Today’s Literacy Headlines

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Having spent our careers doing research on student motivation and learning with technology, we recommend these three strategies: (1) go out of your way to build relationships; (2) stress the relevance of what students are learning; and (3) establish new routines.

It’s not easy to teach young children remotely. These strategies can help make instruction accessible and engaging—for students and their families. Get 8 tips for home learning in preschool from an early childhood special education teacher.

All Classroom Q&A posts on The Inclusive Classroom (from the past nine years!) are described and linked to in this compilation post. Examples include four educators who consider how to provide inclusive learning opportunities during the school closure crisis (including by keeping IEP goals in mind and by keeping things simple), making an inclusive classroom work, and ways to be a successful co-teacher.

Kwame Alexander―poet, Newbery and Caldecott medal-winning, best-selling author, and founding editor of Versify, an imprint of HMH Books for Young People―has spent years visiting elementary and middle schools to share his love of writing with students. But Alexander wanted to reach more kids than he can with school visits and to teach young people that writing is cool and inspire them to tell their stories. With that goal in mind, he partnered with education technology company Age of Learning to create WordPlay, a digital series that combines live action and animation.

Poor regions across the globe where internet access is scarce are turning to television to reach students. That strategy could also help in wealthy countries that have focused on online classes. While television lessons are not as valuable as online interactions with teachers and other students, experts say, educational broadcasts do pay dividends for children’s academic progress, their success in the job market and even their social development. To make lessons less passive and more effective, many of the lessons being broadcast now use all the tools of professional studios, like eye-pleasing sets, script writers, 3-D animation, multicamera shoots, graphics and even related smartphone apps.

In April, the NWEA, a nonprofit assessment organization, published research showing some students could start school this fall nearly one year behind where they would normally be, part of a phenomenon referred to as the “Covid slide.” Not all students will be affected equally: Other research predicts that the losses will probably be greatest for low-income and Black and Hispanic students. Nationally, educators and officials have floated one possible solution: year-round school. Under this model, which has existed in parts of the country for decades, schools operate with shorter, more frequent breaks throughout the year, rather than one lengthy summer vacation. While research on the model’s effectiveness is mixed, proponents argue that it keeps vulnerable students from falling farther behind and ensures that students benefit more consistently from school meals and other services.

“Can you give an example of an online lesson that’s effective for students with disabilities?” That’s the question Elizabeth Barker has fielded over and over as schools have prepared to reopen. But it’s the one question that Barker, a special education expert with NWEA, a nonprofit data and assessment provider, can’t answer. Because students in special education, by definition, require individualized support, there is no such thing as a model lesson. She does, however, point to four ingredients for effective special education during in-person schooling that should guide educators as they look for ways to engage students with disabilities in distance learning.

The national shift to distance learning this spring left many of the nation’s nearly 5 million English-learner students shut out of the learning process—without internet, without language support, and without the devices they needed to participate in online education. The experience was tough even in places where schools found ways to connect with English-learners. Now, as schools begin to reopen, districts should redouble their efforts to make up for lost time, a new report from the Council of the Great City Schools suggests. The report urges districts to pay close attention to how they choose and use technology and assess what skills students have learned and lost since schools shut down. It also emphasizes the importance of: family engagement for parents and other relatives who are not fluent in English; professional development that emphasizes effective teaching strategies for all educators who work with English-learners; and rethinking how schools deploy English-learner specialists to ensure that students have ample opportunity for one-on-one or small-group learning support during online-only classes.

As a school year like no other gets underway, the laws surrounding individualized education programs remain unchanged and experts say parents should fight for the services their kids need. While the details may look different — with IEP meetings occurring virtually rather than in person, for example — special education advocates and attorneys say that families should approach the IEP process much like they would in any other year. Denise Marshall, CEO of the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates, is reminding parents that the whole concept of the IEP is that services for students with disabilities should be individualized. The IEP team should consider the student’s present levels of performance, needs, goals and how to meet them before making any determinations about placements.

Creating a strong classroom culture is priority number one during the first weeks of school. This year should not be any different—in fact, creating connections and a sense of belonging has never been more important. And yet, as coronavirus numbers soar, many schools are opting to return at least partly to remote learning in the fall. So, how can we create a positive classroom culture when we can’t even see our students face-to-face? It’s going to take a mixture of adapting the old tried-and-true beginning-of-the-year traditions to digital media and creating whole new practices and activities.

Some U.S. schools have already begun the 2020-21 academic year, with thousands more set to launch in the next few weeks. Americans would be well-served to look beyond the country’s borders for signs of how school reopenings might go and lessons they might learn. In the United States, the volley of conflicting guidance documents and policy recommendations for safe schooling during the COVID-19 pandemic has been difficult to parse, and tensions are high as the stakes for key decisions have life-and-death implications. Numerous countries managed to reopen school buildings earlier this year, and the resulting successes and failures are instructive. The Kaiser Family Foundation published a side-by-side comparison of the rate of positive COVID-19 tests on the day of school reopenings in 13 different countries. All but two had a national positivity rate below 4 percent on the day schools reopened.

Three educators offer tips for online instruction, ranging from keeping videos short (3-5 minutes) to laying out an agenda at the beginning of each class.

A generation of education policy has been shaped in part by an extended discussion around racial differences, and the lingua franca of that dialogue is testing data. Achievement gaps are at the heart of school improvement initiatives led by states, cities, universities and philanthropies, and civil rights groups like the NAACP and the Urban League have organized vigilantly around the exam performance of minority children. But there is new reason to think that the persistent focus on testing and disparities may yield unintended ill effects. An experimental study conducted by David Quinn, a professor at the University of Southern California, found that media coverage of the achievement gap “may have increased viewers’ implicit stereotyping of Black students as less competent than [white] students.” The negative perceptions were formed in response to a television news segment just two minutes long. The research comes at a time when prominent thinkers are re-examining the logic of the achievement gap and its starring role in education debates. While most believe that assessment should continue to inform school evaluations and accountability, some question whether the construction places responsibility for disappointing test scores on the heads of students themselves.

New children’s books published to mark the 19th Amendment’s 100th anniversary provide a wider lens than Alice Paul and dig deeper than “Girls Rule!” It was with trepidation that I tackled a new crop of children’s books published to mark the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment. When the story of the long fight for women’s enfranchisement has been told popularly, it has too often been presented as flat celebration — all the complexities and nastiness, the racism and classism, the defining incompleteness of the project pressed out to make a neat fist-in-the-air tale of victory. If it’s so hard to honestly address the ways in which injustices have been replicated within movements for justice, how can those contours be effectively communicated in children’s books? Especially children’s books that are designed to inspire?

In the wake of national unrest and a renewed demand for racial justice, and on the eve of a back-to-school season unlike any in memory, Emily Hanford new radio documentary – “What the Words Say: Many kids struggle with reading—and children of color are far less likely to get the help they need” – is timely because it travels upstream to remind us why these deep-seated inequalities among U.S. children continue to persist. On national reading tests, more than 80 percent of Black and Native American students score below proficient, and 77 percent of Hispanic students remain mired under that same threshold. Making matters worse, many parents don’t know how far behind their kids are until it’s too late. As inexcusable as this state of affairs may be, it’s unclear how things are supposed to improve in the time of Covid-19. If Hanford makes one thing palpable through her reporting, it’s that schools have a hard enough of a time teaching children how to read when the lessons are conducted in-person, let alone through the keyhole of Zoom. With many schools planning to remain physically shuttered through at least the first semester, if not longer, they would do well to leverage the wealth of resources available to bridge the gap. If they don’t, the Matthew Effect on reading comprehension will take hold and never let go.

Have you ever revisited something you wrote, only to discover that it omitted important information or assumed the reader just knew what you meant? This spring, not being in the physical classroom with my students highlighted that challenge for me. I wrote directions and created assignments that made sense in my teacher brain, but they sometimes left out important components and didn’t make much sense to my students. To address this, I started to test-run my students’ experiences to ensure that my materials and learning experiences were user-friendly and accessible for all of my learners. This practice was humbling but very valuable. As we begin a new year that will likely include distance learning in one way or another, it’s more important than ever to steer from the student end. Here are some methods I’ve found to make test-running students’ experiences both efficient and effective.