. When you are ready to go live, here is a great template to use for planning your rotation and sharing it with students.

Children don’t often get to read stories by or about Latinos. The American book publishing industry remains overwhelmingly white, according to the Cooperative Children’s Book Center, which found only five percent of books published for young readers are by or about Latinx people. But several new groups of writers, editors and agents are trying to increase Latino representation in children’s literature. They’re working in different ways, and have their own stories to tell. I spoke to a few of them — and got some reading recommendations, too.

During this school year, thousands of children will begin reading. Despite their best efforts, however, up to a tenth of them will struggle. If we were aware of the early warning signs, we could help these children by using research-based remediation. But dyslexia is poorly understood by the public. Unveiling these misconceptions can help millions of children. It could also help decode the human mind. Before a child learns to read, she needs to recognize that spoken words are composed of sounds (e.g., cat begins with a k sound), or else, the function of letters is mysterious. But for children with dyslexia, phonemic awareness is difficult. Speech perception is likewise atypical. Infants who are at risk for dyslexia (because dyslexia runs in their families) show atypical brain response to speech well before they ever read their first word. And since the reading brain network “recycles” the speech and language network, an atypical speech system begets atypical reading.

Danielle Whittington teaches 40 fourth-grade students each day but she has not met all of them in person. In her hybrid classroom, 15 are at home, and the rest are in school — and, she says, she is worried that the two groups are not getting the same education. For students at home, Whittington gets to school each morning at 6:30 to record 15-minute videos, which walk the remote learners through the day’s online assignments. She said she is certain many of the students at home are alone, doing their work with no help from an adult. “They will be delayed,” she said of the virtual learners. “They’re not going to be as advanced as the kids that are sitting in this class.” Whittington’s students who learn from home must check in by 8 a.m., each sending her a message so she knows they are logged on, but she may not be in touch with them again until students in the classroom leave for the day at 2 p.m. When they get on the bus, she is available to the virtual learners to answer their questions. At night, she responds to parent emails — but she doesn’t have Internet access at home, so she parks her car on the highway where she can get a signal.

When parents drop off their kids at the Guadalupe Community Center on San Antonio’s West Side, program manager Manuel Garcia doesn’t want them to feel like they are making yet another tough choice in the middle of the pandemic. In the last few months as the pandemic has dragged on and jobs either disappear or hours are cut, more families are choosing between groceries and medications. Between paying electric bills or rent. Now that school is in session, remotely, kids need wifi, log-in help, quiet workspaces, and, for younger kids, constant supervision. Providing any of those things will cost money and time that have to come from somewhere else. Garcia wants the program he manages to provide a safe place where the entire family will be given the support and routine they need to thrive during remote learning — an easy choice, and a high quality one.

Aimee Dearmon, Speech and Language Pathologist (SLP) and Board Certified Behavior Analyst (BCBA), says the disruption of routines, schedules, classroom layouts, and necessary social distancing protocols will be very difficult for our most vulnerable students with autism and other developmental disabilities. The biggest challenge with developing classroom action plans is establishing the same level of support while maintaining social distancing. Educators need to craft strategies and processes that meet health guidelines and ensure that students understand and adapt to new routines and behavioral expectations. Dearmon recommends social scripts, video modeling, visual supports, and prompts. Using these ABA reinforcement tools, students with autism and other developmental disabilities can learn simple distancing protocols such as how to wear a mask, walk in the hallway, and remain apart from others in the school setting. Learning new routines establishes a level of comfort for these students to understand and allows them to predict how, what, where, and when learning will happen.

All it takes is a nationwide crisis to underline the most glaring equity issues our society faces. The one that has captured my attention during COVID-19 is the chronic lack of home internet access for people of color, low-income households, and rural residents. That lack of access puts schools in an especially difficult position as they expand their use of technology during the pandemic, and beyond. It’s important to remember that this technology challenge has been staring us in the face for decades. It is not just a COVID-19 issue—it is a civil rights issue of the utmost importance.

The dominant view is that the way to improve America’s abysmal elementary reading outcomes is for schools to spend more time on literacy instruction. Many schools provide a “literacy block” that can stretch to more than two hours per day, much of it allocated to efforts to develop reading skills such as “finding the main idea,” and “determining the author’s perspective.” But it doesn’t seem to be working. Yet a small army of cognitive psychologists, analysts, and educators has long cast doubt on the view that reading is a discrete skill that can be mastered independently from acquiring knowledge. To these contrarians, a focus on academic content—not generalized reading skills and strategies—will equip students with the background knowledge they need to comprehend all sorts of texts and make them truly literate. Fordham’s newest report, Social Studies Instruction and Reading Comprehension: Evidence from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, brings forward new evidence to this debate.

From making soup to creating a butterfly garden, everyone can do something. And we can learn how to find common ground among disagreements.

After the news broke of the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, her most famous quotes filled social media. One speaks volumes to educators, particularly, librarians. “Reading is the key that opens doors to many good things in life,” she said. “Reading shaped my dreams, and more reading helped me make my dreams come true.” Educators who want to explain her work, impact on the country (specifically women’s rights), and legacy can turn to one of the many biographies of her life. Here are SLJ’s review for some of the options.

Like many Appalachian Trail hikers, Emily M. Leonard of Lowell had a lot of stories to tell once she returned from hiking the famous footpath from Georgia to Maine. So she decided to write them down in the form of a children’s book. In “Black Bear’s Adventure: An Appalachian Trail Journey,” Leonard offers highlights from her monthslong journey through the wilderness. Released in August, the self-published book was written by Leonard and illustrated by twin sisters Laurie Joy Miller of Old Town and Lisa Joy Jones of Orrington.

Booker Innovative Elementary School learning strategist Juliana Urtubey was named Wednesday as the 2021 Nevada Teacher of the Year. Gov. Steve Sisolak and State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jhone Ebert made the announcement during a virtual ceremony, with members of the Booker school community in attendance. Urtubey, who was born in Bogota, Colombia, is a member of Ebert’s Teacher Advisory Cabinet. She’s passionate about “closing cultural and linguistic gaps that can exist between educators, students, and families” and works with students who face learning, mental, emotional or physical challenges, according to the release.

Sometimes humans struggle to find the words to convey the sheer depth of their love for one another. Leave it to Sam McBratney’s Little Nutbrown Hare and Big Nutbrown Hare in Guess How Much I Love You to show us the way. They love each other as high as they can hop, they love each other across the river and over the hills, and finally, all the way up to the sky. McBratney died at his home in County Antrim, Northern Ireland surrounded by family on September 18, according to his publisher, Walker Books. He was 77. No cause of death was given.

In Broward County, Florida, school officials noticed something worrying this month. Schools were back in session, virtually. But a few weeks in, one group of students was missing in large numbers: kindergartners. The trend seems to cut across income lines, with declines in schools that serve mostly students from low-income families as well as wealthier ones. When the Education Week Research Center surveyed some 400 school district administrators and principals in late August, more than half reported seeing a decline in kindergarten enrollment — and the pattern was similar for high-poverty and more affluent school districts.

Thousands of children in pre-K and students with advanced disabilities returned to in-person school in the nation’s largest school district.

Education during a pandemic is hard enough, but for families experiencing homelessness, remote learning is especially challenging as families grapple with access to devices and wi-fi, rules about adult supervision at shelters or hotels, and lack of access to the support and safety that schools offer.

As plans for reopening U.S. schools vary widely, librarians are strategizing amid uncertainty and adapting makerspace environments — whether in-person, remote, or through hybrid learning models — to ensure hands-on learning remains available to all students.

The reality is that students with autism and others with highly specialized requirements need in-person school more than other student populations, but the actual work puts both teachers and the students at risk for transmitting COVID-19. The adults who work with these students can’t rely on the kind of social distancing other educators can.

In this article, Donalyn Miller writes, “During the pandemic, social readers have lost outlets for discussing books with others, but we can still encourage students to read and keep their reading momentum going by finding opportunities for young readers to share and promote books with their school communities.”

Most of the nation’s nearly five million English-language learners are returning to classes, whether virtual or in-person, after a months-long stretch of distance learning where they were separated from the educators who are key to their academic success. How those students and their teachers rebound from the struggles tied to the school shutdowns of the spring could depend on guidance from their states and school districts about how to recover from learning loss and reconnect with families. To help educators and state leaders take a look at what others are doing around the country, Amaya Garcia, the deputy director for English-learner education with the education policy program at New America, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, compiled a national database of state guidance and resources for English-learner education.

Early education advocates have warned of serious learning losses among young children in the wake of the pandemic, since many preschool programs and child care centers were slow to move online or didn’t offer virtual options at all. In Chicago, school district leaders acknowledged the challenge of teaching 4 year olds online and initially intended to offer in-person preschool full time this fall, but plans were scuttled in favor of an all-virtual start after a late summer spike in coronavirus cases. That meant teachers had to move quickly to shift play-based lessons online and figure out how to two-dimensionally dazzle new classroom recruits — most of whom are having their first real experience with school.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a pioneer in the women’s rights movement and the second woman appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court, died Friday at age 87 due to complications of pancreatic cancer. On education issues arising during her 27 years on the court, Ginsburg was a stalwart vote for sex equity in schools, expansive desegregation remedies, strict separation of church and state, and, in a memorable dissent, against broader drug testing of students.

After months of distance learning, students around the world are returning to the classroom — even though many countries are bracing themselves for a second wave of coronavirus infections. What does the pandemic mean for children, parents and teachers this academic year? We take a global look, with special correspondents Olly Barratt, Lucy Hough, Patrick Hok and Michael Baleke reporting.

As COVID-19 continues to impact schools, one MSU instructor has found a way to help her students and help students, teachers and parents in area public school systems. Shawn Justice, instructor of education, was trying to develop creative ways to help students in her Children’s Literature and Materials class get their required field experience hours virtually this fall. “I have had to really think outside of the box about how to give my students the quality experiences they need and still meet all the course requirements,” Justice said. “Education is changing, so I thought the structure of the field experience hours probably should look different, too.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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