Literacy Now

It’s late on a Friday afternoon and a dedicated teacher has gone into the bookroom in search of just the right book to pique the interest of a particular student. This book certainly has to meet the requirements of Common Core. Instinctively, the teacher knows she cannot rely merely on the color-coded stickers on the books. Lexiles are not enough to guide her. Luckily, her reading specialist had this situation in mind when she filled the bookroom with quality children’s literature.

The current trends in reading are driving school districts to purchase sets and programs they believe will support the needs of their students. Systems are marketed as being researched and evidence-based. However, when teachers are armed with the knowledge of best teaching practices, research shows that students learn best when using authentic quality books. Motivation increases and the love of reading grows when students are engaged in books that capture their imagination and challenge their thinking. Computer programs do not know which books connect to a student’s life, but teachers do.

Children’s literature is seen as deceptively simple by some. When used to its potential, children’s literature contains more than just endearing stories. It contains characters to which students can relate and a sequence of understandable and often predictable events. The language uses similes and metaphors that students can modify in their own writing. Authentic quality literature becomes a window to the world but also a map to students themselves. A good book allows students to understand and problem solve within the circumstances of a book that reflects pieces of their own lives.   

Now is the time to build book collections to support what teachers know about their students and best practices in reading. No canned program or system can compare to the expertise teachers bring when using authentic literature. Guided reading, comprehension focus groups, strategy groups, and RTI all can be developed to a richer level of success when done with fidelity using the best books teachers can find. Mindful reading means paying attention to the content we provide students so they grow in their thinking.

The elements of a successful bookroom stay the same whether teachers are selecting titles for an elementary or a secondary level bookroom. Do the characters in the books relate to the world they know? Do the books invite readers to question and learn, to make connections? Readers love books that they find are relevant to themselves and their lives.

The Five Essential Elements

1. Books that are authentic quality literature. Although publishing companies are quick to offer prepared programs for bookrooms, teachers can select books using various resources. Websites like The Nerdy Book Club and the Cooperative Children’s Book Center of University of Wisconsin-Madison offer recommendations beyond Newberry and Caldecott winners. Teachers can find mentor texts, picture books, and chapter books at every level to supplement their curriculum.
2. Books that are culturally relevant and accurate. What is your school population and how do the books chosen represent it? Diversity is fluid, and the titles in the bookroom should reflect how populations change. Although not all cultures are represented equally, teachers need to strive to find materials in which children can identify themselves. 
3. Books that inspire children to think and question. Across content areas, books can be found that support the curriculum in a way that challenge students to question, think, form opinions, and wonder. Pairing a biography about Neil Armstrong or with an informational text about the solar system gives students a chance to think about what it takes to explore space and debate the merits of such exploration. They can persuade or dissuade others to take up such a challenge.
4. Books that represent different times and truths/ideas. Books should cover different time periods and beliefs in history. There are many universal big idea themes that should be represented such as hopes and dreams, fears, challenges, opportunities, greed, ambition, family, and discovery. Also important are themes like slavery throughout the world (past and present), equality, fairness, freedom, and rights.
5. Books that align with the school’s curriculum. Every school district has its own requirements in addition to Common Core Standards. When adding to the bookroom, meeting the needs of classroom teachers who are looking for materials to supplement their curriculum is important. Reading specialists need to talk to all teachers to determine ways to support their teaching with literature from personal narratives to science.

Books are treasures that open the mind to new ideas and imagination. A bookroom should reflect the best in what literature has to offer children. Teachers have the skills to use these books in the many ways students need them presented. The most essential ingredient to a bookroom is the knowledge teachers bring to it when they search for the right book for that certain student late on a Friday afternoon. Mindful reading provides students with the authentic literature they need to be engaged in their learning.

Martha M. Fallis is a reading specialist/literacy coach in the Columbus School District in Wisconsin.

As teachers, one of our goals is for every student to read and comprehend at or above grade level. We want students to take ownership of their reading, monitoring themselves while they are reading and self-correcting when they need to. I have struggled with this as a teacher. Students look at the first letter or letters of a word, make a guess, and continue reading. They rarely go back and self-correct when the word does not make sense. When students are reading aloud to us we are able to draw their attention to their mistakes, but what happens when they are reading by themselves? Are the students self-correcting or are they just reading on? What effect is this having on their comprehension? To address this, I focus more instruction on students identifying the mistakes they have made while reading and reading accurately the first time.

One strategy is to have students record themselves reading into a computer or tablet. Students have a passage in front of them that is at their reading level. They record themselves and then go back and listen to their reading, marking any errors on their paper. If students are able, I have them mark what they said. They record the number of errors that they made and then repeat the process.

This took modeling and practice, but once students had the hang of it, I could set them up on the device and they could do it themselves. Hearing second and third graders talk about what errors they had made and how they could not believe they did not read the right word when they knew the word was amazing. This strategy brings students’ attention to how they were reading and what they needed to pay more attention to while reading.

Another strategy I use with students as early as first grade is to write down the misreads they make while they are reading. I then read it back to them and have them follow along. I will read what they said, not what the text actually says. They catch on quickly that what they said was not correct. They tell me that what I read was wrong. The students start to get their eyes on the word and read more carefully, paying extra attention to what they are reading.

Similar to the previous strategy, I write phrases and sentences on notecards from the lessons that we have already done. The students each get one notecard and read it aloud. If they read it correctly the first time, they get to keep the card. If they do not read it correctly, then I get the card. Their goal as a group is to get more cards than I do. This has made a huge difference in how much attention students pay to the whole word. They even have made improvements on identifying if the letter is a b or a d.

Many students have shown improvement in the number of words that they read correctly in a minute, but, of course, there are still some students who are making the same mistakes and are not paying attention to what they are reading. Our goal is to get students to pay more attention to what they are reading and to read accurately the first time. The more attention we can draw to students’ misreads and the more we can get students to see that they are not looking at the entire word, the fewer mistakes they will make and the better readers they will become.

Jennifer Johnson is a reading specialist working with children in grades kindergarten through fourth grade in Shenandoah Community Schools in Iowa. 

Many language arts teachers are not fully prepared for the type of collaboration expected of them in their first years of teaching. Though teacher education programs may have discussed collaboration or teachers may have encountered it during their student teaching, learning how to collaborate with an educator with whom instructional responsibilities are shared can be quite a process for novice language arts teachers. In this article, we, former coworkers and collaborators, share five tips for collaboration. We created these tips based on what we learned during one fantastic collaborative year in a co-taught inclusion sixth grade language arts classroom.

1. Get to know one another professionally. It can be intimidating or stressful to share a classroom with someone you do not know, but remember your coteacher might be just as intimidated as you are. Find time to sit down and talk before the year begins. Although knowing your coteacher on a personal level is ideal, you must develop a professional relationship with him or her. Share a little about yourselves and figure out teaching styles and preferred in-class and out-of-class communication methods. Remain open to continuing to develop a communicative, working relationship with your coteacher as the year progresses.
2. Look at students’ accommodations together. After getting to know your collaborator, it is important to take some time to examine and review students’ IEPs. This ensures both of you will be familiar with not only the specific accommodations but how they relate to the language arts content and the effect particular disabilities may have on students’ progress in the curriculum. Talk about how upcoming classroom activities or assignments can be adapted for student needs.
3. Plan together, with the end in mind, during weekly planning meetings. You and your coteacher should have shared responsibility for not only course planning but also its instructional design and implementation. Universal design or backward design of lessons and units helps both teachers meet all student needs and makes sure students are not left out. Both teachers’ formative assessments will allow for planning adjustments to be made. Be flexible with the instruction. Meeting at least once a week is vital to effective collaboration and student outcomes.
4. Share teaching responsibilities. You and your coteacher should both be responsible for portions of lesson delivery. What you and your coteacher will teach may be fixed or change from week to week based on teaching styles and strengths. Whereas shared planning helps embed accommodations naturally within lessons, shared teaching sends students the message they have two equal teachers who care about their success. When each teacher assumes the role of teacher, the collaborators and the students win. Each collaborator feels a shared responsibility for teaching, which allows for more effective discussions around planning and teaching. Students then receive accommodations in an organic way.
5. Think about how accommodations can help all students. Sometimes language arts teachers are not aware that accommodations can help students with and without exceptionalities. There is no rule against using the accommodations with any student in the classroom. They may be used to support, differentiate, and meet the needs of all students in the classroom. This is just another example of why planning and implementing instruction together as a team are important parts of co-teaching. Collaboration genuinely seeks to help and support all student learning. That’s the true magic of collaboration!

These tips can help your next collaborative teaching experience. Our experiences revealed that collaboration in the language arts classroom decreases the chance students—with or without IEPs—feel marginalized. Each of us felt a shared responsibility for the planning and teaching of our co-taught language arts course and grew as teachers because of this. But, more important, our students benefitted from our commitment to true collaboration in the language arts classroom.  

Beth Kelly is currently serving as Program/Compliance Specialist for Dare County Schools in North Carolina, and she continues to teach math part time to children with various degrees and types of disabilities in middle grades. Beth earned her Maed from East Carolina University in Learning Disabilities in 2005 and is certified as a National Board Exceptional Needs Specialist/Early Childhood through Young Adult. Kathryn Caprino is a clinical assistant professor in English education at the University of Florida. She teaches children’s literature and English education methods courses and observes student teachers. Kathryn was a middle and high school English teacher.

Digital literacies are not solely about technical proficiency but about the issues, norms, and habits of mind surrounding technologies used for a particular purpose.

—Doug Belshaw, educational researcher

We often hear people talk about the importance of digital knowledge for 21st-century learners. Unfortunately, many focus on skills rather than literacies. Digital skills focus on what and how. Digital literacy focuses on why, when, who, and for whom.

For example, teaching digital skills would include showing students how to download images from the Internet and insert them into PowerPoint slides or webpages. Digital literacy would focus on helping students choose appropriate images, recognize copyright licensing, and cite or get permissions, in addition to reminding students to use alternative text for images to support those with visual disabilities.

Digital skills would focus on which tool to use (e.g., Twitter) and how to use it (e.g., how to tweet, retweet, use TweetDeck), while digital literacy would include in-depth questions: When would you use Twitter instead of a more private forum? Why would you use it for advocacy? Who puts themselves at risk when they do so?

Think of the use of social media during the Arab Spring. People used social media in a way that went far beyond knowing how to click and deep into civic uses and navigating ways to communicate with others under the radar of a communication-hindering government. It was a way of both encouraging one another to remain critical and supporting one another through adversity in creative ways.

If you are familiar with educational researcher Doug Belshaw’s eight elements of digital literacies, I have just mentioned the civic, critical, creative, and communicative. The other four are cultural, cognitive, constructive, and confidence. This last one is important and takes time to build. (For more on the essential elements, be sure to read W. Ian O’Byrne’s sidebar.)

Real-world learning

Teaching digital literacy does not mean teaching digital skills in a vacuum, but doing so in an authentic context that makes sense to students. It means teaching progressively rather than sequentially, which helps learners understand better and more clearly over time.

Instead of teaching how to use a hashtag and how to tweet and retweet, I give my students meaningful tasks to help their learning. (Twitter plays a large role in my teaching, but the essential elements can be applied in many technological contexts.)

After students have the skill to use multiple platforms, I allow them the choice of which platform to use for the support they need, but I make sure they ask questions. When is it best to do a Google search versus ask a question on Twitter? Why would students tweet to a particular hashtag or person versus another? When they tweet to people from another country in another time zone, what kind of context do they need to consider? What should they add, remove, or modify in order to communicate better?

Critical connections

When we encourage students to use technology, do we remind them of the risks of placing their information online and give them choices of how much personal information to reveal? Do our students recognize the ways in which Facebook’s privacy settings continually shift without user permission, and what posting a photo today might mean for their future employment opportunities? Do students recognize the importance of password-protecting their devices and having different passwords across platforms?

We also need to recognize the risks of blogging/tweeting, which include opening avenues for abuse. We should not be throwing students into the public domain to discuss sensitive topics without having conversations with them on what they might face and which of these risks they are willing to take, how they would handle it, and how they might support each other. Then we should give them a private option if they so choose.

To be honest, I avoid putting my students in high-risk situations, but this does not mean avoiding teaching digital literacy. It means discussing with them why they would post a real photo of themselves as avatars versus something more abstract. It means talking about audience—whom they are addressing and who are people who might accidentally come across their blogs or tweets. It means opening dialogue about why we write in public, to what end, and for whose benefit.

I place students in authentic situations as much as possible. When they tweet and blog, they have a public audience beyond our class. I ask students to tweet to other educators and learners (locally and internationally). They tweet about their burning questions and seek feedback on what they are working on for class. When working across cultures, we tackle questions of inequalities related to language use (English when my students aren’t native speakers but fluent) and infrastructure (the Internet is slower in Egypt).

Using judgment

It is important for students to recognize that although technology gives us a lot of power, it also restricts us in many ways, and we need to question how the affordances of technology modify our communication and our behavior.

For example, it is worth discussing the process of Wikipedia. Although Wikipedia is not a scholarly source, it is usually a good enough first stop to learn about something. However, students need to know how it is updated. They need to recognize that there are back-channel discussions about what ends up appearing on the site. These discussions can be fraught with power dynamics, resulting in controversial issues appearing unbalanced as more powerful authors block alternative viewpoints.

Moreover, it is worth discussing how to enhance accessibility of students’ digital content. Are they cognizant of using fonts that are easy to read? Are they conscious of accessible color schemes? Do they know to provide alternative text to images?

Digital literacy is not about the skills of using technologies, but how we use our judgment to maintain awareness of what we are reading and writing, why we are doing it, and whom we are addressing.

We can only begin to put the seeds of this critical literacy in our classes and hope students will transfer this beyond the classroom and into their increasingly digital identities and lives.

Maha Bali is an associate professor of practice at the Center for Learning and Teaching at the American University in Cairo, Egypt. She is an editor at Hybrid Pedagogy, cofounder of virtuallyconnecting.org, and cofacilitator of edcontexts.org. She has her own blog and also writes for The Chronicle of Higher Education’s ProfHacker blog.

This article originally appeared in the January/February 2016 issue of Literacy Today, ILA’s member magazine.

“Thank you for letting me have a voice. No one has ever done that for me before,” was the first full sentence out of Alana’s mouth after the first Kids Tales Creative Writing Workshop. Alana was a shy girl and often kept to herself, but on the last day of her Kids Tales workshop, she called me over to her table and told me she never had her own journal before. She explained she only got to write in school and, even then, only about what the teachers assigned. Outside of school, she was shuffled constantly between her parents’ houses and rarely had a chance to voice her feelings. Kids Tales gave her that voice.

I started Kids Tales, a nonprofit that runs creative writing workshops for kids ages 8–12, two years ago when I was in eighth grade. Starting in elementary school, I had the opportunity to participate in creative writing classes, workshops, and camps. When I got to middle school, I realized many kids don’t get the kind of opportunities I had. Many kids like Alana don’t have any educational opportunities outside of school. They don’t have the materials, the space, or the encouragement to write. When I started Kids Tales, and still today, my goal is for kids whose families don’t have the resources for writing experiences outside of school to get the opportunity to write and the chance to find their voice.

During a Kids Tales workshop, kids spend one week brainstorming, writing, and editing their own short story. At the end of the week, the stories are assembled in a collection and self-published as an anthology on Amazon.com.

The teachers in Kids Tales workshops are teenagers—one of the main components of Kids Tales workshops is that kids teach kids. Kids Tales teachers will tell you that getting to teach kids to write is an eye-opening experience. Teaching a weeklong workshop to 10 younger kids has a big impact on the lives of those kids, their families and communities, and even the world. Writing is one of those things that, once you inspire kids to do it, they never want to stop doing.

Kids Tales started out small in the summer of 2014 with two workshops in the Milwaukee, Wisconsin area. After seeing how much the kids in Milwaukee loved the workshops, we expanded for the summer of 2015 to Chicago, Illinois and Washington, DC.

Kids Tales, an official 501(c)(3) nonprofit, won the American Field Service (AFS) Project: Change, Vision in Action award and taught a Kids Tales workshop in Colombia, South America in June 2015. We were lucky to be honored by the International Literacy Association in its inaugural 30 Under 30 list and were awarded the Milwaukee Business Journal’s Junior Eureka Award for creativity and innovation. It was a busy year.

Now to plan Summer 2016. Kids Tales will again be teaching in Milwaukee, Chicago, and Washington DC. We are working with the National Writing Project to expand to more U.S. cities. Kids Tales will continue our partnership with AFS and will teach Kids Tales workshops in more countries worldwide.

My dream is for all kids, in all corners of the world, to be published authors and hold in their hands their own book. Everyone has a story to tell, and everyone should have the chance to tell that story. If you would like to learn more about Kids Tales go to our website, Kidstales.org. If you are a high school teacher and think your students might want to become Kids Tales teachers, please send us an e-mail.

Katie Eder is a 15-year-old award-winning author from Wisconsin. She founded Kids Tales, Inc., and is the executive director. She was recently honored as one of ILA’s 30 Under 30.