Literacy Now

Like many of our middle school students, Alex’s life is in turmoil. His parents are in the midst of a very expensive divorce and his college fund is quickly depleting as lawyers battle over his time. Compounding that, Alex’s dad has moved in with his third-grade teacher and his mom has started dating. He has had enough. So Alex gets drunk, takes the keys to his mom’s car, and heads out to give his dad a piece of his mind.

Of course, things do not go as planned. Alex finds himself in police custody having decapitated a neighbor’s garden gnome. His actions land him with a strict grounding at home, teasing at school, and assigned community service at a local nursing home with a notoriously cantankerous patient.

The beautifully composed story perfectly blends poignant moments with the humor that typically follows the lives of early adolescent students. Readers easily connect with Alex’s plight while seeing his character develop as he becomes less self-centered and learns how to serve others.

Cross-curricular Connections: English language arts, social studies/history

Ideas for Classroom Use:

This book lends itself to several different types of activities to support all of our diverse learners.

Cause and Effect

Notes From The Midnight Driver provides students with many opportunities to evaluate cause and effect relationships. Students can discuss and reflect on Alex’s choices and answer questions like What could have been done differently? What would have been a different outcome? In addition to having large and small group discussions, blogging is a great platform for students to share their thoughts. Unlike oral discussions, blogging gives students more time to contemplate, form their own ideas, and then share them with their peers. Through blog commenting, students can hold ongoing conversations outside of the classroom

Character development

In our classroom, we will use a “plot mountain” graphic organizer to study how Alex’s character develops and to analyze how Sonnenblick creates a character that the audience can identify with. Students will use that as a model and create a character for their own narratives.

Letter writing

Although we live in the age where digital mediums reign our interpersonal communication, Alex uses letters to communicate with the judge on his progress. This lends itself to a discussion about communication mediums, audience, and impact. Students can select a topic, such as the dress code or the equitable use of physical education equipment, and determine how that would be communicated to a friend, a kindergartner, a parent, a grandparent, or a superintendent. Students can then compose their message for different audiences using different tools. They have to ask themselves, Would I text message, e-mail, Tweet, or write a letter explaining my argument? This is an authentic opportunity for students to practice communicating their message across different mediums for different audiences.

Living history

This book inspires readers to learn from the wisdom and experiences of older generations in their communities. Students can interview persons of interest, record their stories and then publish them to share with future generations. Some of my students favorite ways to publish are through video (iMovie or We Video), digital picture books (Mystorybook or Storyjumper), graphic novels, blog posts (KidBlog), and animation (StikBots or PowToon).

Service learning projects

Students want to know that what they are learning in school is relevant to their lives and empowering them to make a difference in the world. Although Alex is assigned community service, he eventually becomes invested in providing the residents at the nursing home, especially his assigned patient, with a jazz concert. This sets an example for students to really examine their communities, identify an area that may be underserved, and use their own talents to provide a service that positively impact the lives of others.

Through many of these learning experiences, students will develop empathy for others while promoting social justice in their own communities.

Additional Resources:

Jordan Sonnenblick's official website links to Sonnenblick’s full list of books, his calendar, blog, and other resources.

"Service-Learning: The Time is Now" is an article explaining why service learning projects are powerful for our students. The article provides several examples of successful projects as well as steps for classroom implementation.

Julie D. Ramsay is a National Board Certified Teacher and the author of Can We Skip Lunch and Keep Writing? She teaches ELA to sixth graders at Rock Quarry Middle School in Tuscaloosa, AL. She also travels the country to speak, present, and facilitate workshops in applying technology to support authentic learning. Read her blog, eduflections.

When I want to relax after a long day of teaching, I often choose to watch a television show. With my “teacher eyes,” I frequently end up thinking about how the show flashing across my screen might relate to the content of an English language arts class.

For example, when watching an episode of Black-ish, I wonder how the show’s underlying commentary on race in America might help students understand a complex social issue related to an assigned text. I ask myself, How can this television show foster critical thought? What questions can I ask my students to help them develop their critical literacy skills?

As a teacher educator, I wonder how I can help current and future teachers address these questions in their own practice. 

In my experience as a high school English language arts teacher, my courses generally focused on one core text—a piece of fiction that I used as the foundation of a unit. However, I did my best to incorporate popular culture artifacts that were tied to central themes, conflicts, or ideas within the core text. I wanted my students to see the connections between their fictional text and the world in which we live. Moreover, I wanted students to grow into critical beings who questioned the world around them.

Teachers can integrate popular culture into their class curriculum as an avenue for students to explore themes from their assigned fictional readings. Increasingly, more popular culture artifacts address sociopolitical issues in a variety of mediums. For example, Black-ish and Fresh Off the Boat offer rich storylines that openly address critical issues such as race, class, immigration, and gender.

Students’ understanding of sociopolitical issues can be deepened by connecting the issues to current events. Teachers can think of the core text as a starting place. Perhaps the teacher then connects a theme from the core text to a popular culture television show. However, students’ emerging understanding can be extended.

How can this be accomplished? The news is a good place to start. News events and political movements offer rich opportunities for students to critically examine dominant narratives in our society. Additionally, popular culture artifacts allow teachers to meet the needs of mandated initiatives that require nonfiction readings be included in class curriculum. Teachers can integrate nonfiction into their course by pairing texts with news articles that address themes and topics from a selected episode.

Popular cultural artifacts can bring complex issues to life. After all, the more perspectives students are offered, the more nuanced their understandings become. Consider the ways in which you might integrate popular culture artifacts with contemporary issues in your own courses.

Kathleen Colantonio-Yurko is currently an assistant professor of literacy at The College at Brockport, State University of New York.

Kathleen Colantonio-Yurko will present multiple sessions including “All TV Shows Are Political?!: Fostering Critical Literacy Through Popular Culture in English Language Arts” at the ILA 2017 Conference & Exhibits, held in Orlando, FL, July 15–17.

In Taiwan, there is a great demand for effective strategies to teach English literacy skills. English textbooks used in elementary schools contain mostly short dialogues, and vocabulary and sentence exercises are usually controlled and graded linearly. These materials often don’t deliver meaningful, interesting, and effective literacy learning experiences.

In 2013, I worked with a group of elementary school English teachers to develop theme-based English reading and writing lessons to partially replace textbooks. Each theme consisted of children’s books of various genres, poetry, songs, or videos. We chose topics that were interesting and relevant to students’ lives, such as dentist visits, pet care, traveling, and cooking.

Reading materials were selected based on a few criteria: First, they had to be interesting and connect to students’ life experiences. Next, they had to be authentic materials that were not modified for the purpose of language teaching. Last, the language needed to be appropriate and not-too-challenging.

Writing is usually the aspect of language learning that second and foreign language learners find most frustrating. In our theme-based, meaning-focused teaching, we made sure that writing activities always came as a natural extension of reading activities. Students always wrote to express personal meaning. In the writing activities we designed, there was never a “correct answer.” Unlike writing activities recommended by textbooks, we never asked students to write copy or practice patterns. High achieving students were free to share what they wanted to say, and low achieving students practiced guided writing such as fill-in-the-blank prompts or sentence completion supported with word banks.

We were very curious about the effectiveness of this theme-based and meaning-based literacy teaching endeavor, so we conducted quasi-experimental research and invited another school of a similar size and parent socioeconomic status background in the same city to be the control group. Students from both schools received English reading and writing proficiency pre- and post-test. It was a delight to see that our students performed significantly better after receiving only one semester (four months) of this theme- and meaning-based literacy instruction. Interviews with students also revealed that they preferred the experimental instruction and wanted it to continue.

We put meaning and student interest at the forefront of what we chose and organized for students to read and to write. All educational and learning theories say that meaning and student motivation is important. What we learned is that while all English teaching theories and classroom research are important, the “meaning first” truth goes a long way. When meaning and student interests become the priority, everything else comes naturally in helping students to learn a new language.

Yueh-Nu Hung is an associate professor in the Department of English at the National Taichung University of Education in Taiwan. She is the director of the Center for Research on Elementary English Teaching, a project funded by the Ministry of Education of Taiwan that works on preservice and inservice elementary school English teacher training.

Yueh-Nu Hung will present a session titled “Finding Meaning in Literacy Learning: Classroom Strategies in Second and Foreign Language Literacy Instruction” at the ILA 2017 Conference & Exhibits, held in Orlando, FL, July 15–17.

The term “best practices” has become ubiquitous in educational policy due to legislation and reports related to the National Reading Panel, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The original intention of best practices was to involve teachers in making experience- and evidence-based decisions. These legislative acts mandated teaching practices that demonstrated positive academic gains using scientific research studies. 

However, the studies informing best practices often minimize the strengths of urban communities. The concept of high-leverage literacy practices (HLLPs)—which we studied in the context of high-performing, urban schools—attempts to fill gaps in the current literature on best practices.

HLLPs build upon and extend what the learner already knows, and are characterized by a purposefully sequenced, interconnected, and iterative progression of experiences that support cumulative and increasingly complex understandings of language and literacy protocols and usage.  

High-leverage literacy practices are always concerned with questions such as: What does the practice mean in terms of supporting a child’s learning? How is the practice connected to learning theory? To date, HLLPs have been identified in math, science, foreign language, and secondary language arts but, until our study, no HLLPs had been unearthed in early childhood literacy contexts.   

Kim, a high -performing, urban first-grade teacher from our study, enacted instructional decisions to create her classroom library that exemplify the three principles of HLLPs: purposefully sequenced, interconnected, and iterative progressions of experiences.

First, the student-created label system was purposefully sequenced. Kim carefully planned the learning experience, paired students, and provided challenging text sets with varying levels of complexity.

Second, the labeling activity was interconnected. Kim drew from multiple literacy skills to create an authentic learning experience. Students employed background knowledge, text features, and context clues to identify a common theme linking each text, and also designed, drew, and wrote the labels.

Finally, the student-created labels were part of an iterative progression of experiences. Kim offered multiple opportunities to authentically apply new knowledge, such as continual revising of the labels as new text sets were introduced.

This example highlights how HLLPs can be measured, sequenced, altered, and adjusted for other academic and personal outcomes. Teachers can observe and identify the points where students struggle within the activity. Additionally, the HLLP builds from one skill to another and can be repeated at various levels and progressions.

Kim’s use of authentic, student-created labels in the classroom library facilitated student ownership of their classroom and academic and socioemotional growth.  

Kindel Nash is an assistant professor of urban teacher education and the coordinator for the language and literacy master’s program at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. She earned her doctoral degree from the University of South Carolina. Her current research explores high-leverage early literacy instruction and its intersections with culturally sustaining pedagogies and critical race theory. Her work can be found in Teachers College Record, Equity & Excellence in Education, Language Arts, and The Urban Review.

Etta Hollins is the Ewing Marion Kauffman Endowed Chair for Urban Teacher Education at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. She was previously professor and chair of Teacher Education at the University of Southern California. She served on the prestigious Teacher Education Panel for the American Educational Research Association and has been an invited speaker for the American Educational Research Association, the Association of Teacher Educators, National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education, the Council of Great City Schools, and the International Literacy Association. Hollins is regularly called upon as a consultant on the preparation of teachers for diverse and underserved students by colleges and schools of education, state departments of education, and school districts.

Leah Panther is a doctoral candidate at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Her research interests include high-leverage literacy practices, urban religious schools, and adolescent literacy. Her current research project involves high-leverage literacy practices in urban religious middle schools.

Kindel Nash, Etta Hollins, and Leah Panther will present a session titled “High-Leverage Literacy Practices: Researching and Defining Literacy Instruction in Urban School Contexts” at the ILA 2017 Conference & Exhibits, held in Orlando, FL, July 15–17.

Getting students to read during the summer months can be a challenge. Our aim should not be to force them to read; it should be to develop their motivation to read. Voracious readers are almost always the highest performing achievers in school. Reading, like any other hobby, must be a year-round activity for optimal academic development and eventual career success. A number of strategies can be used to capitalize on students’ existing attitudes and interests and to promote summer reading:

• Read together: Whether first-grade or 12th-grade, stop telling and start sharing literary experiences. Don’t feel bound to the child’s reading level, as listening comprehension is typically much higher in early years.
• Encourage children to read what interests them—from comic books to blogs and even drama: While wide reading is the goal, no one likes to read everything. Check out ILA’s Choices Reading Lists for book recommendations for children by children.
• Consider their interests: For example, if the child is a sports enthusiast, suggest adventure, history, mystery, or other genres with an essence of action and competition.
• Read challenging books: Often, children can understand books above their comprehension level if the material relates to their prior knowledge or experiences. Besides, with help, what challenge can’t be met?
• Share your enthusiasm for reading: In general, we speak about what matters most to us. Talk to students about the books you read to inspire habitual reading (e.g., It was so inspirational to see how Chelsea left everything behind for a chance to perform on Broadway. I wish I had that confidence when I was 18 years old).
• Link technology to reading: Apps and websites offer freely available e-books, words of the day, historical significant events on this day, and visual dictionaries.
• Find an online community: More than eight million stories have been uploaded to FanFiction for reading, reviewing, and interacting with child and adolescent authors.
• Engage in the arts: Music, art, and drama bring what we read to life.
• Incentivize with learning opportunities: Read a book and go to a museum, read two books and go to a theatre production, and so on.
• Subscribe to freely available e-newsletters written for children/adolescents: (e.g., Teen Ink and Clover).

Evan Ortlieb is a professor and coordinator of the Online PhD in Literacy in the Department of Education Specialties at St. John’s University in New York City. He is an internationally recognized leader in the field of literacy education with previous work experience in Singapore and Australia and whose expertise centers on literacy empowerment, literacy teacher preparation, language diversity, and differentiated literacy instruction. He currently serves as president of the Specialized Literacy Professionals (SIG) of the International Literacy Association, and section editor of Unlocking Literacy Learning within the Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy. He also serves as president of the Ortlieb Foundation, a non-profit organization that provides college scholarships for cancer patients.