Today’s Literacy Headlines

Some city parents were so desperate to get their dyslexic children the reading instruction they couldn’t find in the public school system that they rewrote the script by founding their own school. Bridge Preparatory Charter School on Staten Island will open its doors to 90 first- and second-graders on Thursday, as the only public school in the state that caters to students with language-based learning disabilities such as dyslexia. The school’s debut marks the climax of a yearslong battle for parents, advocates and elected officials eager to create an environment with small classes, intensive phonics-based instruction and other supports. The charter school opens against the backdrop of a public school system that educators and experts contend has no systematic approach to teaching thousands of students with learning disabilities how to read, despite no shortage of methods proven to work.

As part of a recent social studies lesson, Lourdes Sierra’s sixth-graders spent time reading about Chicago. Their task was to make connections and comparisons between the bustling city 1,500 miles away and their small New Mexico community. Sierra teaches at Vado Elementary School in Gadsden Independent School District, where nearly every student is from a low-income family. Her school is located about halfway between Las Cruces, New Mexico and El Paso, Texas. Sierra is going into her sixth year as a bilingual teacher at Vado. After teaching kindergarten for several years, she’s now taking on sixth grade and working to become a bilingual education administrator. We talked with Sierra about how she bonds with her students, how she makes reading more exciting, and how the recent uptick in immigration enforcement has affected her school.

Grandparents loom large in young children’s lives, and titles featuring these beloved family members are particularly welcome, including such favorites as Helen E. Buckley’s Grandmother and I and her Grandfather and I. Consider these new titles to update your storytime programming or displays as holidays and Grandparent’s Day (the first Sunday after Labor Day) near.

For decades, reading instruction in American schools has been rooted in a flawed theory about how reading works, a theory that was debunked decades ago by cognitive scientists, yet remains deeply embedded in teaching practices and curriculum materials. As a result, the strategies that struggling readers use to get by — memorizing words, using context to guess words, skipping words they don’t know — are the strategies that many beginning readers are taught in school. This makes it harder for many kids to learn how to read, and children who don’t get off to a good start in reading find it difficult to ever master the process.

Finland has been in the spotlight of the education world since it appeared, against all odds, on the top of the rankings of an international test known as PISA, the Program for International Student Assessment, in the early 2000s. Tens of thousands visitors have traveled to the country to see how to improve their own schools. Hundreds of articles have been written to explain why Finnish education is so marvelous — or sometimes that it isn’t. Millions of tweets have been shared and read, often leading to debates about the real nature of Finland’s schools and about teaching and learning there. We have learned a lot about why some education systems — such as Alberta, Ontario, Japan and Finland — perform better year after year than others in terms of quality and equity of student outcomes.

You can say no to the back-to-school Read-a-Thon. No three cheers for finishing a book or dollar for every book read. No bonus iPad time if she would please finish one chapter of a single chapter book. Just as reading shouldn’t be a punishment, it shouldn’t be rewarded. It shouldn’t be work and it shouldn’t be required to earn time for play. Reading isn’t something to plow through determinedly, accounting for each title. This isn’t because reading isn’t important. It’s because it is. Reading is not only fundamental to academic achievement, it’s also crucial to developing other measurable skills like executive function and social behavior. We are all agreed that reading makes you more knowledgeable and a better learner.

When California passed a new law requiring the state to provide instructional resources on media literacy to all of California’s teachers, KQED teamed up with the California Department of Education (CDE) and the California School Library Association to fulfill the mandate. The result is now live and available to all teachers at CDE Media Literacy Resources. This site highlights KQED Teach and PBS Media Literacy Educator Certification by KQED as the go-to professional learning resources for media literacy. State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Tony Thurmond said in his announcement that “These resources will assist educators in the classroom as they teach students how to access, use, evaluate, and integrate the information they read or hear online.” He described why media media literacy is more pressing than ever. “Students are bombarded by information from a wide range of sources. Being media-literate is a skill that can not only help them become critical thinkers, but can also help in all areas of their education and future as informed and active civically engaged citizens.”

“Background knowledge plays a key role in students’ reading comprehension – our findings show that if students don’t have sufficient related knowledge, they’ll probably have difficulties understanding text,” says lead researcher Tenaha O’Reilly of Educational Testing Service (ETS)’s Center for Research on Human Capital in Education. “We also found that it’s possible to measure students’ knowledge quickly by using natural language processing techniques. If a student scores below the knowledge threshold, they’ll probably have trouble comprehending the text.” The findings underscore the importance of having reached a basic knowledge level to be able to read and comprehend texts across different subjects.

I believe in creating high-functioning communities that are free of the mandate to produce. The idea being that if a community is high-functioning, they will be productive. The reality is that there are many communities that produce without being high-functioning, and once you start off on the wrong footing, the whole situation just goes from bad to worse. STEM education is about doing. It’s not about knowing. If you want to set up your STEM community for success, you have to have more than just tests and standardized ways of assessing knowledge. They key thing to understand about evaluation is that STEM work is accomplished through the collective. STEM is not about individual talent, it’s about the team.

When Susan McClarty’s district made the switch to open educational resources, the 6th and 7th grade science teacher at Centennial Middle School in Broken Arrow, Okla., initially struggled to find quality materials aligned with the Next Generation Science Standards. But last school year, her school participated in a field test for a new, open-source middle grades science curriculum: OpenSciEd. The units were easy to use and emphasized hands-on discovery, she said, and using them took the pressure off of teachers to shape a coherent curriculum. McClarty is one of the many teachers who have found it difficult to find materials that answer the NGSS’ call for science instruction based on questioning and discovery. Now, OpenSciEd is slowly rolling out one of the first full, OER curricula that claims alignment to these standards.

Playtime. Downtime. Family time. According to Denise Pope, a senior lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, these three factors — or PDF as she calls them — protect kids against a host of negative outcomes, strengthen resilience, and bolster students’ mental wellness and academic engagement. Pope is co-founder of Challenge Success, a Stanford-based organization that works with families and schools to redefine and embrace a broader definition of success and promote student well-being. In a recent interview with KQED’s Forum, Pope shared her suggestions for raising resilient, ethical and motivated learners.

It’s an age-old question pinched straight from the ‘90s: Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? The answer today might be, well, everywhere. Thanks to a reboot from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which owns the brand, the world’s slipperiest super thief has an animated series on Netflix, a clutch of Google Earth games and even a new series of paperbacks—all of which are finding their way into classrooms two decades after she fell off the map. Her return comes at a time when geography proficiency has flatlined among U.S. students, despite calls for schools to focus more on global citizenship. Perhaps the question isn’t where she is so much as where she can help the most.

Raina Telgemeier, who drew this cartoon for The Post to celebrate Saturday’s National Book Festival, is the author of the best-selling graphic memoirs “Smile” and “Sisters.” She will discuss “Share Your Smile: Raina’s Guide to Telling Your Own Story” on the Main Stage at the festival and will also be one of the celebrity judges at the poetry slam on the Teen Stage.

Erika Christakis is a former faculty member of the Yale Child Study Center and the author of the best-selling book The Importance of Being Little: What Young Children Really Need From Grownups. Christakis says that we’ve reached a perilous moment for very young kids: Increasingly we treat them as commodities and find ourselves “in danger of losing the child in childhood.” Instead of imposing adult expectations, she argues, parents and teachers should try to “take their blinders off” and see the world through the eyes of young children—a change in perspective that might allow us to better understand and cultivate their unique abilities.

My kids may not realize it yet, but they are in the process of making an old friend. Her name is Raina Telgemeier, and my son was the first one to meet her. When he was seven, his dentist sent us to an orthodontist in the big city where I set my eyes on a palate expander for the first time (I don’t think they existed when I was little), and I started to panic about how my little boy was going to deal with his first dental appliance, one his trusted parents had to tighten every single night with a very pokey-thing all up in his mouth. Softie that I am, I took my son to Target after that first appointment, and it was there we found Raina and decided to bring her home.Immediately Raina was my son’s constant companion. Smile went everywhere with him. We couldn’t even drive to the mailbox (we have a long driveway) without his bringing the book with him in the truck.

Trade books support learning across the curriculum in classrooms at all grade levels. The books reviewed in this week’s column include recently published books that are strong choices for introducing units as well as for delving into topics and issues of interest. They enrich instruction, encourage discussion, and stimulate interest in further exploration through independent reading.

Alhough I am a strong supporter of student choice for independent reading, the fact remains that, as a teacher of elementary literacy, I have a curriculum to teach that purposefully exposes my third graders to a variety of text genres (character fiction, mystery, expository and narrative nonfiction, etc.), affording them opportunities to strengthen decoding, fluency, and comprehension skills they need to be lifelong readers and thinkers, as well as—let’s face it—standardized test takers. This can be a tough pill to swallow for a kid who just wants to read about sea animals or laugh his way through comic books all day, use her reading notebook to draw cartoons, or in some cases, not read anything at all. That’s where I’ve found a motivator is helpful, and I’ve had great success motivating even my most reluctant readers with interest-driven, technology-enhanced, project-based learning experiences based on students’ in-class reading. Literary projects appeal to everyone because of the innate differentiation embedded in them, offering entry points for all learners.

For years, Florida’s pre-K program has been judged on how its young graduates did on a “readiness test” given when they started kindergarten. More than 40 percent of the the state’s pre-K providers ended up with a “low performing” label this year because too many of their former students stumbled on the test. That pre-K rating system has been criticized by early-childhood educators ever since lawmakers created it nearly 15 years ago while authorizing the Florida Voluntary Pre-Kindergarten program for the state’s 4-year-olds. Now, the state is set to make changes. Under a new rule the State Board of Education approved this week, preschools offering what is often dubbed VPK will get some credit for helping their students improve, even if those children do not score “ready” on the test in kindergarten.

When Lee Bennett Hopkins died on August 8, he left a legacy that showed his incredible impact on poetry in general and poetry for children, specifically: More than 120 anthologies of poetry for children, his own work, countless poets whose careers he launched or who he inspired and helped, poetry awards he founded and funded, and story after story of blunt criticism and seemingly limitless generosity of time and spirit with fellow poets. “What really distinguished Lee? First, the way he championed poetry across the curriculum,” says Janet Wong, a poet and children’s author. In his 1972 anthology, Pass the Poetry Please, Hopkins wrote, “It is my firm belief that poetry can and must be an integral part of the total school curriculum, interwoven within every subject area.” “That was really revolutionary at the time when he started putting anthologies together,” says Wong. One of his biggest impacts he had was seeking out diverse voices to include in his books.

In My Papi Has A Motorcyle, a little girl named Daisy Ramona waits for her dad to come home from work so they can ride around their city, Corona, Calif., on the back of his motorcycle. They pass a tortilla shop, a raspado shop, her grandparent’s house, and her dad’s construction site. The book is illustrated by Zeke Peña and written by Isabel Quintero. It’s a love letter to the city, and her father. This summer we’ve been asking authors and illustrators how they work together to bring stories to life. They often don’t — but illustrator Zeke Peña says he and Quintero chatted back and forth constantly. “Zeke did such an amazing job with that market, that so many people have told me, like, I know that market. That market’s in my neighborhood, you know, with the piñatas outside, and the little gumball machines, and the carnicería inside the store. So it is very specific, but it’s also a story that especially Latinx kids in other parts of the country can enjoy or relate to.”

The New York Times publishes more than 1,400 articles and Opinion pieces every week, on topics ranging from science to sports, politics to pop culture, foreign affairs to food and fashion. How can teachers take this incredible breadth of material and use it with their students? Our mission at the Learning Network for over two decades has been to help you do just that. But this year, we’re taking that mission a bit further. The writing curriculum detailed below is both a road map for teachers and an invitation to students. For teachers, we’ve pulled together the many writing-related features we already offer, added new ones, and organized them all into seven distinct units. Each focuses on a different genre of writing that you can find not just in The Times but also in all kinds of real-world sources both in print and online.

Peter Sís is a victim of his own uniqueness. Truly, there is no one like him: a children’s book author of rare intellectual sophistication and ambition; a wholly contemporary illustrator whose greatest visual affinity may be with medieval illuminated manuscripts; a maker of art of surpassing sweetness that’s shot through with a consistent melancholy. Oh, and he was a 2003 MacArthur “genius” fellow. Sís loves birds. It no doubt pleases him that his name rhymes with “geese.” Perhaps it also pleases him that it’s impossible to pigeonhole his work. Spiritually aerial, Sís’s art is resolutely on the wing. These rather grand claims are borne out by a visit to “The Picture Book Odysseys of Peter Sís.” It runs at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art through Oct. 27.

This meta-analysis of preschool effectiveness research demonstrates that high-quality preschool leaves children better prepared for school, especially in terms of their academic skill development. There is growing evidence of long-lasting benefits for children’s school progress and behavioral outcomes. Of the studies in that measured children’s literacy beyond school entry, about half found significant benefits of preschool for children’s reading performance in elementary school—in several cases persisting up to 5th grade. A substantial body of research on programs that succeed in preparing children for school identifies important elements of quality, including well-prepared teachers, coaching and mentoring, research-based, developmentally appropriate early learning standards and curricula., and meaningful parent engagement. Policymakers should turn their attention from whether to invest in pre-k programs to how best to do so.

Regardless of a child’s age or challenges, parents can encourage sound homework routines for a successful start to the school year. First, students should consider how to create organized work spaces, backpacks and lockers cleared of clutter and systematized for easy retrieval of important assignments. Second, nightly to-do checklists are a must to help prioritize and plan ahead. But many students still struggle when it comes to homework. Their stress tends to be exacerbated by three primary challenges: procrastinating, feeling overwhelmed and struggling to retain information. Ideally, parents can help elementary school children develop effective homework habits so they will not need as much guidance as they get older

At first, I cringed when I thought about a classroom without perfectly tidy desks, pushed-in chairs, and thoughtfully chosen seating assignments. I thought, “Why would any teacher want to lose control of his or her classroom that way?” While I despised making seating charts every month, I prided myself on it, too. Doing it well was kind of like solving a Rubik’s cube or complicated equation. But I started to warm to the idea of a flexible-seating classroom, where students can pick their own seats from a variety of options, when I visited one in action. What I saw was kids looking comfortable and engaged in their work. Being ready to make the change was the easiest part of the process. There are many considerations to think about when implementing flexible seating: designing a classroom layout, purchasing items, logistics, and communication.

On Point is planning a new four-part series to explore the achievement gap in American K-12 schools, what’s causing it — and what’s working to narrow it. Here’s what’s coming up: Part I — What Is The Achievement Gap? (Sept. 9): “The gap” is everywhere — not just urban districts, and not just districts known for low-performing schools. We talk about why the gap between educational achievement, for white students and students of color has been so intractable, where it came from, and whether we should be calling it the achievement gap at all, or the opportunity gap. Is it about students’ lack of achievement, or the lack of opportunities they’re being offered?

To properly advocate for their special-needs children, parents must become experts on a wide range of legal, medical and educational matters. They have to manage paperwork, monitor their kids’ reactions to medication, master the intricacies of both their children’s rights and their school’s responsibilities, and learn how to determine whether their kids are getting the proper supports — and what to do if they’re not. But this information isn’t readily available in books or on official web pages. Services vary widely from state to state and from district to district — even from school to school — and most do not post details about their programs and special services online. Other information is buried in impenetrable legalese on various state and federal websites. Without official or user-friendly sources of information about schools, parents have to learn on the fly. So they turn to one another for help online. Though even some leaders of these virtual communities say there’s no guarantee the information given out is accurate, special ed parents burdened with the task of educating themselves find the internet the best — if not the only — place to go.

Most states have raised their cutoff scores for proficiency on state tests in the last decade, according to a study released Wednesday. The report, by the National Center for Education Statistics, converts each state’s cutoff score for proficiency into an equivalent score on the 2017 National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, math and reading tests in 4th and 8th grades. That “mapping” process found that states have made it harder for students to demonstrate proficiency on their tests. In 2007, states’ cutoff points for proficiency in 4th grade reading were as low as the equivalent of 163 on NAEP’s 0-500 point scale. By 2017, no state’s cutoff point was less than 200.

Here are four titles published in the past year that can help set the tone that school is a place where everyone belongs. Included are teaching ideas for each book that invite dialogue, introspection, and community building. While every title has the potential to ignite connection, it also has the potential to create disconnection. There is no universal reading experience. However, these titles can electrify students to learn and challenge them to think in new ways. Whether using these texts or others in your library, start the school year with purpose and joy, with books that build a sense of belonging.

California Department of Education (CDE) has released the much-anticipated “California Practitioners’ Guide for Educating English Learners with Disabilities.” The guide will help with identifying, assessing, supporting, and reclassifying English learners with disabilities. Developed to meet the needs of California, the 464-page guide was produced with the assistance of a broad coalition of organizations and individuals with decades of professional experience, so it should be relevant to educators nationwide.

In the beginning of La La La, a little girl wanders around the pages of the book singing to herself. She’s alone — and lonely — until she finds an unlikely friend: the moon. It’s illustrated by Jaime Kim and authored by Kate DiCamillo, who has written dozens of children’s books, including The Tale of Despereaux and the Mercy Watson series about an adventurous piglet. This summer we’re asking authors and illustrators how they work together — or separately — to translate words into pictures. Or in this case, word singular, because for La La La DiCamillo gave illustrator Jaime Kim: A challenge a manuscript with exactly one word. “The only word in this is ‘la,’ and I don’t even know if that counts as a word,” DiCamillo says.

Andrea Ramos, eighth grade student at Kelly Elementary School: My favorite hobby has become reading and writing. English is not my best subject, but I do pretty well in it. The first time I got hooked on a book was the summer before seventh grade. Jessica Bibbs-Fox, teacher at Kelly Elementary School: My parents, from the sharecropping Jim Crow era, birthed my siblings in the segregated South and worked their way out of the fields to become middle-class Angelenos. They instilled in me a passion for reading through an understanding of the struggle to attain that privilege and respecting the power it holds. So I read, and I read a lot! I recognize the importance of teaching students the impact of reading on one’s life and history. Oftentimes students, much like my own school peers, are not excited to read because they haven’t been taught our history and taught to respect the power of reading.

A social entrepreneur, drawing on his background as an immigrant, believes he has found an untapped resource to help more struggling students succeed in reading. The secret? Families. Saphira is going into the fourth grade at Girls Prep in the fall, and she’s been falling behind in reading. So this summer, for five weeks, she’s making the hour-and-a-half trek each way from her home in the Bronx to try to catch up. And what makes this summer reading program different for many others is that once a week, her father Gerren, who works as a private driver, attends with her, through a program called Springboard. Springboard now runs summer and afterschool programs in 12 cities. They give away free books and backpacks full of school supplies and tablets as incentives to the families. In just five weeks, on average, 3 out of 4 students get to the next reading level or even further. Plus, when Springboard follows up six months later, they find families are still reading together more often than before.

If there’s one victim of the testing and accountability era that policymakers and school system leaders haven’t mourned, it’s the field trip. After all, field trips have long been dismissed in some quarters as wasteful, distracting, unserious exercises. But many teachers have consistently seen things differently. As a new school year looms, it’s worth asking whether it’s time to reconsider the value of the humble field trip. Enter University of Arkansas professor Jay Greene, who has done creative, pioneering research on civic values, school choice, high school graduation rates and even the selection of names for schools. Throughout the past decade, though, Greene has been breaking new ground in tackling a scarcely-studied question—the educational value of field trips.

While English-language learners generally lag behind their peers in academic achievement, lumping the students into one group can limit schools’ ability to identify their individual strengths and struggles. Whether they’re a newcomer to the United States, a longterm ELL struggling with academic English, or a student who is somewhere in-between, English-learners have diverse academic and linguistic needs—and a new study argues that there are vast differences in what they need and how they perform in school. Using longitudinal data from a large, urban California school district, the research found that newcomer English-learners and reclassified English-learners take just as many, if not more, advanced academic courses than their native English-speaking peers.

Parents considering making a commitment to music instruction may find that kids benefit from being involved with music in many ways, some of which may be surprising. The New England Board of Higher Education says several studies show that consistent music education improves vocabulary and reading comprehension skills. Emerging evidence points to an area of the brain that controls both musical ability and language comprehension as being more closely related than previously thought. Music education may help young children learn words and how to pronounce them, as learning to play music enables them to process the many new sounds they hear from others. Researchers have discovered a strong relationship between participating in school arts and academic success as demonstrated by students’ grade point averages, according to the National Association for Music Education.

AASL released its new, downloadable Developing Inclusive Learners and Citizens Activity Guide. Designed to support school librarians in nurturing inclusive learning communities, the Guide offers reflection activities, scenarios, and resources based on the six Shared Foundations and the four Domains of our National School Library Standards. The goal of the Activity Guide is to help learners and school librarians alike seek balanced perspectives, global learning, empathy, tolerance, and equity to support inclusive environments within and beyond the four walls of the school library.

M.T. Anderson, recipient of the 2019 Margaret A. Edwards Award, delivered these words upon his acceptance of the honor at the annual conference of the American Library Association, which was held in Washington D.C. The annual Edwards Award (MAE), administered by the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) and sponsored by School Library Journal, recognizes an author as well as specific titles that have stood the test of time and made a “significant and lasting” contribution to young adult literature. Today, I’m going to talk about hope. On YA lit panels throughout my career, I’ve heard many answers to the question “What distinguishes YA books from books for adults?” The answer from other writers is often a single word, stark and moving: hope. They answer that leaving the reader with hope for tomorrow is the essential ingredient.

Social-emotional learning generally refers to the processes, activities or programs designed to help individuals cultivate and advance a wide range of non-academic competences or capabilities, often called SEL skills. School-based SEL typically takes place within classroom settings either during regular classes or after school. The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, or CASEL, an organization that specializes in evaluating SEL efficacy, has identified five core competencies in social-emotional learning: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills and responsible decision-making. Research has found notable connections among SEL skills and academic success, behavioral health as well as social-emotional development in school and later in life.

Schools that prioritize literacy as a central mission of the school have greater retention, more proficient readers, and higher levels of overall academic achievement. But what does that mission look like in practice, and how can we get there? As we count down to the International Literacy Association 2019 Conference with its theme of Creating a Culture of Literacy, we asked our Twitter community, “What is something often overlooked when working to create a culture of literacy in learning environments?” Their responses remind us that there’s no one-size-fits-all blueprint; the exact formula is unique to each school and classroom.

During the summer, Education Week’s Larry Ferlazzo shares thematic posts bringing together responses on similar topics from the past eight years. Today’s set focuses on reading. Contributors include Daniel Willingham, Kylene Beers, Donalyn Miller, and Nancy Frey.

Andrea Davis Pinkney and Brian Pinkney are literally the couple that met at the copy machine. They attended business events, went out to lunch, and from there, “we started sharing about our lives,” Brian says. He was an illustrator, she was a writer, and “We thought, wow, we could really do some amazing things together.” The Pinkneys have now been together for 30 years, and in that time, they’ve collaborated on nearly 20 children books. Their latest is Martin Rising: Requiem for a King, a series of documentary poems chronicling the final days of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s life — written by Andrea and illustrated by Brian. Andrea and Brian are coworkers for the long haul. They’ve collaborated on baby board books, biography picture books, and narrative non-fiction books for older kids.

Lee Bennett Hopkins, who in scores of anthologies he edited as well as in his own writings used poetry as a tool to teach and fire the imaginations of young readers, died on Thursday Aug. 8 in Cape Coral, Fla. Beginning in the late 1960s he published more than 100 anthologies over a half-century. There were volumes on particular subjects, about animals, space, inventions, art, punctuation, the different people youngsters were likely to encounter when they began attending school. He drew on writers known mostly within the children’s literature universe and on household names like Carl Sandburg, Langston Hughes and E. E. Cummings. And he wrote poetry himself, often slipping one of his works into the anthologies he edited. Whether somber or silly, poetry could reach children in a particularly powerful way, Mr. Hopkins believed.

A student’s ability to comprehend a text will vary depending on his familiarity with the subject; no degree of “skill” will help if he lacks the knowledge to understand it. In the United States, where schools are all teaching different things, test designers try to assess general reading ability by presenting students with passages on a range of subjects and asking multiple-choice questions. Many of these questions mirror the American approach to literacy instruction: What’s the main idea? What’s the author’s purpose? What inferences can you make? Test designers also attempt to compensate for the inevitable variation in students’ background knowledge. But kids with less overall knowledge and vocabulary are always at a disadvantage. While the tests purport to measure skills, it’s impossible for students to demonstrate those skills if they haven’t understood the text in the first place. The bottom line is that the test-score gap is, at its heart, a knowledge gap.

When I was a high school English teacher, I prided myself on my work ethic. But I was too bogged down to, let’s say, pick up The Handbook of Reading Research and read the information-rich but dense 30-page research articles on best practices. Instead, my approach to instruction was based on what I learned in college, professional development, and trial and error. I was a good teacher, but I could have been better. After beginning my doctorate in educational leadership with a specialization in literacy, I was forced to read those long, complicated articles. I was astounded by how much I didn’t already know. I was on the front line; why hadn’t anyone told me about, for example, Self-Regulated Strategy Development, which I now use as the backbone of my instruction? Why was all of this research being conducted if it wasn’t disseminated to the people who could use it the most: teachers? Research should inform what’s actually happening in the classroom to make maximum use of what’s being discovered. While there’s a great need to bridge the gap at the system level, it’s possible to bring more evidence-based practice into your classroom.

Evan Hempler clambers up the treehouse in his backyard to check his “weather station.” “I use this yo-yo to catch moist air to make a prediction, like how much moisture is in the air,” he explains. A colorful pinwheel monitors the wind. Evan has a high IQ and excels at building things, his mother Ronda says, but from the time he was a toddler, he struggled with speech and later reading and writing. A diagnosis of dyslexia didn’t come until Evan was in third grade. Now, he wants to tell everyone about people like himself who have the condition. Evan and his brother David, 7, hosted a booth at Port Orchard’s Festival by the Bay to raise awareness of dyslexia. “Dyslexia is a reading difference, not a disability,” Evan said, showing off his booth under construction. “This board will say, ‘Dyslexia is my super-power.’ I like it because it makes me better at engineering. … But reading and spelling is harder for me because I have dyslexia, sometimes math.”

Navigating new places and spaces, meeting teachers, and making friends—it’s all part the school experience. Here you’ll find a selection of 2019 picture books that can ease the way.

If you were to visit any preschool or kindergarten classroom, you’d surely find that shared book reading is a common activity used to facilitate discussions and support a young child’s language and literacy development. A new study, published in Early Childhood Research Quarterly, examined the extent to which preschool teachers use different types of questions during classroom-based shared book reading. Researchers found that only 24 per cent of what teachers said during the shared book reading were questions, and the kids answered the questions accurately 85 per cent of the time. In today’s episode, I’m joined by one of the study’s authors, Dr Tricia Zucker, who is an Associate Professor with the Children’s Learning Institute at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth in Houston. We chat about what the main findings were to come from the research, whether the questions teachers were asking were too simple for students, and how teachers could improve their questioning practices to ensure children are given the appropriate level of challenge.

Every kid imagines their favorite storybook coming to life. And one urban planner is making those childhood dreams come true for kids in Ohio. Kauser Razvi founded Literary Lots, which creates temporary, real-life children’s book scenes in Cleveland. Past installments include scenes from Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. This year, the Literary Lots team turned a vacant lot in Cleveland’s Slavic Village neighborhood into a scene straight out of The Wild Robot by Peter Brown, Razvi says.

“Put the world on pause,” author Jason Reynolds tweeted on Tuesday, seeming to sum up the feeling of the literary community as it mourned the death of author Toni Morrison. The Nobel Laureate, Pulitzer Prize winner, and creator of the seminal works Beloved and The Bluest Eye, among others, was 88. Heartfelt reaction from admirers and authors she influenced flooded social media. Reynolds, the Newbery Honor winner and National Book Award finalist, wrote about Morrison’s impact on him. “You taught me boundlessness. No Boxes. That I get to fight for freedom, and make my own simultaneously. Thank you, Mother Morrison.” He continued, “I had to grow into Toni’s work like growing into a suit meant for me, when it was time. When I was ready. But the suit had always been meant for me. Had always been waiting for me.”

Foldable paper microscopes? A tabletop card game about killer snails? Interactive design games for kids? They’re all great end-of-summer activities to get kids thinking again about science, technology, engineering, and math, according to the National Science Foundation. “It’s about that everyday learning around the dinner table or walking down the street, with things we encounter and have the opportunity to explore and understand,” said program director Julie Johnson, the NSF’s lead on efforts to advance informal STEM learning in contexts other than school. The NSF published a blog post highlighting a range of tools, games, activities and public television shows it has supported, all of which Johnson said can be considered “informal learning resources” that “promise self-exploration and choice.” While each is different in how it aims to promote learning, all share a focus on helping all children build the belief that they can become effective scientists.

As Alabama students return to school this week, the youngest among them is heading toward a new hurdle never before attempted in this state. This year’s first-graders, come two years from now, will have to read on grade level. If not, they will not advance from third to fourth grade. That’s according to a new law passed by the Alabama Legislature this spring. The Alabama Literacy Act was designed with the goal of improving academic achievement across the state by ensuring early learners get a solid foundation in reading. Assistant State Superintendent Elisabeth Davis is heading up the state’s efforts to implement the new law, which covers everything from requiring teachers to be trained in the science of reading to regular assessments of how well young students are reading to working with parents to help their children read. Even though there are still decisions to be made about the tests and materials that will be used, one of the most important parts—teacher training—is already underway.

How do students best learn to read? Equally important, how do students learn to love reading? The Common Core emphasizes reading comprehension skills, like identifying the main idea of a text. Yet in her new book, “The Knowledge Gap,” Natalie Wexler argues that teaching those skills in a vacuum, rather than centering instruction around interesting and rigorous content knowledge, hurts both student achievement and engagement. In the excerpt here, Wexler observes two elementary school classrooms, each one taking a different approach to teaching reading. When young children are introduced to history and science in concrete and understandable ways, chances are they’ll be far better equipped to reengage with those topics with more nuance later on. At the same time, teaching disconnected comprehension skills boosts neither comprehension nor reading scores. It’s just empty calories. In effect, kids are clamoring for broccoli and spinach while adults insist on a steady diet of donuts.

The most important point raised in Natalie Wexler’s new book The Knowledge Gap is nearly an afterthought. It’s in the book’s epilogue. After a compelling, book-length argument in favor of offering a knowledge-rich education to every child and documenting our frustrating lack of progress in doing so—to raise reading achievement, promote justice, even, she suggests, to end school segregation—the author makes a surprising observation. “I’d love to point to a school district, or even a single school, and say: This is how it should be done,” Wexler writes. “Unfortunately, I have yet to see an American school that consistently combines a focus on content with an instructional method that fully exploits the potential of writing to build knowledge and critical thinking abilities for every child.”

Students with learning disabilities can struggle with reading comprehension, written expression and problem solving. Children who display learning deficits could have a disorder such as dyslexia, dyscalculia, auditory processing disorder, nonverbal learning, or visual perceptual/visual motor deficit. What’s being done to identify and accommodate students living with these kinds of disabilities? What do parents need to know to be a good advocate for their child? What resources are available to educators? Are learning deficits harder to identify in biligual students?

Over the last several decades, psychologists have unearthed a wealth of evidence on how children learn. But for three basic reasons, it’s proven hard to translate that evidence into classroom practice. There’s overwhelming evidence that, especially when students don’t know much about a topic, it’s best to provide information explicitly. But the prevailing theory in the education world has long been that it’s better for even novice learners to “discover” or “construct” knowledge for themselves, often in largely self-directed groups. Consistent with that theory, teacher-training programs encourage educators to value imparting skills over information—including supposed skills in reading comprehension and critical thinking. The reasons for the disjunction between the worlds of education and science are complex. But the obstacles to getting the findings of cognitive psychology into classroom practice fall into three basic categories.

More than 30 studies point to better reading comprehension from printed material. The benefit for reading on paper was rather small, after averaging the studies together. But 29 of the 33 laboratory studies found that readers learned more on paper. Genre is also important. In the studies that had students read narrative fiction, there was no benefit for paper over screens. But for nonfiction information texts, the advantage for paper stands out. The mounting research evidence against screens is important because it clashes with textbook publishers’ long-term plans to emphasize digital texts.

For the past three years, Greenwood Community Schools has seen early detection as the biggest key in helping children who suffer from dyslexia, and now all public schools are required to identify and assist those students. The law now requires every school district to have at least one reading specialist trained in assisting students with dyslexia. The law also requires schools to screen students for reading-based disabilities, and provide help through intervention for students who are or may be at risk of being identified as dyslexic. Greenwood schools has been using the a method to train its teachers to assist students from kindergarten through second grade, with the intention of making sure they are ready for the IREAD exam in third grade, said Lisa Harkness, the district’s curriculum director and its designated reading specialist. The method helps children develop literacy skills by breaking down why letters and words sound the way they do.

It’s summer break, but 14 rising third-graders spent a recent morning at Denver’s McMeen Elementary learning about proper nouns. Some of the 14 students were learning English as a second language. Others were native English speakers who struggle in reading. For 3½ weeks this summer, they all signed up to spend their mornings practicing literacy and language skills, and their afternoons doing fun activities as part of Denver Public Schools’ “summer academy.” The academy, which is free for families, has several purposes. It started years ago as a way to help English language learners maintain the progress they made during the school year. For nearly 30,000 of Denver’s 93,000 students, English is a second language; the most common first language is Spanish. Recently, the district has extended summer academy invitations to any students in kindergarten through third grade identified as reading “significantly below grade level,” who could use a similar literacy boost. The academy also serves as a training ground for teachers new to the district who must learn the way Denver teaches English language development.

In order to narrow the achievement gap between low-income and affluent students, schools may benefit from adopting elementary curricula focused on building knowledge, according to an article in The Atlantic. Previous case studies show students from different socioeconomic backgrounds and spanning different reading levels do not differ in reading skills, but rather in the knowledge and vocabulary that provides the context needed for reading comprehension. When kids from both lower and higher reading levels had the same knowledge, their comprehension was essentially identical.