Literacy Now

A few Reading Today issues back, I pondered the importance—and the challenges—of educational leadership, particularly what it takes to lead in the midst of policy. I made the following observation:

“…politicians and the public can fight the fight, but regardless of how we feel or where we stand on policy decisions, the job of public educators is to implement what has been put in place by a vote or decision (state or federal).”

Nowhere is this more evident than with the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), in which the continuing debate is undoubtedly a hot topic, but for the wrong reasons. Equally full of passionate support and disdain, the “noise” is coming at teachers from all directions—from teachers unions to parents, from media outlets to state legislators, and even from publishers shopping what’s billed to be CCSS-aligned materials.

The unspoken implication for teachers is that whether or not they agree or disagree with education policy, their job is to teach within it; deliver student outcomes as prescribed and/or interpreted by an educational overseeing body. That leaves the average teacher wondering who to follow. Sometimes the policy noise can be deafening and, worse yet, defeating to the very teachers it is meant to guide.

As the largest global professional network of literacy educators, we have the duty to cut through that noise. Each educator that comes upon us and considers joining weighs the value of what we offer and considers us as worthy (or not) of their dime and time. When an educator makes the choice to join, they are likely seeing IRA not only as a resource for supporting fine classroom instruction in reading, but also hopeful that IRA will support what is right and good for reading instruction at a greater level—one of influencing those who create the policy under which they deliver instruction. Literacy educators around the world want an advocate.

We can tell our members what makes for good instruction—the research and evidence that produces student outcomes—but it may be of marginal use if we are not assertive within the global realm of education in informing and influencing the bodies of government that craft the policy.

This is no mean feat for IRA; within our ranks, we have disagreement over what is effective. But arguing amongst ourselves which body of research is valid can no longer be an excuse for not supporting—and advocating for—teachers everywhere. We believe our job is to convene the collegial dialogue and the debate in a way that ultimately informs good practice for inclusion in education policy.

We live in an age when taking a public stance on an issue often includes vilifying the opposing view. The fallout carnage of the vehement argument of right and wrong perspectives has a wearying effect on our teachers and serves no useful purpose for them as to what they need to teach literacy to our children. IRA is stepping up and finding the right balance with serving literacy educators by continuing to translate research to sound classroom teaching and renewing our charge of advocating on their behalf for what is effective instructional literacy practice.

In doing so, there have been times when we’ve been accused of being pro-Common Core, or criticized simply for not demonstrating enough favor for or against education policies, Common Core or otherwise. But the truth is, in the end, our stance on any one particular issue does not make us who we are as the International Reading Association. In fact, the truth is simple: We are pro-educator. We are for teachers. That is our stance, and if it’s Common Core-aligned research and lesson plans our members need, then that is what we are going to provide.

We owe it to teachers—our members—to do just that, as well as to continue to voice, with fervor, what is necessary to build sound education policy.

Marcie Craig Post (mpost@/) is the executive director of the International Reading Association. This column originally appeared in Reading Today magazine. Members can read the rest of the magazine in digital form and non-members can join IRA here.

In most people’s minds, the “maker movement” in education is associated with STEM-related concepts and technology-based activities. There is good reason for that; it’s an approach to project-based learning (PBL) that encourages experimenting, building, and playing with different concepts. However, my entry point into this hot trend has been primarily through the unusual route of literacy.

This maker movement isn’t necessarily something new. For years in my library, I have allowed opportunities for my students to play and tinker with reading and writing. As a library media specialist, I felt that I had the scope and the affordances to make that possible, to enable activities that were outside of the sometimes strict classroom regimen. Those early experiences were my first attempts at creating a maker culture.

I have always regarded myself as a student of learning. I started collecting secondhand education books during my first years of teaching. I learned early on that educational theories and practices are cyclical and things once old are eventually new again, often reappearing under the guise of a new name. One of my favorite books in that collection—and the one that led me to tinkering with literacy—was called If You’re Trying to Teach Kids How to Write, You’ve Gotta Have This Book! by Marjorie Frank. The playfulness of the writing is reflected in its whimsical graphics and nonlinear structure. The author herself writes about the “joy that fooling around with words” has added to her life. I remember distinctly how just looking at this book made me want to have fun with reading and writing with my students.

Putting it into action

Students are most accustomed to stories in a linear structure. To expose them to a different way, I often read children’s books with nonlinear narratives to my elementary students. One of my favorites is Black and White, written by David Macauley. Picture books such as this have their own logic. After examining texts that don’t need to be read sequentially from beginning to end in strict order, students become more aware of the innovative possibilities for their own writing.

Another favorite of mine is Inanimate Alice, written by Kate Pullinger and produced by Ian Harper. This “born-digital” story has an “open text” construction and deliberately allows opportunities for student co-creation. The story unfolds in episodes that can either be read individually, sequentially, or in any order. My students enjoyed creating their own next episodes by crafting their own narratives, using various tools and resources, print and digital, or even remixing the Inanimate Alice assets to tell an original story. The maker movement encourages children to imagine, create, and build. My students did this during our “choose your own adventure” unit, which was based on the video game Roller Coaster Tycoon. We kicked off our unit by going on virtual rollercoaster rides. We then read a book based on the game and had fun picking our path and choosing our endings. The participatory nature was highly engaging. Students then used websites to design and test their own roller coasters. Some used the app Inklewriter and others chose to write their stories in print. No matter the medium, students thoroughly enjoyed the experience.

The perfect example of a story that moves through the continuum of creating, but with literacy as the inspiration, is Skeleton Creek, written by Patrick Carman. This hybrid text is told half in print and half in video. Similar to Inanimate Alice, ittells stories across multiple media platforms. This transmedia story helped to move my students from consumption to creation and sparked a mash-up of experiences. The process became less about the task of writing and more about telling stories by leveraging traditional elements and new technologies to shape their narrative. Students designed multimedia reading experiences that fused a story with video, games, and puzzles.

Embracing a growing trend

Following these experiences, I decided to formalize the concepts into a makerspace learning experience. Last year, I was invited to participate in the Brooklyn Storymakers Maker Party organized by the Brooklyn Public Library and Hive NYC Learning Network. At the event, kids had the opportunity to create online comics, design video games, make stop-motion animation, and more. The event was a part of Mozilla Maker Party—one of hundreds of events around the world where people become makers.

With Inanimate Alice as our mentor text, we worked with students to create postcards that characters in the story might send to the main character Alice. Using the Mozilla Webmaker tool Thimble, kids remixed postcards using digital media and the Web. The tool allowed the children to remix their favorite digital postcards by modifying HTML and CSS right in their browser. Instantly, they were able to see the results of their work. Each postcard was written as a #25wordstory,a process of writing created by Kevin Hodgson that lent itself well to our activity. The kids’ creativity was awesome and they were all proud to share it through social media. Many left that event excited to read further episodes and try out other tools such as Popcorn Maker and X-Ray Goggles.

It was after this event that I decided to designate an area in my library as a makerspace. Unveiled last school year, it includes a 3-D printer, Legos, electronics to experiment with at the “Take Apart Station,” and more. A string of imaginative experiences led up to this and set the stage for creativity and making. I believe this maker movement is one that all educators need to embrace. The incredible affordances of new media allow for opportunities to create a “maker culture”’ in our schools like never before. This is true whether you have a formally designated makerspace in your school or not.

The word makerspace, for me, is really simply a metaphor for enabling opportunities for your students to create, imagine, and build, and what better springboard for that than stories? Stories fuel and ignite the imagination.

Laura Fleming(larfleming@yahoo.com) is a library media specialist at New Milford High School in New Jersey. A K–12 educator for 16 years, she focuses on the development of interactive and transmedia storytelling, and runs
the Worlds of Learning blog.

I recently encountered a familiar phenomenon. One of my undergrads approached me for advice concerning her younger sister, a “poor reader.” I later got a chance to talk to the 9-year-old, who described herself as “a poor reader,” saying she sometimes gets so bored that she falls asleep. But when I asked if she fell asleep reading Goosebumps books (which she’d mentioned as favorites), she exclaimed, “Oh no! Because it’s exciting... you don’t know what’s going to happen!” It also came out that she’s in her school choir, prefers jazz to classical music, loves to write (especially when she can choose the topic) and wants to be—I’m not kidding—a gynecologist.

Of course it's possible that she has some reading issues. But it's clear that she's more than intelligent enough to be a good reader. A big part of the problem, it seems to me, is not the reader but what she’s reading.

Now consider the same phenomenon from a different angle. I once asked a conference audience—teachers, reading specialists, and others professionally involved in literacy—to be pretend-editors. I then described an “imaginary” manuscript, asking if they thought it suitable for 9- and 10-year-olds.

First I listed some vocabulary items from the text: pliable, transfixed, luminous, gibbering, travesty, pompous. Next, some phrases: “seized up,” “rue the day,” “a bemused expression.” Finally, some major themes and plot elements: “good” people often live in denial of political and military evil; intense and bitter bigotry that inspires physical violence; underlings in devotion to an evil leader, who controls them through terror and competitiveness.

When I then asked if they thought the story appropriate for the age-range, not a single attendee said yes: The vocabulary was too difficult, the concepts too complex—the book was sure to bore children.

A gasp arose when I revealed the manuscript was Harry Potter. These experienced professionals had rejected a series which we know many 9- and 10-year-olds are reading and understanding, enough to finish and rave about.

These examples reveal something of profound importance, I think, about literacy development. If children are sometimes mislabeled, or mislabel themselves, as “poor readers”—and if books as “difficult” as the Harry Potter series can enchant an entire generation—I have to ask if we're underestimating young readers. In any case, investigating the issue will illuminate some of the dynamics and complexities involved.

Consider some starting principles. I’m focusing on the nature of text, but there are of course other factors involved. Illustrations can play a huge role and topic can be profoundly motivating (consider The Babysitters Club series). Even marketing can make a significant difference. And children sometimes like books simply because their peers like them. But the nature of the text is, I think, the most basic aspect of any book’s ultimate success, or should be.

And of course I believe in certain natural developmental limits in young readers. Anyone who actually works with kids runs up against such limits all the time. My brilliant, literature-saturated 13-year-old reminded me of this recently, with her response to Jack London’s “To Build a Fire”: “The man sucked—the dog rocked!” Developmentalism, however, is sometimes seen as a lock-step process, but it's not! In The Pleasures of Children’s Literature, Perry Nodelman and Mavis Reimer point out that “…[f]aith in the Piagetian view of children…has diminished,” then quote psychologist William Kessen as saying “…we are in a post-Piagetian world.”  

Even more important is to keep in mind that, ultimately, the reader-text connection is and should be mysterious. There’s a lot experts can say about this connection—but they can’t say it all. As Oscar Wilde put it, “Art is the most intense mode of individualism the world has ever known” and this reality automatically makes the relationship between book and reader something unique and unpredictable. I can't help but come to a fairly simple conclusion: When it comes to writing for children, don’t be afraid of complexity. There's more within their reach than we sometimes think.

There's also currently a shift in the field of reading toward the importance of “dispositions,” recognition that motivation and related factors play a central role. “Dispositions” are why “poor readers” of upper high-school age manage to perform well on their driver’s-license tests—why many “weak” students can memorize stanza after stanza of rap, or make up and recite their own—and why the eighth-grader my wife once knew, who read at a second-grade level, nevertheless thrived on the complex texts of audiophile magazines. Motivation, to put it succinctly, generally trumps readability. This doesn’t mean readability doesn’t matter—only that we’ve tended to overvalue it. 

“Readability is not a formula,” says research in Reading to Learn in the Content Areas. “It is an exploration of what characteristics within the reader and within the text will create a successful marriage… Professional judgment is essential in determining readability; no score or formula can do more than help teachers understand the problems that may arise with reading materials.”

The main way to stop underestimating young readers, I think, is to believe they’re capable of surprising us. This will lead to more openness in our choices of appropriate texts—even to a somewhat “experimental” attitude, which by its very nature will be truly child-centered. And of course the pay-off is enormous. Children who are engaged in challenging and interesting texts become both more proficient as readers and more habituated to reading itself.

The essential point is while complexity shouldn’t be the make-or-break factor, there's another textual characteristic we can call primary. Any number of things can make a text motivating. But the king of them all is Story—the greatest ferry I know with which to cross the “zone of proximal development.” In any given narrative text, it seems to me, “readability” will work only in relationship to the power of Story or lack thereof.

“Acting,” Sir Ralph Richardson once said, “is merely the ability to keep a large group of people from coughing.” This ability is at the heart of the mysterious power of Story. In order to motivate our students more fully, we need to use Story as often and as effectively as possible.

“Thought flows in terms of stories—stories about events, stories about people, and stories about intentions and achievements,” said Frank Smith, a well-known reading researcher. “The best teachers are the best storytellers. We learn in the form of stories.”

So I propose Story as the true king of that unruly and magical country in which a child meets a text. For the best teaching is, as Yeats said, “not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”

And I end with a Jewish proverb, a simple but profound bit of advice on how humans can best engage written language.

“Words should be weighed, not counted.”

Tim J. Myers has more than 32 years' experience as a classroom and university teacher in English and education, was a university teacher educator for 20 years, and is now full-time in English at Santa Clara University. He is also a writer, songwriter, and storyteller with 15 published children’s books which have earned recognition from the New York Times, NPR, and Smithsonian. Find out more information at his website or on Facebook.

photo credit: familymwr via photopin cc

Service-learning is a way of learning with the head, the heart, and hands—a learning that transforms students.  It’s a kind of learning where meaningful connections between students and the world around them are made and more and more schools around the world, especially here in the U.S., are seeing the benefits of service-learning projects in their schools. Published research indicates these types of programs positively impacts students’ civic and academic achievement and this year President Barack Obama declared March 31 “A day of service for the nation.”
“I encourage Americans to make this a national day of service and education by speaking out, organizing, and participating in service projects to improve lives in their communities,” Obama said in his presidential proclamation. “Let us remember that when we lift each other up, when we speak with one voice, we have the power to build a better world.”
Community service impacts students lives by creating authentic opportunities for young people to be active and to be the solution-designers their communities need. Not only are students exposed to issues where change is needed, they are collaborating with their peers—sometimes across grade levels—in an authentic way. 
“It connected the AP and General Program students; we worked together collaboratively to make a difference in our community in mid-Michigan,” said Ana Luisa, a primary teacher in Aldine ISD who experienced her high school service learning experiences as a student. “It helped some of us make career choices; or connect our careers to serving others.  One mechanic still spends one day a week providing free oil changes for the elderly and low-economic populations.”
In my own experience coordinating service projects, I’ve seen my middle school French ESL students in Palo Alto gain confidence and proficiency in English through a Book Buddy project with kindergarteners in East Palo Alto.  Even though the newly-arrived students from France were just beginning to learn English, they were role models and rose to the challenge to read in English to the beginning readers.  But that wasn’t all, the students returned with an enthusiasm to embrace their own acculturation process and proficiency. 
At Cesar Chavez Public Charter School for Public Policy, students in Washington, D.C., choose their own service-learning projects. Their week-long projects include planting trees, fundraising, administering public surveys, creating and passing out pamphlets on an issue important to them, and making pet beds and toys for the Washington Humane Society.  I’ve seen kids who were discouraged become empowered by seeing they can make a difference in this world. 
In the spring of 2014, at Sammons Elementary, Aldine ISD, the first and fourth grade students held a “World Porridge Day” to provide meal sponsorships for African children receiving meals through Mary’s Meals (www.marysmeals.org). The children learned that through giving we do indeed receive.  The children were engaged throughout the project.  They continued to talk about the project and brainstorm alternative solutions to world hunger, they decorated donation containers, made informative posters, brought in spare change, calculated costs to provide meal sponsorships, and even wanted to send them soccer balls for their after-school activities. 
As we prepare for a new school year, let’s prepare our students for the future through learning with the head, the heart, and the hands. Through authentic community projects we can connect and implement to our curriculum to transform our students and ourselves.

Jennifer King is a native of Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario.  She has a broad background in international education, and is currently a literacy coach in Aldine ISD in Houston, Texas.

photo credit: GlobalPartnership for Education via photopin cc

I once noticed a fellow teacher’s Facebook post about how students are excited to have a certain teacher for whatever reason. The post ended with “What a compliment.”

My reply to the thread was, “Is this the compliment that matters most?”

We shape the future—that is about as tried and true as clichés can be, but it’s very true. As we all prepare to start school again, from Mass Customized Learning to Units of Study to Teacher Evaluation Frameworks, there is one thing that never changes above all else. Are the students ready to come back and are they excited to have YOU as their teacher?

Research on reading motivation is abundant and currently there is a push for the engaged classroom, experiential learning, and technology. We can spend hours discussing motivation strategies, allocating district funds towards specially designed programs, reading research, or training teachers to fix specific instructional needs. But, come tomorrow, what makes someone motivated about learning?

Teaching may now be about evidence-based strategies or programs, but one thing never changed—the art of teacher, what you bring to the table.

You see there is a Venus/Mercury, Yin/Yang relationship. We seem to have drifted into a patriarchal or structural system to (bring on the next cliché), “Do what is best for all students.” But if you desire to have students eager to come to school, doing what is best for students requires compassion, the art of the teacher, the matriarchal approach. Let me posit this, how many students do you see know how to read but don’t choose to read? It’s likely those students had the structure (Reading Recovery, Reading Workshop, Reading Street, etc.) and have met reading standards. But have they been nurtured? For instance, does a student spend time with a book or with writing, like it was a doll or a toy car?

Think back and ask, “Who motivated me?” “What motivated me?” “Why was I motivated?” In my formative years, aside from family, I can think of three teachers. Did you ever have that teacher you wanted to have or that teacher who you wanted to recognize you? Do you remember the power of that harmony—the balance between trust, respect, guidance, and encouragement to embrace challenges? Do you remember the love?

Over the summer, I heard a story about a young man who participated in an experiential learning program for some “at-risk” identification. In short, the young man was motivated to learn math. This was evident in that he chose not to go swimming in favor of math tutoring.

What kid chooses math over swimming in the middle of summer?

There is no doubt the young man was motivated to learn math and there is no question that he wanted to be a better mathematician. But why, as the student was heading into grade 7, did things click? Maybe it was the program, but my wager is on the teacher. Somewhere in this experience, trust and respect anchored this relationship. In this was love.

As we start this new school year, some of us are very excited to teach and reveal the world, but some others of us are scared, perhaps as a first-year teacher or a wounded teacher. On that first day, what is the goal? How will students be motivated to learn? The answer is in and with you. How excited is that one student or classroom of students to be in your learning community?

As an esteemed colleague would say, “You are the silver bullet,” not the research, staff development or new programs. If you want students to be motivated and excited to learn, start with you. If you want them to read, teach them how, but journey with them through the “why.” Teach them the mechanics and conventions of writing, but explore with them the majesty of emotions and message. Invite your students to take interest in you. Lead them to believe and trust in you and encourage them to do the inevitable.

At the onset of summer, a teacher whom I consider to be an inspiration said these simple words, “Remember, I chose to be a teacher.” You are the most influential guardian between having to go to school and wanting to go to school. It’s your turn. Remember the art of teaching, remember the love, remember how to inspire students to read or write. Invite them into a love of learning, be it literacy, math, and/or science. Leave the structure, the research, and strategies for you and your colleagues. Work tirelessly for the love of every student. Recant the adage, “The students know who the best teachers are.” In turn, they will give you the greatest compliment in the world—their affection.

Best of luck to all of you. Light fires in the eyes of all students.

Justin Stygles is a sixth grade language arts teacher and IRA Advisory Committee of Teachers (ACT) committee member based in Norway, Maine. He also serves as the state’s Maine Reading Association coordinator. Visit his blog at www.mrstygleclass.blogspot.com.