Literacy Now

We have 50 years of research that proves family engagement is an important strategy to improve student outcomes—so why is it still so hard to achieve? Educators, just like families, don’t get an instruction manual on how to build effective home–school partnerships. That’s why it is so important that schools and districts spend time building the capacity of all the key stakeholders to work together in meaningful ways to improve student achievement.

Building the capacity of families and teachers to work together begins by planning purposeful family engagement events that provide families with literacy strategies they can use at home to support their children’s learning. Those events must contain five essential elements that help families and educators develop the capabilities, connections, cognition, and confidence to work as partners to improve student learning.

• Family engagement events or activities must contain a relationship component. Trusting, respectful relationships are the foundation of true partnerships.
• Every training event or activity should leverage the strengths of families. They should be partners in both the planning and the implementation of every event and all of the events should be differentiated to meet the individual needs of families.
• All of the events and activities should be designed to support student learning. Providing families with new strategies they can use at home to support what students learn in the classroom is one of the best ways to link families to their children’s learning.
• Every event should include opportunities to work in groups. The best family engagement events provide many opportunities for peer-to-peer learning and dialogue.
• Finally, every family engagement event should provide opportunities for practice and feedback using a variety of strategies. Families who feel more confident using new strategies are much more likely to continue using them at home, and confidence increases with practice.

Family engagement increases student achievement, but it doesn’t happen overnight and there is no single strategy that will work for every family or every school. Taking the time to build the capacity of both families and school staff to build effective partnerships is the only way to move from random acts of family engagement to truly engaging all stakeholders.

Sherri Wilson has worked in the field of family engagement at the local, state, and federal level for more than 20 years and is a founding board member of the National Association for Family, School, and Community Engagement. She is currently the director of Consultative Services at Scholastic.

Sherri Wilson will present a workshop titled “Building Capacity to Engage All Families” at the ILA 2017 Conference & Exhibits, held in Orlando, FL, July 15–17.

Graphic novels, video games, blogs, and more. With the growing list of media choices to use in your literacy teaching, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. How do you narrow down your options to figure out what’s best for you and your students? And what are the best ways to use this media to support literacy and language arts development over time?

In our work as classroom teachers and literacy researchers, we’ve learned that different kinds of media come with important considerations for how to choose and use them effectively in your teaching practice. Though we continue to learn more every day, we’d like to share what we’ve gathered so far.

Social media: Considering students’ everyday writing practices

Social media can be effective for broadening the space of the classroom, as it allows for an increased, potentially interactive audience wherein the students are largely in charge of creating and designing content. In my research, I have explored how students can use varying social media platforms for writing and have found that students seem to use social media platforms differently based on their understanding of the classroom norms in conjunction with their understanding of the platforms. For example, students tend to write more formally when designing websites but less formally and more personally when creating blog posts or posting to Instagram. It is important to consider the goals of the unit when selecting a platform as these will likely affect how the students write within that platform.

Video games: Bridging virtual worlds and life experiences

Leverage students’ enthusiasm by asking them to connect their gameplay to topics covered in class. For example, a number of teachers have engaged students who are passionate about Pokémon Go by connecting the game to important topics such as biology, geography, and literature. A different approach, however, is to examine the practices of students around video games and other digital media and to use those as points for discussion. The ways that students research and learn online about a game like Pokémon Go, for example, could spark a discussion about Internet literacy and how to tell which sources are reliable.

Visual media: More than just a motivator

It might be tempting to select visual media in the hopes of engaging apathetic students. However, visual media is not the proverbial magic bullet of education. Rather, it comes with its own challenges and can prove frustrating for students unfamiliar with approaching these texts analytically. I’ve watched students quit reading a graphic novel because the images were too chaotic for them to process. That said, preparing students with the terminology and functionality of the medium can go a long way in supporting their literacy experiences. In comics, what is a gutter and what does it do? In film, what distinguishes between a fade and a cut and why do they matter? When students have these tools, they are better prepared to view and discuss these texts.

Literacy educators have the power to transform the way students engage with texts across all kinds of media forms. We hope these thoughts will help you take your own literacy practice to the next level.

Earl Aguilera is a former high school English teacher, K–12 reading specialist, and current doctoral student at Arizona State University. His research focuses on the role of new media literacies for students learning through and about digital technologies.

Olivia G. Stewart is graduating from Arizona State University, where she focused on digital literacies and literacy practices while using digital technologies. Her dissertation work reflected these interests as she studied how students use varying social media platforms for writing and how these uses effect “what counts as writing” in students’ increasingly digital literacy practices.

Kelly M. Tran is a researcher of games and learning. She is particularly interested in the communities around games and the informal teaching and learning that occurs between players.

Dani Kachorsky is a former high school English language arts teacher whose love of comics, film, and young adult literature led her to put these visual media in a place of prominence in her classroom instruction. Her experiences in the classroom influenced her research interests in visual and multimodal literacy.

Earl Aguilera, Olivia G. Stewart, Kelly M. Tran, and Dani Kachorsky will present a panel discussion titled “Beyond the ‘Fakebook’ Profile: Engaged and Purposeful Literacy Instruction Using Alternative Media” at the ILA 2017 Conference & Exhibits, held in Orlando, FL, July 15–17.

ILA has partnered with Heinemann Publishing to broadcast its first-ever social justice panel, “Disrupting a Destructive Cycle: How Literacy Drives Social Change,” through Facebook Live on Saturday, July 15 from 2:00–4:00 PM ET. The panel will be moderated by Nikole Hannah-Jones, an investigative reporter covering racial injustice for The New York Times Magazine.

Cornelius Minor, lead staff developer at the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, will open the event, which is inspired by an on-the-fly discussion he led at the ILA 2016 Conference & Exhibits. ILA 2016 took place just days after the Alton Sterling shooting in Baton Rouge, LA, and the Dallas, TX, murder of several police officers gunned down in a seemingly retaliatory effort. Minor engaged attendees in an impromptu conversation to demonstrate how teachers should talk about emotionally charged and controversial topics.

Hannah-Jones will deliver a short keynote before diving into the discussion.

Panelists include Minor; Monita K. Bell, senior editor of Teaching Tolerance; Deborah S. Delisle, executive director and CEO of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development; Zareen Jaffery, executive editor of Salaam Reads; Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, assistant professor in the Literacy, Culture, and International Education Division at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education; and Gene Luen Yang, (U.S.) National Ambassador for Young People's Literature.

The conversation will explore how educators can confront complex social issues such as racially motivated violence and cultural intolerance in the classroom, in addition to looking at the role of literacy as a key agent of civic engagement and social change. Hannah-Jones says she hopes that educators who attend will leave with a set of tools they can use to facilitate constructive conversations and empower their students to promote social justice.

Those interested in participating can visit the event page to learn more and to RSVP. To tune in, visit our Facebook page at the time of the event. Interested, but have conflicting plans? The full recording will be archived on our Facebook page.

Alina O’Donnell is the editor of Literacy Daily.

Being in Boston for the ILA 2016 conference was an extremely exciting learning opportunity for me. Although I had to travel more than 5,000 miles from Nigeria—and I was seven months pregnant at the time—it was worth every second.

I crossed several hurdles, including fundraising to cover expenses so I could attend—and present on the work of my social enterprise, Magical Books—but it’s the sessions I attended and resources I received that made the conference so memorable.

It has all aided my work with children over this past year in a country where reading for pleasure is not often promoted and most students read simply to pass exams. I aim to change that, and so I can’t wait to return for ILA 2017 to again be among so many like-minded literacy educators.

At the general session last year, I listened to Adora Svitak talk about the power of literature in teaching empathy and to Kwame Alexander talk about how to make poetry relatable, enjoyable, and accessible for children. I am also glad to have attended Pernille Ripp’s session on strategies to engage all learners, mainly that students shouldn’t be compelled to use reading logs, as this stifles the fun and limits the number/volume of books they want to read.

Teaching practices and instructional strategies that position students closer to reading and writing excellence by Kelly Gallagher was another session that inspired me. Now, I allow children to make their choice regarding the books they want to read irrespective of the volume and also model through mentor texts how students can be better writers. In addition, I take time to confer with students on their progress and challenges, to engage them with high-interest topics, to give lots of low-pressure ungraded writing, to write alongside them, and to encourage them to write for an audience.

Tiffany Todd’s session “60 Apps in 60 Minutes” was very engaging and eye opening. In fact, we were able to make a list of 100 apps. I was probably familiar with about two before the session, but now I know about Story Creator, Quizlet, AutoRap, readwritethink.org, africanstorybook.org, and 95 others.

I found the session “From Phonics to Fluency to Proficient Reading” by Timothy Rasinski enlightening, especially because at Magical Books, we organize literacy clinics for struggling readers. One of the things I learned was that automaticity and increase in reading speed is gained through reading more and often. I have also found the “making and working words” and “vocabulary ladders” lesson plans very useful in improving students’ reading level and vocabulary.

I continue to be excited by the resources I received and, most important, the network of literacy educators I met and still communicate with. The ILA conference was a great learning experience that opened up so many opportunities beyond my national borders—and it could do exactly the same for you.

Oluwaseun Aina, an ILA member since 2015, holds a master’s degree in communication and language arts from University of Ibadan, Nigeria. She is the founder of Magical Books, a social enterprise that promotes literacy among children and young adults. She was included on ILA’s first-ever 30 under 30 list in 2015.

Imagine being at a party where the food, the drinks, the music, and the room to mingle were each in a separate location. You probably wouldn’t really appreciate any of the individual parts as much if you had to keep switching gears from one to the other. Having everything together creates a more enjoyable experience.

Integrating subjects has a similar effect in classrooms. When we were students, school seemed so departmentalized, each subject taught in isolation from the others. As we innovate our teaching, we look to our experiences as adults and think about how we can help our students to see the world through many lenses and use a variety of skills to interpret a situation.

When academic content is integrated, students explore a concept or skill repeatedly through the day in different ways and through various lenses, allowing for broader application of the individual skills and a greater conceptual understanding of the world.

Once you start blurring the lines and teaching to the conceptual understanding rather than compartmentalizing reading and writing, the questions often become, How do I incorporate the individual subject skills required to reach that understanding? Where does reading fluency, envisioning, sentence structure, etc., live in the integrated curriculum? It means taking a step back and looking at the big picture, thinking about your year, your students, and purpose, and then rolling up your sleeves and digging in. It might get messy; you might be uncomfortable. But don’t worry, the skills are embedded and purposefully taught within the genre. If you have the flexibility to design your scope, sequence, and units, you are ready to dive in.

What if my year is preplanned? Well, here you’ll need to gather all of the small pieces, or skills, and create the Big Idea from them. For example, if your sequence calls for teaching quotation marks and the proper placement of the comma, you can build a narrative unit around those skills and look deeply at reading and writing literature that is full of dialogue. As the students repeatedly encounter dialogue and use it in authentic situations, they will build more mastery.

When integration is done well, you will enhance your students’ conceptual understanding of real-life topics while still teaching reading and writing skills. It sounds hard, but there are many resources out there. You can begin with Understanding by Design by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe; Thinking Through Genre by Heather Lattimer; and The Reading Strategies Book and The Writing Strategies Book, both by Jennifer Serravallo.

Bonnie Greenwald, a literacy liaison and learning specialist, works with teachers to guide their practice and create and modify curricula in order to optimize learning for a range of students through a developmentally appropriate, integrated curriculum.

Anacarla Schelino, a lead teacher and literacy specialist, has worked at The School at Columbia University since 2005. Throughout her 20 years of teaching in public, charter, and independent schools, she has supported teachers’ and students’ learning of project-based curriculum that integrates a variety of disciplines.

Bonnie Greenwald and Anacarla Schelino will present a workshop titled “Reading and Writing in the Integrated Classroom” at the ILA 2017 Conference & Exhibits, held in Orlando, FL, July 15–17.