Literacy Now

Eat more veggies, but not potatoes. Eat more salads, but only dark green leaves, no iceberg lettuce, and skip the dressing. Eat more fruit, but not bananas. And never strawberries—strawberries have pesticides. Avoid gluten, but make sure you eat your whole grains. Drink milk, it’s good for you. Don’t drink milk, it’s bad for you. Weigh yourself every day, it’s motivating. Don’t weigh yourself every day, it’s defeating.

Conflicting information about diet and nutrition will make you crazy enough to crawl under the covers with a big bag of Doritos. 

The only area of my life where I find more consistently conflicting information? TEACHING. Every time I read a journal, buy a new resource, collaborate with a colleague, or visit my curriculum materials, I’m given conflicting information. No matter what I do, I’m doing it wrong.

Make sure your students are reading classic books and literature, but don’t make them read old dead white men. By the way, every student should be exposed to Shakespeare, Orwell, Hawthorne, and Hemingway. 

Students should read material that they consider a struggle. It’s good for them. Students should read material that is at their independent level. Reading shouldn’t be a struggle.

Activate students’ background knowledge as much as you can before assigning a text. But don’t give them too much information up front, or they won’t see reading as a means of gaining information. If you tell them everything, they don’t have to read.

Make sure your students are reading widely and often, from a variety of genres. Track this to make sure. But not with checklists, book lists, or counting minutes. And never assign particular genres—allow choice. 

Collect data from assessments every week so that you can see progress and plan instruction. Use formative assessment often. But don’t continually stress your students out with assessment and data collection. By the way, assessments take away crucial instructional time, so limit assessment.

Follow the standards to the letter, but meet kids where they are. 

Differentiate, but ensure that every student completes the same common assignments. 

Read aloud to your students every day. Don’t read aloud to your students. It’s a waste of time because listening isn’t tested.

Make time every day in class to allow for independent reading. Class time is for direct instruction, and if students want to read what they choose, they should do it at home. 

My mantra has become one of common sense. All things in moderation. I read the journals, buy the new resources, collaborate and follow curriculum, but I keep the faces of students in my mind at all times. They need me to sort through all the advice and do what is best right now. Their needs change every day. 

Some days they need dressing on their green salad.

And if you need me, I’m under the covers with an empty bag of Doritos.

Julie Scullen is a former member of the ILA Board of Directors and also served as president of the Minnesota Reading Association and Minnesota Secondary Reading Interest Council. She taught most of her career in secondary reading intervention classrooms and now serves as Teaching and Learning Specialist for Secondary Reading in Anoka-Hennepin schools in Minnesota, working with teachers of all content areas to foster literacy achievement. She teaches graduate courses at Hamline University in St. Paul in literacy leadership and coaching, disciplinary literacy, critical literacy, and reading assessment and evaluation.

Math is often perceived as a challenging subject to teach and to learn. This line of thinking often stems from early learning experiences that relied on traditional teaching models. Today, more teachers are embracing non–content area books to help students understand and apply abstract mathematical concepts.

Our experiences with integrating reading and math have convinced us that if we teach math skills and concepts using popular children’s books, we can effectively engage and teach even the most reluctant learners.

In some important ways, learning to read and learning math are different. However, conceptualizing mathematical thinking using age-appropriate, quality children’s literature allows for productive experiences that enhance students’ mastery of the subject.
Working together, we developed guidelines for selecting books, concluding that the books must allow us to

• Connect to our students’ background knowledge
• Bridge abstract knowledge to concrete knowledge
• Apply new knowledge to real-world situations

With these guidelines in mind, we then generated a list of timeless classics. Two main selections and activities proved especially effective.

Amazing Grace. Mary Hoffman. Caroline Binch. 1991. Dial. Make spiders and have students number the legs on the spiders. Allow children to count (by twos) the legs on the spider. Push the math concepts of the book forward by providing coins from the U.S. and Trinidad so that students can compare the coins and use them to purchase the spiders made in class.

All by Myself. Mercer Mayer. 2001. Random House. Using ordinal numbers, recount the sequence of events in the book. Have children use teddy bear cookies as counters to vote on the kind of juice they want to have with their cookies for snack. To reinforce the book’s main idea, make a graph illustrating the number of students who have little sisters, little brothers, or neither.

The activities above can be used with a variety of books and adapted for use with children from pre-K through second grade. If early childhood educators use books that are carefully selected and pre-examined for their value in teaching mathematical concepts and skills, the children will be motivated to engage productively in learning. They will ask more questions, make more requests, and become involved in useful learning experiences, just as mouse did when he was given a cookie.

Delilah Davis is an assistant professor in reading and early childhood at Texas Southern University. She serves as the director of Field Experience and Clinical Practice.


Ingrid Haynes is an associate professor in reading and middle grades at Texas Southern University. She serves as the department chair for Curriculum and Instruction.

Delilah Davis and Ingrid Haynes, along with Summer Pannell and Reginald Todd, will present a session titled “Literacy Strategies for Improving Mathematics; Developing Autonomous, Self-Directed Learners” at the ILA 2017 Conference & Exhibits, held in Orlando, FL, July 15–17.

Classrooms are more diverse than ever before. In our interconnected world, students bring a range of languages, literacies, and cultural practices into their schools. As educators, we’ve often thought about culture as something associated with a student’s ethnic heritage. However, a newer approach to teaching and learning called culturally sustaining pedagogy challenges us to promote, celebrate, and even critique the multiple and shifting ways that students engage with culture.

Django Paris, associate professor of language and literacy in the College of Education at Michigan State University, developed culturally sustaining pedagogy to extend asset-based teaching approaches such as culturally relevant pedagogy for the 21st century. His approach challenges us to go beyond acceptance or tolerance of students’ cultures and to move instead toward explicitly supporting aspects of their languages, literacies, and cultural traditions. Culturally sustaining pedagogy also encourages us to consider the term “culture” in a broader sense, including concepts such as popular, youth, and local culture alongside those associated with ethnicity.

Recently, educators have taken up culturally sustaining pedagogy within particular academic content areas. My colleagues (Rebecca Woodard, Andrea Vaughan, and Rick Coppola) and I have examined what culturally sustaining pedagogy might look like in literacy classrooms in Chicago, IL. We’ve found a few practices that literacy teachers might try as entry points to this work.

Seek out nontraditional texts. In our research, literacy teachers sought out nontraditional read-alouds and mentor texts for writing. We’ve documented teachers going beyond canonical texts and incorporating videos, student writing, poetry, and more into culturally sustaining units. Teachers might also consider using blog posts, memes, podcasts, and other artifacts as reading material or writing models. In addition to potentially promoting students’ cultures, languages, and literacies, these texts encourage broader ideas about what counts as reading and writing in schools.

Explore and model meshing languages. Language is a critical part of culture. Rather than require only “standard” English in the classroom, culturally sustaining literacy teachers explore, model, and support the meshing and blending of language varieties. We’ve documented teachers speaking and writing in ways that blend languages, dialects, and formal and informal registers. In addition to helping students see themselves in the texts they write, this approach helps students note complex power dynamics surrounding language use.  

Encourage students to explore alternative cultural affiliations. Culturally sustaining literacy teachers understand that students engage with a wide range of cultural groups and encourage them to explore these affiliations. In our research, we’ve seen students explore Chicago culture, culinary culture, digital culture, and more. Teachers can ask students about spaces, places, and communities where they feel like cultural “insiders” and can help them connect with these communities in person or online. This practice helps students and teachers understand the complexity of culture and the multiple affiliations of every student.

These suggestions just scratch the surface of what it means to teach literacy in ways that are culturally sustaining. Teaching, like culture, is complex. However, by approaching our practices with this cultural complexity in mind, we may be able to see and understand our students’ languages, literacies, and cultural practices in deeper and more meaningful ways.

Emily Machado is a doctoral candidate studying literacy, language, and culture at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She researches equity-oriented writing pedagogies in urban classrooms. Previously, she worked as a public elementary school teacher in Washington, D.C. She tweets at @emilynmachado.

Emily Machado, along with Rebecca Woodard, Andrea Vaughan, and Rick Coppola, will present a session titled “Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy in the Urban Literacy Classroom: Lessons from Mr. C’s Class” at the ILA 2017 Conference & Exhibits, held in Orlando, FL, July 15–17.

June is almost here and, if you haven’t already, it’s a good time to revitalize your classroom. ILA has plenty of tips to help you declutter, reorganize, and breathe new life into your curriculum. Whether it’s reevaluating your assessment process or eliminating tired formats, these articles will help bring about refreshing changes for both you and your students.

Burn the Worksheets: Fire Up Student Writers

A Less-Is-More Approach to Assessing Readers

Use Monthly Quiz Activities to Practice and Evaluate Critical Reading

Bring New Energy to Your Springtime Classroom

Taking Organized Thoughts to the Cloud

Clare Maloney is a former intern at the International Literacy Association. She is currently seeking a BA in English from the University of Delaware.

“This will be the first book I ever read,” shouted one of my seniors. I had left him little choice; he could either read or not graduate. A week earlier, a 10th grader made the same comment. When asked how she made it through so many years of school without reading a book, she explained, “English teachers ask for quote analysis, and it’s really easy to do that without reading the book.”

I’ve heard many similar confessions throughout my 18 years of teaching. Many of my students are reading five to six years behind grade level. I have seniors about to graduate high school who do not meet the literacy demands needed to fully function in society.

Kelly Gallagher (2009) defines readicide as “the systematic killing of the love of reading, often exacerbated by the inane, mind-numbing practices found in schools.” He attributes this genocide to two main factors: high-stakes testing (which often leads teachers to value test-taking skills over reading proficiency) and limited authentic reading experiences.

Gallagher’s theory echoes observations and experiences from my own teaching career. I’ve seen English classrooms with no books, or only tattered copies of classic titles. The urban high schools where I teach in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) are becoming book deserts.

Even when books are available, some administrators and educators do not allow students to read during class out of fear of losing valuable learning time. I believe that when students are allotted time for free voluntary reading, they become better readers, score higher on achievement tests, and expand their content knowledge.

Teachers can use free reading time to supplement textbook learning. For example, when studying the Holocaust, students might choose to read Elie Wiesel’s Night: a teen’s account of his survival from the Nazi death camps. Another example is Cindy Neuschwander and Wayne Geehan’s Sir Cumference and the First Round Table, which offers creative explanations for geometry concepts.

I understand that building a strong classroom library can be difficult with budget restrictions. Teachers can try borrowing a class set of novels from the public library, browsing secondhand bookstores, or applying for grants from education nonprofits. I have received $1,000 in book grants from donorschoose.org every year for the past five years.

Ray Bradbury captured the importance of voluntary reading when he said, “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”

Concerned educators—it’s time to take action. Let’s reverse readicide.

Karin Kroener-Valdivia is an 18-year English teacher with the Los Angeles Unified School District in California. She is also National Board Certified and a UCLA Writing Project Fellow.