Encourage students to expand their repertoire of ways to read and respond to literature.

​As someone who loves to read and write, one of my favorite things to do is annotate texts — whether it be a few scrawled words in the margins of my most beloved hardcover books or endless questions written on sticky notes falling out of flailing paperbacks, my annotations capture the spirit of my hyper-personal engagement with a text.

When I became an English teacher, I knew that I wanted my students to learn how to annotate, in part because I wanted them to capture their noticings and wonderings as they engaged in their own distinctive reading process. In “Literature as Exploration” (1995), Louise Rosenblatt wrote that every person has a unique, transactional experience when they read a text, in which they “live through” something special. I think of annotations like mementos of this special reading experience because they capture a moment in time in the transactional experience that would otherwise be lost. 

Every time we read a text, even if it’s one that we’ve read hundreds of times before, we encounter a new transactional experience. As we annotate and re-annotate texts, we leave behind a trail of our reading experiences: our questions, thoughts, and wonderings. I desperately wanted my students to develop that experiential, transactional trail of their reading processes. 

The Traveling Text

Imagine my surprise when I discovered, as a new teacher, that my students often responded to my call for annotations with, “I don’t know how to annotate!” or “Can you tell me what to annotate for?” or, worst of all, “I hate annotating. It’s a waste of time.” I can recall my naive shock when I heard my students respond in this way. In a desperate attempt to show my students the value of annotating, I began tirelessly modeling annotation strategies and my own methods of annotation, but doing so yielded little success. 

With time, I developed an incredibly simple strategy for teaching my students to annotate. Essentially, I stopped teaching my students to annotate through direct instruction and, instead, encouraged them to teach one another. This instructional strategy was, in my teaching, a solution to the problem of students feeling like they “don’t know” how to annotate or that annotating has “no purpose.” I call this strategy The Traveling Text (download here).

The Traveling Text is simple, requires minimal teacher preparation, empowers students, builds community, and teaches annotation skills. And implementing this strategy with your students only takes four steps.

​The impact of The Traveling Text

In my teaching experience, here are some of the impacts of this strategy on my students and our classroom community: 

• Promoting belonging: when students are invited to respond to one another’s annotations, it promotes in them a new sense of themselves as intellectual members of an academic community. For students who are more introverted in verbal class discussions, this strategy can allow them to engage in a written dialogue with other students.
• Building students’ repertoire of responding to literature: as they read and respond to one another’s annotations, students’ repertoire of reading strategies expands. Perhaps this is because when we are given a window to see into others’ transactional reading experiences, they expand our own methods of responding to literature.
• Shifting the audience of annotations from teacher to fellow student: students no longer write annotations focused solely on identifying the literary elements that they think their English teacher wants them to find, like symbolism, for instance. Instead, their annotations become more honest, insightful, humorous, and personal, likely because students know that their peers will be reading them, not their teacher. 

Teaching students to read for meaning (and for pleasure) is a daunting task. Often, our students come to us already feeling like they don’t know how to read and annotate literary texts in the “correct” way, one that highlights what a teacher or evaluator might be looking for. 

The Traveling Text creates possibilities for students to expand their own repertoire of ways to closely read and respond to literature. But, even more importantly, the strategy encourages students to experience a sense of intellectual community and belonging with their classmates as they share with one another written artifacts of their own transactional reading experiences.
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Breaking down the science of reading to identify specific skills & supports for emerging readers. 

Many people are talking about the science of reading — a term that is certainly not new,  but has been gaining some serious traction recently, and prompting some heated debate. This debate largely stems from how this term is being interpreted and what this means for the students in our classrooms. What is truly meant by the science of reading? 

After doing some of my own research, I’ve come to understand the science of reading as a comprehensive body of cross-disciplinary research conducted over the last 20 years that deepens our understanding of how the brain learns to read, including what skills are involved, how these skills are connected, and which parts of the brain are responsible for our reading development. The research seems clear, but because the term has become so loaded, I believe we are losing sight of what our young learners really need to become strong, capable readers.

What makes a skilled reader? 

One of the leading researchers of early language development and its connection to later literacy, Dr. Hollis Scarborough, developed in 2001 what he termed the Reading Rope, which helps us articulate the specific skills readers need to have in order to be proficient. The rope consists of lower and upper strands, with the upper strand focusing on language comprehension, and the lower strand emphasizing word recognition.

All these micro skills start to work together through practice and repetition, so that these skills can become instinctive. Ideally, over time, language comprehension becomes more strategic and weaves together with word recognition to produce a skilled reader. 

​I have greatly appreciated Dr. Scarborough’s work, and recognize connections to how I have and continue to talk about the reading development in my coaching work. Despite using a few different terms, we have similar meanings. What he describes as literacy knowledge, I have described as concepts about print. Similarly, we talk about comprehension as consisting of micro skills including vocabulary and background knowledge — the skills needed to make sense and meaning of a text. 

However, I have gone a bit further in my explanation of what emerging readers need and have developed the Reading Wheel, which is based on my understanding of research and my experience as a childhood educator, teaching students how to read.

You’ll see that, in addition to phonological awareness, I include alphabetic awareness, which is defined as “knowledge of letters of the alphabet coupled with the understanding that the alphabet represents the sounds of spoken language and the correspondence of spoken sounds to written language.”

I also discuss the importance of good reading habits, which include what Dr. Scarborough describes as verbal reasoning and a few others. Good reading habits are those often taken for granted skills that proficient readers use when reading — predicting, evaluating, questioning, clarifying, and monitoring for meaning, for example. In my work with teachers, I try to have them engage in the reading of a text, and then reflect on some of the moves they made while reading, to help reveal the habits they utilize most, and how these might be incorporated into their teaching. I also include a specific focus on stamina, which I define as the skill of being able to read for longer and longer periods of time, and the willingness to keep reading, even when it feels hard. 

What support do readers need?

To me, all these skills are equally important. The problem arises when we place more value or importance on certain skills over others — e.g., word recognition over language comprehension, which has often resulted in phonics instruction, all the time! Phonics instruction has its place when it comes to helping children learn the relationships between the letters of written language, the sounds of spoken language and supports their phonemic awareness and decoding skills; however, phonics instruction alone would not suffice. Emerging readers need opportunities to recognize the word patterns and letter blends in context, as they show up in books. 

If we look closely at both Dr. Scarborough’s Reading Rope and the Reading Wheel, we’ll see that they underscore the importance of being able to read words AND make meaning, evident by the weaving of the individual threads of the rope and the circular nature of the wheel. 

Students need explicit instruction when it comes to developing comprehension skills, in order to support them in thinking critically, making connections, and developing their identity as readers. Young readers need differentiated instruction and in the moment feedback as they work to progressively read more complex texts. This often happens during readers' workshops, or small group instruction, such as guided reading. 

Lastly, children need opportunities to engage in independent reading and participate in read alouds, to gain exposure to a wide range of texts aligned to their needs and interests, to grapple with different topics and content, to help foster a love for reading, promote stamina, and learn meaningful habits from a skilled reader — their teacher. My students loved read alouds, and often begged me to read more, so they could find out if Clover and Annie end up as friends in The Other Side, or find out if and how the teacher will respond to the class making fun of Chrysanthemum, or find out the connection between Kissin’ Kate Barlow and the Warden in Holes. 

As Diana Townsend states, “If we really care about teaching kids how to read, we need to focus on creating space and time for teachers to enhance their professional knowledge." They need time to explore the research around reading development for themselves and engage in conversation with colleagues about how it should inform their instructional strategies and approaches, rather than relying on a packaged curriculum or reading programs to do it for them.

​Furthermore, there needs to be meaningful and ongoing inquiry, where teachers can try things out, and then reflect on what’s working, when, for which readers, and why, as we know it takes time and patience to get things “right.” At the end of the day, Townsend reminds us that, “no one is going to ‘win’ the reading wars and children will always be the losers.”
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Help students independently investigate and interpret unfamiliar words using context clues. 

​When it comes to reading, one of the most significant challenges students face is vocabulary. If students come across a word they don’t know while reading, it can have a substantial impact on their comprehension and their confidence. I witnessed this as a classroom teacher, and I’ve heard it from many of the teachers I now coach. 

​Searching for clues

One of my most tried and true strategies, which I used in my own classroom as an elementary teacher, and one I continue to offer to teachers, involves encouraging students to read texts like a detective who is searching for clues. Asking them to engage in this way encourages students to look for clues that can help unlock meaning, offer insights, and assist them in interpreting unknown words.

But these clues — often referred to as context clues — go beyond the language immediately surrounding unknown words. Clues might be found in the paragraph before or after an unknown word or phrase. Sometimes there are clues in the text features, including pictures, visuals, captions, or word boxes. We need to support students in treating the whole text as a series of clues that can help them become familiar with specific vocabulary words as they read independently. 

Monitoring for meaning

Our Monitoring for Meaning resource can support students with this process, particularly when it comes to identifying and investigating difficult words. It offers a helpful template that prompts students to: 

• Write down unknown words as they come across them
• Consider the larger context in which the words appear, and
• Identify specific context clues they may find close to the words

This resource asks them to use their best guess and then either confirm or revise their thinking after using a dictionary. Furthermore, it prompts students to lean on their prior knowledge to help decipher new words.
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Literacy teachers have the demanding and important task of teaching reading, and while there is no single strategy that can guarantee success, encouraging curiosity and investigation while reading is a high leverage way to support students in becoming competent, confident readers. 

Encourage curiosity and caring in young learners, and support an understanding and appreciation of differences.

DR. CRISTINA COMPTON
Director of Program Development
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Conversations about race are not easy. They can bring about feelings of fear, anger, and frustration, and as a result, these conversations are often avoided. However, grappling with topics of race and diversity are truly important, especially with young children who are cultivating their understanding and their perceptions of the world. Experts argue that children are never too young to learn about kindness, fairness, and human rights. Research states that children “as young as three months old...may look differently at people who look like or don’t look like their primary caregivers.” 

As a parent of a soon to be two-year-old and a professional development consultant who works closely with educators of young children, I am committed to seeking ways to engage in and facilitate my own conversations about race, especially in today’s world, as well as share strategies with educators that they can use in their own classrooms. What follows are a few strategies I’ve curated and adapted from my own musings and readings, as well as some concrete strategies inspired by one of our reimagining education initiatives: Literacy Unbound. These strategies can be particularly helpful when it comes to facilitating conversations about race with young students and cultivating skills, mindsets, and capacities that will serve us well today, and in the future. 

The importance of asking questions

One of the most effective ways to grapple with topics of race and diversity is to ask questions. This is particularly effective with elementary students, as they commonly ask many questions of their own. By encouraging their curiosity and caring, and creating a safe space for them to be inquisitive, you can help pacify concerns, address confusions, and support an understanding and appreciation of differences. Additionally, you can raise your own questions focused on topics of race, diversity, and exploring differences to get students thinking and recognizing how they can be advocates of positive change. Here are some examples of questions that I turn to, curated and adapted from websites like PBS.com:
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• What do you notice makes people different? What makes people the same? 
• Why do you think people look different from one another?
• Think about your family. What are three things that are the same or different about you and them? (Think of physical features or likes and dislikes!)
• Think of a time you took a stand for yourself or for someone else. If someone was being mean to your friend, how would you stand up for them?
• When we see something we believe is unfair, what are ways we can stand up for others?

These questions can be a part of morning circle time, a weekly reflection or journal writing prompt, or even as a theme for a bulletin board, where students can share their responses using post-its or index cards (or, while online, students can add their thoughts online to Padlets and Jamboards).  

Introducing & exposing students to diverse books

As Dr. Aisha White,  Director of the P.R.I.D.E. Program at the University of Pittsburgh, explains, books — especially picture books — are a safe place to start when talking to children about race and racism. She suggests selecting picture books that offer multiple perspectives and explore various entry points for addressing complex topics. Some popular texts she suggests include: 

• Separate Is Never Equal: Sylvia Mendez and Her Family's Fight for Desegregation, which explores fairness and discrimination 
• Shades of People, which explore diversity 
• Chocolate Me, which explores racial bullying

These texts can be read as part of designated read aloud time, as part of a school-wide, character building initiative where the books are read in every classroom, or as a central text that guides and inspires a larger unit of study.

But as Dr. White explains, it’s not enough to just read the book. “If a parent (or educator) just reads the book and doesn’t have a conversation — doesn’t start to talk about racial disparities and racial discrimination and racism in America — then it won’t really affect a child’s attitudes toward race…it comes back to…having a background knowledge before speaking with their children, and being brave enough to have the tough conversations.”

What does it look like to support students in reading complex texts more closely, more carefully, more creatively, and more critically?  

Sparking conversations around texts

​Literacy Unbound, one of our signature initiatives, aims to unbind traditional approaches to the teaching of reading and writing using drama and play-based strategies to spark conversations that are inspired by questions raised in a specific, shared text. Teachers and students are brought together in this process as critical and creative thinkers, which helps foster a space for collective inquiry and exploration. 

Using drama and play can be particularly effective with young students, especially when looking to support engagement and participation, while also providing a safe entry point for complex and challenging conversations. 

Let’s look at a few strategies from Literacy Unbound to see how they can be effective and what they can look like when applied to one of my favorite texts, The Other Side, by Jacqueline Woodson. The Other Side follows the story of a little Black girl named Clover who sees a little white girl across a fence, but is told by her mom that she can’t cross to the other side of the fence because it isn’t safe. 

Facilitating conversations about race with young students is no easy task. It takes courage, patience, and a lot of thoughtful planning and reflection on the part of educators, parents, and caretakers. Moreover, it takes a lot of persistence. Being open-minded and developing understanding, kindness, and an appreciation of others who are different from us is not something that happens after reading one text or engaging in one conversation.

As Glenn Singleton and Curtis Linton note in their book Courageous Conversations About Race: A Field Guide for Achieving Equity in Schools, courageous conversations about race require that we stay engaged and anticipate feelings of discomfort, as well as expect and accept non-closure.

We encourage you to create space for these conversations with your students and reimagine the ways in which you can spark curiosity and critical thinking around race and equity in a safe and supportive classroom. 
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Invite students to unpack and engage with Kate Chopin's 1899 novel.

About the text
Published in 1899, The Awakening tells the story of Edna Pontellier, a young woman from Kentucky who marries into an upper-class Creole family in New Orleans, Louisiana. As Edna becomes increasingly alienated from the domestic demands of marriage and motherhood, she meets a young man who offers her a glimpse of an alternate path, one of her own choosing. Biographer Per Seyerstead writes that with The Awakening, Kate Chopin “broke new ground in American literature… revolting against tradition and authority; with a daring which we can hardly fathom today.” The Awakening transcends its historical setting as it speaks to women’s agency and desire, issues which remain fraught in contemporary society. 

Invitations to Create
Finding ways to engage students in the reading of classic texts can be difficult, particularly when so much teaching and learning is happening remotely. Invitations to Create — a method from our Literacy Unbound initiative, which reinvigorates students and teachers through project-based, collaborative curricula developed around challenging texts, ultimately increasing student engagement and building classroom community in the process — offer engaging multimedia prompts that are designed to support students in their reading and understanding of a shared piece of literature. Each invitation offers an opportunity to reflect, analyze, and synthesize the text at hand. 

Our Invitations to Create provide key opportunities for educators to move students from talking about the text to experiencing the text. Through Invitations to Create, students can feel the story in ways that might not otherwise be possible — they can talk from within a text, and speak directly from the perspective of the characters. This process allows rich meaning-making to happen, and will allow you and your students to find ways to experience literature together, even while apart.

Each invitation is focused on a meaningful quote that our team identified as a hotspot for further thinking, discussion, and creation. Additionally, the hotspots are accompanied by multimedia connections such as photographs of the New Orleans landscape, maps from the 1890s, audio clips of the quotes, and connections to current events or related media. These connections are meant to inspire further thinking, engagement, and curiosity for students while they're reading. Who is Edna? Why is she struggling with being a wife and mother, and is the end inevitable?
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To access additional free K-12 resources from our team, please visit our Resources page. 

Breathe new life into book clubs and place students at the center of their reading experience.

G. FAITH LITTLE
Initiative Director, 21st Century Learning
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Time moves forward, as it always does. We can take this time to reflect on lessons learned when we unexpectedly and quickly shifted from teaching in the classroom, to teaching remotely, and then into a next normal of blended in-person and virtual learning spaces. One big takeaway from this time of critical reflection is that we aren’t starting with a blank page. Whatever the season, we can adapt tools we already have to meet the challenges we’re facing.

Breathing new life into book clubs 

New tools can breathe new life into our planning and our teaching, and creating a new tool doesn’t need to be done from scratch. By connecting Ten Tips for Successful Book Clubs with our Global Mindset Framework, we can quickly create a new resource that integrates teaching 21st century skills into each reading opportunity we plan for our students. 
 
Book clubs offer many benefits to student readers, including:

• Promoting a love for literature and a positive attitude toward reading
• Reflecting a student-centered model of literacy (employing a gradual release of responsibility)
• Encouraging extensive and intensive reading
• Inviting natural discussions that lead to student inquiry and critical thinking
• Supporting diverse responses to text
• Fostering interaction, cooperation, and collaboration
• Providing choice and encourage responsibility
• Exposing students to literature from multiple perspectives
• Nurturing reflection and self-evaluation

A successful book club for your students will:

• Generate excitement
• Create opportunities for shared decision-making
• Communicate expectations
• Establish ground rules
• Offer opportunities to lead by example
• Gather tools
• Anticipate tough conversations
• Be student-centered
• Celebrate completion
• Tweak what you’ve already tried

Understanding the Global Mindset Framework

​Now that we’ve framed some of the characteristics of book clubs, we can connect each facet to our Global Mindset Framework. This will help us streamline our work when planning for our next book club iteration, or beginning a book club community with our students.

The Global Mindset Framework is the articulation of 21st century skills students need to navigate their present and their future, sorted into five categories of capacities: caring, collaborative, creative, critical, and global. The framework addresses key questions that teachers and school leaders struggle with as they attempt to make key concepts relevant to children in a changing world. 

To understand the Global Mindset Framework, we can look to the Global Learning Alliance (GLA). The GLA is the outgrowth of our groundbreaking research on the features and practices surrounding 21st century teaching and learning. It has evolved from the seeds of a research project and is now a consortium of schools and universities around the world dedicated to understanding, defining, applying, and sharing the principles and practices of a world-class education within a wide range of educational contexts. 

21st century capacities

​Global capacity: The capacity for students to step outside the confines of their own familiar social world to understand distant realities in order to engage productively with the world. 

Critical capacity: The capacity for students to develop their full critical cognitive capacities in order to be discerning and informed citizens of the world.

Collaborative capacity: The capacity for students to develop habits of observation, reflection, and collaboration, and to be able to communicate in multiple modalities such as through images, words, sounds, gestures, or an integration of these modes in order to actively contribute to various discourses in the world. 

Creative capacity: The capacity for students to follow their curiosity by questioning or imagining in order to contribute positive improvements or inventions to their world.

Caring capacity: The capacity for students to explore compassion, empathy, and self-awareness in order to develop caring partnerships with themselves, their communities, countries, and world. 

Activating 21st century skills

​Using the template below, we can imagine how we might combine various capacities from the Global Mindset Framework with our tips for success to generate a profile of a book club that integrates 21st century skills into student learning. We want to keep moving our teaching forward to meet the needs of today’s students, but we don’t often feel we have the time we need to recreate our plans. By layering the Global Mindset Framework over our book club planning, we can revise what we’ve already got going for us instead of starting from a blank page.

Connecting skills to next steps

​Using the template above, we can customize our profile to fit a specific book — in this case, we'll use Malala Yousafzai's I Am Malala: How One Girl Stood Up for Education and Changed the World. In this model, we start with our to-do list; we imagine some of our options, and what we need to collect to complete our plan.

The task before us all is to educate students today for the world they’re poised to lead tomorrow, and as we recognize that we can no longer sustain a 20th century in a 21st century world, we must remain flexible in order to meet the dynamic needs of our students. As we look for ways to build upon the expertise and techniques already alive in our classrooms, we can easily create opportunities for students to build 21st century skills, shifting from teacher-centered instruction to an environment that puts students at the center of their reading and writing experiences. 
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Uncovering the meaning of unfamiliar words while reading independently is a keystone skill for students from the time they start to read, all the way through college and beyond. 

Monitoring for Meaning is an adaptable tool that guides students of all ages through this process, supporting them as they move through the cognitive steps of identifying and unpacking new words. As students work to decipher the meaning of difficult or unfamiliar words, they are empowered to access their prior knowledge and use available context clues to form their definitions, before turning to additional resources.
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To access additional free K-12 resources from our team, please visit our Resources page.

TAGS: LITERACY, READING, RESOURCES

Invite students to unpack and engage with Alice Walker's short story.

About the text
​​Set in the rural South in the 1970s, Alice Walker's short story gives readers a window into the world of an African-American family when a daughter who left for school in the city returns to visit her mother and sister who remained behind. Walker uses quilting and other rural craft work as a metaphor for exploring the historical legacy of the enslavement of Africans in the United States.

Invitations to Create
​Finding ways to engage students in the reading of classic texts can be difficult, particularly when so much teaching and learning is happening remotely. Invitations to Create — a method from our Literacy Unbound initiative, which reinvigorates students and teachers through project-based, collaborative curricula developed around challenging texts, ultimately increasing student engagement and building classroom community in the process — offer engaging multimedia prompts that are designed to support students in their reading and understanding of a shared piece of literature. Each invitation offers an opportunity to reflect, analyze, and synthesize the text at hand. 

Invitations to Create provide key opportunities to move students from talking about the text to experiencing the text. Through each invitation, students can feel the story in ways that might not otherwise be possible — they can talk from within a text, and speak directly from the perspective of the characters. This process allows rich meaning-making to happen, and will allow you and your students to find ways to experience literature together, even while apart.

Each invitation in this set is focused on a meaningful quote that our team identified as a hotspot for further thinking, discussion, and creation. The hotspots are accompanied by multimedia connections such as historical photographs, audio clips of the quotes, and connections to current events or related media. These connections are meant to inspire further thinking, engagement, and curiosity for students while they're reading. 
​

To access additional free K-12 resources from our team, please visit our Resources page. 

Promising & practical strategies to help track the growth of children's literacy skills.

DR. CRISTINA COMPTON
Director of Program Development
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When you’re caring for children who are participating in remote learning, it can be challenging to identify and understand their progress and growth as readers. You’re likely wondering: Am I doing this right? Are we making progress? How will I know? When children are in the classroom and engaged in in-person learning, the responsibility for these questions largely lies with their teachers. However, the new normal for teaching and learning requires equal — if not more — participation from parents, in order to support and ensure the advancement of students’ reading skills. 

Given how busy we are trying to balance our own work responsibilities along with the needs of our children, it can often feel easiest to default to tools like reading comprehension quizzes, multiple choice tests, or even worksheets to help recognize and assess reading progress at home. While these measures can be helpful, they certainly don’t tell the whole story. We could be missing out on identifying areas of growth and celebration, as well as a robust understanding of our children’s areas of struggle.

But there are promising — and practical — strategies that parents can utilize to help monitor and track the growth of their children's literacy skills. Don't feel as though you need to create your own assessments, rubrics, or projects to achieve this — that is, unless you have the time, capacity, and energy! Instead, consider some quick, informal strategies to monitor students’ growth. These strategies can tell you a lot about a child’s reading behaviors, habits, and progress. 

Habits & behaviors of good readers

In her book, 7 Habits of Highly Effective Readers, Joanne Kaminski explains, “Kids who are highly effective readers and score high on their state exams seem to have similar habits.” She goes on to explain that she has seen these habits in her own children as well as children she’s taught and tutored. The seven habits she describes are: 
   

1. They love listening to books
2. They have books everywhere 
3. They know how to pick out “just right” books
4. They read often 
5. They read for meaning 
6. They like to read aloud 
7. They use the most frequently taught comprehension strategies 

This list can be helpful to parents as they look for evidence of their children's reading behaviors. When these behaviors are present, you can feel good that your young learners are on the right track! 

As we level up our understanding of a child's reading progress, we can turn to Mosaic of Thought: The Power of Comprehension Strategies, in which the authors Ellin Oliver Keene and Susan Zimmermann outline a list of habits that are more reflective of the kind of work students are doing while reading, including: 
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• Determining what is important
• Drawing inferences
• Using prior knowledge 
• Asking questions 
• Monitoring comprehension and meaning
• Creating mental images

For parents, a list like this can feel daunting. You may not know how to look for these specific skills, and are likely asking yourself questions, such as: How do I know they are inferring? How can I prompt them to determine what’s important? Identifying skills that children are exhibiting during reading is often left to teachers. 

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Knowing what to look for

There are ways to simplify the identification of reading habits and skills so that you can determine what children are doing before, during, and after their reading. We can break down more complex reading habits into observable actions, behaviors, or concrete examples that signify the deeper learning that is taking place. When it comes to reading, we can look for the following: 

Stamina
If your child is reading for long(er) periods of time, this is great! Interest and stamina are very important, especially as books increase in demands and complexity. 

Fluency
Have your child read to you! This can be a great way to monitor fluency, decoding, and self-correction strategies on the part of students. 

Comprehension and thinking skills:
A simple set of questions can be very telling when it comes to a child’s predicting, inferring, and comprehension skills. You can use these same questions each time they read, and students can either answer for you, or as part of writing and drawing exercise. Here are some suggestions for what you can ask a child before, during, and after they read: 

• Before reading, you can ask what questions: “What do you think the story/book will be about?” 
• During reading, you can ask what and why questions: “What’s happening in this picture?” “What did you learn?” “Why do you think?” “Why did ____ do that?” and “How do you know?” This last question is a particularly good option for supporting children in explaining their thinking! 
• After reading, you can ask how questions: “How did the character(s) solve their problem(s)?” “How did the story connect with your predictions?” 

Thoughts about reading
Talk to your child about what they are reading. Ask them about the kinds of books they are reading, what they're enjoying (or not enjoying), and why. This can help you gain insight into your child’s general attitude toward reading, the kinds of books they gravitate toward, and the types of books that they find easiest to read.

When you've got young learners in your home, you deserve a lot of credit for balancing work, at-home learning, childcare, and household tasks. What you’ve been able to do during this unique time has been nothing short of remarkable. Remember that when it comes to supporting learning at home, we can monitor a child's reading progress with simple strategies that make the process feel useful and manageable for everyone involved. Start with a strategy that feels feasible and accessible, and build from there. Happy reading!

Distance learning can be challenging, especially for our young, emerging readers. What can we do to support them?

DR. CRISTINA COMPTON
Director of Program Development

Distance learning can be challenging, especially for our young, emerging readers. In the classroom, young students are exposed to print-rich environments, and are supported and guided through a multitude of literacy activities such as phonics, guided reading, shared reading, and direct reading instruction. Now that learning is taking place in the home, there are growing concerns about the deficits young students will experience, particularly when it comes to reading. What can we do? How and when should we do it? And how can parents prioritize reading practices at home? 

As a Master’s student, the focus of my thesis included understanding and improving the reading habits and attitudes of my third grade students. I launched my study by administering a survey, and provided them with a number of statements including, I like to read, I prefer reading to watching TV, and I read more than I watch TV. I had students read each statement, and then circle an emoji that best matched their feelings about the statement (ranging from positive to negative).

My students’ responses, along with my observations, were pretty discouraging. I noticed many of my students didn’t want to read, or would read for a few minutes before putting their book down and saying, “I’m done.” I was determined to do something. In the next phase of my work, I reached out to parents of those students with particularly negative responses to the survey, and asked if they would be willing to participate in my study. Their participation included signing a contract in which they agreed to engage in three specific literacy practices at home: reading aloud, shared reading, and independent reading. 

It is these three literacy practices that I think parents should prioritize, as I believe they are simple, effective, and particularly helpful when it comes to supporting reading development outside of the classroom. 

Reading aloud

Reading aloud promotes fluency and exposure. Exposure plays a significant role in reading development and cultivating a positive attitude towards reading. The parents who participated in my study agreed to read to their children for 20 minutes a day, at least three times a week. I would encourage all parents to do the same. If you can do nothing else, read aloud to your child! Expose your children to as many books as possible, and regularly engage in read alouds. This can be incorporated into a lunch break, added to a bedtime routine, or even occur first thing in the morning — whatever works best for you. If this feels too difficult, there are many read aloud resources available online that can support you, such as Epic, which offers a massive digital library for children aged 12 and under, and YouTube, which offers free access to a variety of voices and titles to choose from.

If you’re ready, interested, and able to step up your read aloud game, you can engage your children further by asking simple questions: What do you notice? What does this make you think? What are you learning about ____? This kind of work promotes comprehension and inferencing skills.

The tried and true think-aloud protocol — in which you share what you’re thinking and what you’re predicting — can also be a powerful model for children. I even do this with my 8-month-old. As her mother I know she’s brilliant (of course!), but can accept she is clearly too young to do deep thinking work on her own, so I point to the pictures and the words in each book, narrating what they are, for as long as she lets me. It’s never too young to cultivate a love for books! 

Shared reading

Fountas and Pinnell define shared reading as a reading experience in which children and their teacher engage in multiple read alouds of an “enlarged version of a text that provides opportunities for students to expand their reading competencies. The goals of the first reading are to ensure that students enjoy the text and think about the meaning. After the first reading, students take part in multiple, subsequent readings to notice more about the text.” From there, students discuss the text, and parents or educators determine next steps for support.

Ideally, parents would be able to put on their teacher hat while reading with their children, tracking and pointing to the words together, sounding words out along the way. Shared reading like this can help improve the rate at which children read, increase their fluency, and add to their enjoyment for reading.

Don’t be discouraged if this feels outside of your reach. Shared reading can also mean simply engaging in shared reading time, without any additional components. Each family member can select a text of their choosing, and read near each other. Whether this happens first thing in the morning, as you read the newspaper or your favorite magazine and enjoy a cup of coffee, or before bed, as you are winding down the day and in search of some quiet time. Being exposed to others who are reading can have a positive effect on a child’s attitudes and habits around reading, as it did for my young readers. 
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​Independent reading

The final activity in my study involved an agreement from parents to provide quiet and uninterrupted time and space to engage in independent reading for at least 20 minutes a day. One of the biggest challenges to reading at home, according to my third graders, is the lack of space and opportunity to read alone. Children are often sharing rooms, household tasks and chores need to be done, and child care responsibilities need to be managed. This, I’m sure, has only been exacerbated during the COVID-19 crisis, as everyone is now living and working from home. Home can feel even more chaotic than before, and quiet time can be a challenge. However, if you can find a calm space where children can engage in independent reading even for even small periods of time each day, it can have a positive impact on reading abilities. This space might be the corner of a room, on a bed, or even in the bathroom. We have to get creative! 

If you’re ready to level up your independent reading game, task your child with practicing one simple strategy while they read. This might include asking them to jot down questions as they read, notice and note (What do you notice? What does this make you think?), or it could involve a challenge to find words that start with certain letters or that contain certain blends, such as Bl or Cr. It doesn’t have to be complicated, just one strategy that will allow children to practice on their own, and then share with you. 

The last tip I’ll leave you with is: if it feels like these strategies aren’t working for your readers, be prepared to throw all these strategies to the wind. Put the book down, and try again later. This is a challenging time — stress and emotions are running high — and we all know that the dynamic between parents and children, when it comes to learning, can be difficult and unpredictable. Some days our children want our help, and sometimes they don’t want anything to do with us! Give yourself some grace and flexibility. Trust that what you’re doing is enough, and remember that one day will not create lasting, negative implications for your child’s reading abilities. Be kind to yourself and to your children, and remember that tomorrow is another day.

Give students the chance to move — intellectually, physically and emotionally — into the world of a text.

DR. ADELE BRUNI ASHLEY
Faculty Contributor

​We begin our session with an exercise borrowed from Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Massachusetts. Players (our term for students and teachers who are in creative collaboration with each other) disperse throughout the room facing in any direction and are invited to move silently about the room at their own pace without collision, always passing through the center of the room en route to another side (rather than merely circling the periphery). Welcome to the act of milling and seething.
 
The purpose of this introductory activity is twofold: first, to foster an awareness of space. All too often in school, students are aware of neither the classroom as a physical space nor themselves and their peers as bodies coexisting within that space. Milling and seething prompts students to examine the entirety of the classroom space; at points, the facilitator leading the activity claps and says, “Look around. Are there any empty places in the room? When I clap again, move to fill them.” Students thus begin to notice the gaps and spaces within the room at any given time and to understand their responsibility to venture out and fill those gaps and spaces. And because of the mandate that they move through the center of the room as they mill and seethe, students must negotiate encounters with one another. They must become aware of where their individual bodies end and the bodies of others begin.

Second, to ease players into imaginative work without any burden of “performance.” There exists no audience in this exercise; all are players. Players need only follow the directions of the facilitator (“When I clap, pause wherever you are. When I clap again, begin moving.”), and these directions shift subtly as the exercise progresses. While at first, the facilitator might ask players to “speed up (or slow down) by 50%, whatever that means to you,” directions ultimately become more like this one: “Pause. You have somewhere important to be. You’re late. When I clap again, get there.” Even with this simple direction, the players start to move into imaginative worlds. 

Reimagining texts and teaching

The Literacy Unbound initiative, the driving force behind this session, was originally conceived as a grand experiment in teacher education that sought to encourage instructors to consider the power of artistic play as an opportunity to help students develop as critical, collaborative, creative readers. At its core, Literacy Unbound seeks to reinvigorate students and teachers through project-based, collaborative curricula developed around challenging texts. Throughout this process, we often witness increased student engagement and the development of a stronger classroom community.

By bringing students and teachers together as creative collaborators, we’re able to reimagine the acts of reading, writing, listening, and speaking through multiple modalities. Though various aspects of this process can change, the core principles always remain the same:

• Begin with movement. Establish a precedent for movement in your classroom early on so students become accustomed to shifting quickly between sitting and walking in the classroom (and pushing desks and tables aside as needed). And be sure that this movement is low stakes. When leading classroom workshops like this one, I often start by saying, “Now, I’m going to ask you to do the most difficult thing I’ll ask you to do all day. When I clap, walk. When I clap again, stop. What questions do you have?” There is laughter when I say this, and students almost instantaneously relax. All they need to do is walk together.

 

• Keep returning to the text. In many classrooms, any kind of movement activity is treated as entirely separate from an “official reading” of the text at hand: one day, we read the text and the next, we do the movement activity (or vice versa). We try to find ways in our classroom workshops of incorporating the text into the movement — of reading with a pen in hand during the same class period in which we mill and seethe. When we ask students to integrate text into their movement in some way, we give them only small pieces with which to work — a word, a phrase, a line. We build larger ideas through an examination of the smaller pieces. 

 

• Compose through movement. All too often, educators use movement to re-present ideas already formed. What we attempt to do in our workshops is craft opportunities for students to discover ideas through movement and then put those ideas into words.

 

• Build the world of the text. As much as possible, we work to “coach students into story,” inviting them into the world of the text in some way. We might approach this by coaching students through guided visualization, or the act of letter writing; in general, we want to offer students sensory details (or sensory questions: What does it smell like? What’s on the walls?) that might help them to step into both textual environments and characters. Prompting students to write in character (or in some other way that makes sense within the given text) then enables them to build that textual world still further.
  
  

Why does this work? 

Through this approach, students get the chance to move — intellectually, physically and emotionally — into the world of the text. So frequently, we talk about text in the classroom. By contrast, our process allows students to talk from within the text; they speak directly from the perspective of one character and then another. They can feel the story in ways that might not otherwise be possible. At Literacy Unbound, we believe strongly that rich meaning-making happens when we find ways to experience literature together in the classroom. 

How can you help students push through complex texts and find meaning in what they're reading?

DR. ROBERTA LENGER KANG
Center Director, CPET

When my son was five years old, his Kindergarten teacher assigned the class 20 minutes of reading for homework every night. We would sit on the couch together, and he would read to me. We didn’t get but two or three pages into the book when his mind would begin to wander, he’d start making silly jokes, or pretend to get really sleepy. I tried to be persistent. I’d prop him up on my lap, and encourage that we point at each word on the page together, sounding them out one by one. He would just sit silently.

I asked him what was wrong, and after some time in silence, he mustered the courage to whisper, “There’s a word on the page that’s bothering me.” That’s what he said -- bothering.  It was as if the word was out on the playground taunting him to jump off the swing, or in the cafeteria ready to steal his lunch money. The word was bothering him.

This was the first time it occured to me that reading is an emotional experience.

The second time it occured to me was when I presented a workshop on reading complex texts at Teachers College. The workshop was designed for a group of middle school teachers from New York City who were embarking on a literacy initiative at their school. As part of my workshop, I wanted to explore what makes a text complex, and why. I passed out seven different excerpts from seven different fields (legal, medical, literary, mathematical, computer science, crafting, and sports) and asked the teachers to read the texts and rank them according to easiest to most difficult. While everyone was engaged in reading, I saw one teacher pick up one of the texts, promptly put it back down again, and then push the paper all the way to the edge of the table where it flew off and fell to the floor.

In debriefing the experience, I asked the teacher to share with the group the strong response he had to this text. He said, “The moment I looked at it, I knew I wasn’t going to be able to understand it, and it made me feel sick to my stomach. I just wanted to get the paper as far away from me as possible.”

Reading is an emotional experience
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We’ve all had this happen to us from time to time. For some, it’s when we’re reading an old English poem, or maybe it’s reading through a mathematical proof, or reading the instructions for filling out paperwork for the IRS. The big a-ha moment for us as educators is that the same reaction we might have when it comes to reading complex texts, may be the same reaction our students are having on a daily basis when we assign texts in our content areas.

Here’s something else I learned from this workshop: there isn’t one type of text that’s easy, and another type of text that’s difficult. I’ve conducted this same workshop with hundreds of educators and every time, I find that different people find complexity in different texts. Our experiences with text complexity are typically based on four criteria:

• personal interest in the topic
• familiarity with the genre
• familiarity with the vocabulary
• importance in or relevance to our lives

It’s these four criteria that inform the emotions we feel while reading. The more criteria we’re able to match to the text, the easier it seems to us. The easier the text is to read, the better we feel about ourselves. The better we feel, the more our confidence grows and our interest in reading increases. The fewer criteria we’re able to match to the text, the more difficult it seems to us, the worse we feel about ourselves. Our confidence decreases and our interest in reading decreases.

Helping students find meaning in texts
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It’s possible we’re inadvertently creating spaces where students become less interested, less confident, and less comfortable with reading because of these emotional interactions with “difficult” texts. But there are some simple solutions that we can implement if we carefully consider the four criteria for making meaning:

• Making connections: Regardless of the texts we’re reading, we can help students make personal connections to the topic, theme, or essential main points of the text. By having students engage in a thoughtful discussion, reflective writing, or building anticipation of the reading through inquiry, we can tap into students’ prior knowledge and help them make connections to the text before reading. This will increase personal interest in the topic.  

 

• Teaching to genre: Understanding the genres within different content areas is crucial to being able to increase comprehension and analysis. Students need to understand the differences between a lab report, a manifesto, a poem, and a proof. Understanding how the text is structured and what its purpose is will help them to determine how they should be reading it and what they should be looking for while reading.

 

• Addressing vocabulary: We want to be mindful about how we’re supporting students to read and interpret new words that might be bothering them, whether that’s through previewing essential vocabulary or giving students tools for decoding vocabulary in context. We can increase students’ stamina and patience if we infuse our classroom culture with a desire to acquire new vocabulary and an open acknowledgement that no one knows all the words...but anyone can learn any word!

 

• Making it relevant: We often take for granted that our subject area is important to understanding the way the world works. Whether we’re in Math and Science or Arts and Humanities, we know what we’re teaching matters, but our students don’t always make that connection. Students will be far more likely to persevere in reading difficult texts if they can draw a direct line between the text and their own lives.

These four steps are not always easy, but if we’re planning with these essentials in mind, we have the power to rapidly transform resistant or reluctant readers in any content area.