Literacy Now

This is the second installment of a four-part, how-to blog series on overcoming the digital divide, an extension of ILA’s latest brief.

As we learned from ILA’s latest brief, “Overcoming the Digital Divide: Four Critical Steps,” teachers who have students from low socioeconomic backgrounds often assume those students have little or no access to digital technology, and then avoid it in their pedagogy.

When those students—who don’t have access at home or in class—try to comprehend technology on the same level as their classmates, they fall twice as far behind. Poor digital comprehension and skills lead to lower levels of academic achievement, social advancement, and eventually, career mobility.

In last week’s installment of our Overcoming the Digital Divide series, we discussed how administrators and educators can increase funding for technology and Internet access in classrooms. This week, we’ll shift our focus to a second digital divide that’s rooted in “weak or ineffective digital pedagogy.” As educators secure access and begin to embrace 21st-century learning, they may need to rethink their teaching approaches to better support the acquisition of these new literacies and skills.

To help you cut through the Internet’s cacophony of 21st-century frameworks, guides, and methodologies, we asked David Ross, CEO of the Partnership for 21st Century Learning (P21), and Karen Wohlwend, associate professor in the Department of Literacy, Culture, and Language Education at Indiana University Bloomington, what they believe are the defining characteristics of effective 21st-century learning models.

Distributed leadership

Before leaders can get teachers and administrators to embrace transformation, they have to create a climate in which all educators are inclined to "buy in" to the vision.

“It’s very difficult to effectively run a school from the top down,” says Ross.

Earlier this year, P21 issued its first Patterns of Innovation report, which identifies five key ingredients to successful 21st-century learning environments. The report found that almost all exemplar schools embody a “distributed leadership” model, wherein all stakeholders—principals, superintendents, teachers, faculty, and students alike—share ownership over a clearly articulated mission for the school, and are actively and enthusiastically involved in execution.

For a closer look at the leadership models of successful 21st-century learning environments, check out P21’s list of case studies.

Collaborative culture

As Wohlwend notes in a report titled  "One Screen, Many Fingers," today’s students are tomorrow’s 21st-century workforce “who, very likely, will need to be experts at collaborating and inventing together...with literacies and technologies one cannot yet imagine.”

In our globalized, technology-driven world, most jobs require the ability to collaborate in both physical and virtual spaces. Today’s employers value individuals who can communicate effectively, work productively in diverse teams, be open-minded to different ideas and values, and use social and cultural differences to generate new ideas and innovate, according to a 2015 UNESCO report.

Wohlwend says she prepares students for these global opportunities by introducing “collaborative composing,” where students play together with digital apps on a single touchscreen device.

In addition to lowering overhead costs (bonus!), device sharing naturally encourages students to “listen to one another, to see from another player’s perspective, to negotiate their ideas, and to develop strategies for sharing materials and decision making,” concepts that can be applied to real-life social and employment situations.

Student agency

When students enter Wohlwend’s Literacy Playshop, they are not there to learn—but to create. In this space, they become filmmakers, performers, and designers who work together to produce sophisticated animated puppet shows, live-action plays, digital films, and more.

Through the Literacy Playshop model, Wohlwend is working to transform students from passive consumers of knowledge to “coproducers” who are actively involved in the creation of educational resources, curricular content, and teaching itself.

Wohlwend says that as students produce 21st-century texts, they not only become more proficient technology users, but also they learn how media messages are constructed.

“We need to be thinking about the ways that people are coproducing, and not just writing texts to be read silently. That is the way we operated with the printed page,” says Wohlwend. “We need to move beyond that thinking and create spaces for people to collaborate, interpret, and produce media in real-time together.”

For ideas on how to incorporate play-based literacy learning, check out The Buck Institute for Education’s (BIE) Project Search, “A Better List Of Ideas For Project-Based Learning” by TeachThought, and “The Materials of a Makerspace” by Makerspace for Education.

Teacher agency

In an Edutopia article, ELA teacher Heather Wolpert-Gawron argues that in order to support the valuable innovation of their students, teachers need the freedom to be innovative as well.

“By denying teachers their chance to develop their own creativity in curriculum, we deny them the power of modeling enthusiasm for their content and the process of delivering that content. We also inadvertently cause a stagnation of imagination and critical thinking in the very troops closest to the students themselves and those tasked with bringing out those very traits in our clientele,” she writes.

Wohlwend has applied this line of thinking to her own work with preservice and inservice teacher inquiry groups. Rather than assign a curriculum, she provides opportunities for them to collaborate, create, and test-drive projects.

“Once they’ve had those experiences, they think, ‘How do I make this happen in my own classroom?’” says Wohlwend. "It’s trusting in teachers."

Emphasis on higher order thinking

Studies show that nearly 65% of today’s students will be employed in a job that has yet to exist.

Our ever-changing world demands an ability to think critically, use continually evolving technology, be culturally aware and adaptive, and make complex decisions based on accurate analysis, according to Judy Willis, board-certified neurologist and former classroom teacher.

To prepare students for these challenges, teachers are starting to ditch prepackaged teaching methods in favor of teaching higher order thinking skills.

In 2015, ILA introduced the Scaffolding Higher Order Thinking Skills (SHOTS) strategy, which provides scaffolding tools and processes—including cue cards, graphic organizers, and question prompts—that educators can use to support text-generative and independent thinking skills.

Other helpful tools for introducing higher order thinking include TeachHUB’s “Teaching Strategies that Enhance Higher-Order Thinking and Edutopia’s Higher-Order Thinking Questions presentation.

21st-century professional development

With a unified vision and strong pedagogy in place, educators’ next step is to operationalize those concepts.

“You can give teachers great ideas, but then their standards response is, ‘So, what do I do on Monday?’” says Ross.

Ross has delivered professional development to more than 10,000 teachers in the past decade. He says that good PD equips teachers with the tools, knowledge, and skills they need to integrate critical thinking, collaboration, and other 21st-century competencies into all content areas. 

“As a classroom teacher, I love content. But if kids don’t have the ability to critically look at content, I can’t be a good teacher.”  

Ross encourages educators to draw inspiration from P21’s 21st Century Skills Map, which provide concrete examples of how 21st-century skills can be integrated into core subjects. He also recommends 21st-century professional development resources from organizations like Common Sense Media, The National Education Association, and the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards.

To explore the rest of this four-part series, visit the links below:

Overcoming the Digital Divide, Step One: Increasing Funding for Technology and Internet Access

Overcoming the Digital Divide, Step Three: Provide Resources

Overcoming the Digital Divide, Step Four: Advocate


Alina O’Donnell is the editor of Literacy Daily.

What is the appropriate role and scope of personal response in our students’ reading and writing?

Six years ago, David Coleman, lead architect of the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts, famously stated to an audience of K–12 educators that, contrary to what they may have been led to believe, it’s important for students to learn that people don’t truly care about what they feel or think.

Coleman was responding to the view that, in many classrooms, students were doing far more “personal” expressive writing than analytical, text-focused writing. Regarding reading, he felt students were spending far too much time exploring “connections to self” rather than making meaning “within the four corners of the text.”

Pushback against Coleman’s denigration of students’ personal experience was swift and has continued since 2011. At the same time, it seems to me that reactions to Coleman’s and the Common Core’s interpretation of the role of “personal response” in literacy development have too often focused on simply defending the value of personal experience—rather than questioning the validity of the personal vs. analytical writing dichotomy itself.

Defending the value of personal response

Over the summer I was reminded of Coleman’s assertion and this widely accepted dichotomy in online conversations I had with a group of ELA teachers planning for the coming school year. How much time should they devote to personal, expressive writing, they wondered, and how much to more analytical, text-focused writing? When should they start steering class discussion away from “text-to-self connections” and insist that students make meaning within the four corners of the text?

These teachers objected to Coleman’s statement, but they agreed about the importance of strengthening their students’ strategies and dispositions for text-focused analysis. At the same time, we all agreed that, for us as much as for our students, having a personal connection to a topic, or having an initial personal response to it, tends to be highly motivating. As one teacher wrote, “When that personal connection and response is there, I’m excited to keep reading and thinking.”

Further conversation yielded another insight; in addition to providing motivation, the realm of the personal is also the realm of belief systems, preferences, biases, values, desires, and agendas. This realm of the personal is ripe for scrutiny and analysis.

In other words, we need to refute the idea that personal responses are somehow separate from, and unfit for, the activity of analysis. (Recent studies on interpretive response as conducive to growth in interpretive sophistication support this view.) As well, we should perhaps see all belief or values-based responses—including Coleman’s statement—as personal.

Putting these insights to work in our classrooms

In the context of the web and its vast trove of personal responses to everything from books (e.g., Amazon.com) to movies (e.g., rottentomatoes.com) to fan fiction (e.g., fanfiction.com) to restaurants (e.g., yelp.com), it did not take us long to envision concrete next steps. “Maybe what we need,” one of us wrote, “is actually more personal responses, and more juxtaposition of contrasting responses—because seeing different personal responses side-by-side ignites curiosity and gets everyone’s analytical engines started.”

In a web-minute, we had created a simple graphic organizer we could populate with different personal responses to a target text. The organizer is designed to invite students to read and reread juxtaposed responses (ideally including their own), identify specific differences, and look for clues to figure out why the responses agree or disagree. The guiding questions for this activity can be easily modified to better connect to particular texts or grade-levels. But we liked the following as a starting point:

• Where and about what exactly do these responses agree and/or disagree?

• What clues do you see that could help explain why these responses agree and/or disagree?

Here are three examples of organizers we prepared to use with our students:

• For first graders responding to Kevin Henkes’s Chrysanthemum (Scholastic)
• For fifth graders responding to the Sega video game Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog, using responses culled from commonsensemedia.org
• For sixth graders responding to R. J. Palacio’s novel Wonder (Penguin), using responses culled from Amazon.

In our classrooms, we discussed following a gradual-release-of-responsibility model, with the teacher first modeling with an example (using responses to a text that all students have recently read), followed by guided practice and opportunities for students themselves to choose a target text and collect responses on their own—from classmates or from the web.

As we wrapped up our summer conversations, we agreed that we’d taken a small step toward dismantling the personal vs. analytical writing dichotomy. We agreed that growing our students’ analytical abilities should not require moving beyond the realm of personal response, exploration, and expression. Rather, growing these abilities could entail learning how to closely examine and analyze personal responses—our own, as well as those of other readers and writers.

In this way we might expand not just our students’ analytical skillsets, but also their disposition to scrutinize and analyze texts of all kinds, from statements of opinion to political slogans to polished policy statements. And all that without obscuring the reality that what fundamentally animates literacy, in all its many forms—and contrary to David Coleman’s assertion—is what people think and feel.

Paul Morsink is an assistant professor in the Department of Reading and Language Arts at Oakland University in Michigan.

As I sit here writing this post, my heart is once again heavy with the hate displayed in #Charlottesville since Friday night. I replay the sounds and images that flashed across my social media feeds last weekend: white men chanting racist and homophobic slurs, people carrying torches and confederate flags, the face of a young woman who died opposing hate.

As a white woman, I know that the work of dismantling the system of white supremacy that flashed across television screens this weekend is not for my friends, family, or colleagues who identify as part of a continually marginalized group. Rather, the work of dismantling the system of white supremacy is an undertaking for my white peers across the country, for me, and especially for educators.

As a former elementary educator in post-Katrina New Orleans and now as a researcher in a racially and linguistically diverse Midwestern school, I know that discussing instances of racially motivated violence in the classroom can feel overwhelming, scary, and uncomfortable. Yet, to not take a critical stance on such issues and to engage the children and young people in our classrooms in such conversations is similar to covering a damaged floor with a beautiful rug—without seeing it, we can pretend that it is not there. In the same way that it takes effort to repair a damaged floor, we must roll up our sleeves to address these realities if we ever wish to make do on reparations. 

For classroom teachers, especially those working in an environment wherein colleagues or students actively voice racist, homophobic, or other hateful views, the idea I am presenting likely feels impossible. I would suggest, however, that this is where technology in literacy education may serve us well. Since leaving the classroom five years ago, I have learned from many teachers and scholars online through Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

Like many of the practitioners I follow, I have developed a professional learning network (PLNs) by participating in frequent Twitter chats and by following teachers on Instagram. Often the content they share addresses specific needs related to discipline or grade-level. Educational scholars have taken to Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and podcasts to make research more accessible to PK–12 educators. But, how might we borrow and build upon ideas for sharing resources from educators and scholars to engage the children and youth we teach in discussions about hate?

When events like Charlottesville occur, many PK–12 and university professionals are quick to share resources for how and why educators must discuss current events with their students. Among the more well-known resources is the Southern Poverty Law Center's Teaching Tolerance, which provides free resources to help educators integrate social justice, anti-bias, and anti-racism education into their curricula. Yet, the rapid change in technology during the last ten years has also allowed for more creative sharing of collective resources. In the aftermath of recent violent acts, various texts, videos, activities, research papers, syllabi, and other resources have been crowdsourced using the hashtag  #CharlottesvilleCurriculum. 



Not only does this hashtag provide me with materials to use in my own classroom or to share with colleagues, but I frequently grow my PLN as I find individuals willing to challenge the status quo and confront white supremacy head-on. Alternatively, I begin to follow others based on suggestions from peers within and beyond education. Through growing my PLN in this way, I have come across more creative ways to engage children and youth in classroom discussions about hate. 

Now, perhaps more than ever before, there are resources readily available for educators—especially my white peers—to discuss critical issues related to race, religion, sexual orientation, gender, ability, etc. With so many materials at hand, we cannot say we do not know how to talk to the children and young adults in our classrooms about such issues. Rather, we must take the time to educate ourselves, to grow our PLN, and to prepare. Not one of us is in this alone nor can even one of us ignore the hate espoused by the men we saw in Charlottesville or the hope provided by national counter-protests. As a recent addition to my PLN noted, “These kids that we teach, they are going to grow up one day. And what we do in our classrooms matters."

Cassie J. Brownell is a doctoral candidate and Marianne Amarel Teaching and Teacher Education Fellow in the Department of Teacher Education at Michigan State University. A corecipient of a 2015 NCTE-CEE Research Initiative Grant, Cassie’s most recent collaborative project—#hearmyhome—explores how writing with and through sound might help students and teachers attune toward literacies and communities of difference.

Budgets for professional development (PD) have been shrinking for years despite the fact that no one denies the critical importance of PD for educators’ success. These days, in order to continue their professional learning, many teachers have to get creative.

Thankfully, there are several budget-friendly options that literacy educators can rely on, even when faced with limited funding.

Digital tools

Digital platforms make it easy to connect with anyone, anywhere, build a professional learning network (PLN), and get the learning you need when you need it.

Coaching

Using cloud coaching, or virtual coaching, school districts can provide differentiated PD for literacy educators. “At a time when school districts may not have the resources to hire a full-time instructional coach or afford ongoing professional development, cloud coaching is an effective and innovative alternative to reduce teacher stress and empower literacy leadership,” says Julie Wise, literacy coach, consultant, and member of ILA’s Technology in Literacy Education Special Interest Group.

School districts are using free platforms such as Skype and Google Hangout, or low-cost options such as Zoom and GoToMeeting, to provide teachers with access to support coaches as well as authors, experts, and other educators.

Another trend is the hybrid online course/coaching support package. This can include the coach assessing educators’ videotaped lesson plans and offering timely feedback. Without the need for travel costs, substitute teachers, or any of the other traditional PD expenses, these options open up new avenues.

Collaboration

Free digital tools that allow for collaboration are trending for good reason. For example, Wise notes that some districts have started using Google Classroom to create online PD sessions where educators can post their assignments and lesson plans, upload student samples, and engage in ongoing discussions.

Twitter is a powerful tool for motivated educators and a great way to build and converse with PLN members. Literacy educators are participating in ILA’s #ILAchat as well as #engchat and #titletalk, and even starting their own hashtags. Educators also use messaging apps like Voxer and Slack for sharing articles, podcasts, and other resources.

“The trend is virtual, online professional development,” Wise says. “We’re talking about differentiated, on-demand professional development where teachers are actually able to select the specific support that they need, whether it’s one-on-one coaching, someone watching and observing them, or working with an entire group of people.”

Micro-credentialing

Many school districts don’t have funding to pay for educators to earn new credentials. Enter micro-credentialing, a new way of valuing the experience and professional learning educators have achieved.

Educators can choose from more than 250 micro-credentials that explore different competencies and prepare the required evidence for evaluation to demonstrate mastery of the selected competencies.

One organization that offers micro-credentials is the nonprofit Digital Promise. “Micro-credentialing is a professional learning tool that recognizes educators for the skills they develop that are critical to effective teaching,” says Digital Promise’s Jennifer Kabaker, director of Educator Micro-credentials. “Micro-credentials support educators who are committed to continuous professional learning and Digital Promise is working with districts and states across the country to incorporate micro-credentials into professional development structures.”

Digital Promise uses the BloomBoard platform to offer its micro-credentialing. Using the platform is currently free, and literacy-focused micro-credentials include Introducing Digital Literacy Tools and Media Literacy.

Edcamps

Edcamps aren’t new, but they remain a growing trend for teachers who want to take control of their learning. The events are free, teacher-led, and entirely participant-driven. Edcamp Literacy was part of the ILA 2017 Conference & Exhibits! Learn more here.

Shannon Montague felt so fired up by the first Edcamp she attended that she co-founded Edcamp Baltimore in 2012. “[Edcamps] have been an ongoing trend because they’re clearly something that is working for professionals,” says Montague, middle school dean of students at Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore, MD, and an Edcamp Foundation board member.

Last summer, Edcamp Maryland hosted an ELA/literacy-focused event that addressed topics such as guided reading and rotations for primary grades, inclusion and differentiation, and student publishing.

“If you trust in your teachers and you believe in your teachers, then you should let them be in control of their learning,” says Colby Sharp, a third-grade teacher at Parma Elementary School in Michigan and a cofounder of nErDcamp, an Edcamp offshoot. “We have to empower teachers to be great and give them an opportunity to learn about the things that they’re passionate about.”

Find what works for you

These trends prove that no matter what your budget, there is some form of PD available to fit your needs. Self-directed literacy educators can build their skills by taking advantage of any of these low-cost PD options or taking one of the ideas and tailoring it specifically to their school’s needs.

Willona M. Sloan is a writer, editor, and literary host from Washington, DC. She has written for numerous publications, covering topics in K–12 education

In thinking about the upcoming school year, we believe most teachers would agree that our students, especially tweens and teens, have been using technology all summer long: reading and writing posts to Instagram, texting, watching videos on YouTube, or scouring the Internet for information about Zendaya or Tom Holland. This would be consistent with a recent Pew Research Center study that found 92% of teens are online daily. It has also been reported that tweens and teens actually use screen media for an average of over four and six hours per day, respectively. While a large percentage of that time is spent on television, the report identified distinct patterns of use. While both groups indicated a preference for watching online videos, tweens were more likely to play mobile games, and teens engaged with social media daily.

Leveraging technology for learning

Despite students’ inclination to informally use technology to read, write, and communicate, a recent survey found a large percentage of teachers use it for drill, review, or practice exercises. Given our roles as teachers, it is important we move beyond drill and practice and look for ways to leverage the skills and engagement exhibited by students with instruction incorporating authentic uses of technology. In other words, potentially leveraging technology for higher level thinking or to produce an artifact—something that is still not widely practiced. This requires moving beyond simply incorporating technology into our instruction to thinking about how it can be transformative. Doing so will effectively prepare students for success in the digital world.

We know many of you are already planning activities for the students that will soon enter your doors. Yet, the last few weeks (or hours) of summer may offer opportunities to reflect on the ways students use technology for creation, rather than consumption. Both Bloom’s (Revised) Digital Taxonomy and the SAMR model are helpful in this process. Thinking about how you create opportunities for higher level thinking or transformative instruction will likely lead to authentic applications of technology that involve your students in reading, writing, and communicating for real purposes and audiences. Considering the two simultaneously may help rejuvenate previous lessons as you consider both the level of thinking, as well as the related purpose of technology (see discussions of this here and here).

Once you have thought about the “big picture,” it may be time to revisit the tools you are currently using. While there are many tools that remain relevant, including Padlet, VoiceThread, and Storybird, this site presents resources directly applicable to Bloom's and SAMR. Given the popularity of Instagram, here are a number of uses for the popular social networking tool in the classroom. Pablo allows students to add a phrase over a picture, which can be useful in creating pictures or memes to share on Instagram or Snapchat. For the YouTubers in your class, Biteable is a tool (similar to Voki and others) students can use to create animated videos from scratch or from an editable, premade template. Willing to try Twitter? Check out this presentation that provides a number of authentic, creative uses.

Join the conversation

Rethinking our use of technology is not always easy, but social media can be helpful. If you are on Twitter, check out @JenRoberts1, @techlearning, @wiobyrne, and @Alex_Corbitt for a few ideas. We’d also like to hear from you: How will you use technology in your classroom this year? Which apps or tools do you plan to integrate? Share your thoughts on Twitter using #newtechthisyear. We look forward to seeing your questions and ideas!

Kimberly Lilly is a seventh- and eighth-grade science teacher in the Onslow County School System of North Carolina. She has nine years of teaching experience, holds a bachelor's degree in middle grades education, and is currently pursuing her master's degree at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

S. Michael Putman, PhD, is a professor and the chairperson of the Reading and Elementary Education Department at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. His areas of research include the impact of teacher preparation and professional development on teacher self-efficacy; student dispositions toward online inquiry; and the effective use of technology within teaching practices.