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Creating Space for Race: Conversations in Elementary Classrooms

6/11/2021

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Encourage curiosity and caring in young learners, and support an understanding and appreciation of differences.
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CRISTINA COMPTON
Elementary & Project-Based Learning Specialist

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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. 
Taking it to Text
This is a strategy that asks students what they know and what they wonder about in the text, in an effort to tap into prior knowledge and have students reflect on their experiences and curiosities. It can be a really generative activity as students ask and answer questions about the setting, the main topic or themes in the text, as well as the characters. For The Other Side (which includes a cover with a picture of two girls — one white and one Black — one on each side of the fence),  we could ask students: What do you see on the cover? What do you know about fences? Where have you seen an example of fences? What do you wonder about this fence? You can also participate in this conversation by sharing your own ideas and wonderings. 


Thought Tracking
Inspired by Neelands and Goode (1990), this is a strategy that can support students as they travel inside the head of the narrator or one of the characters in a story to think about what they might be going through in that moment. Students will likely have different interpretations and understandings of the characters, how they are feeling, and why they are acting in a specific way. By creating a space for students to share their perspectives and interpretations, it can assist with building empathy, understanding, and the appreciation of differences. Continuing with the cover from The Other Side, we might ask students something like: 


What do we wonder as we look at this picture? I wonder what each girl is thinking.  Let’s travel inside the head of the girl in the pink sweater first. If you have an idea of what might be going through that girl’s head at this moment, raise your hand. What might she say?  It might start with “I wish…” or “I wonder…”

Students can share their responses aloud with the class, as part of a turn and talk with a partner, or even jot down their ideas on a post-it and add to a class chart paper so that the larger group can look across student responses and examine any similarities or differences. 

Hotseat
Another strategy inspired by Neelands & Goode, hotseat can support students in stepping into the shoes of one of the characters in the story, to think and speak as this character, and ultimately build capacities for critical reflection, empathy, and relating to others. Furthermore, it can help students examine what we know about a character in the story and what we think about their actions and responses to various events in the text, as well as highlight what we want to know more about. Using The Other Side, students might do a hotseat with Sandra, one of the secondary characters. Consider this passage: 


“Once, when we were jumping rope, she asked if she could play. And my friend Sandra said no without even asking the rest of us. I don’t know what I would have said. Maybe yes. Maybe no.” 

After reading, you can invite a student to come to the hotseat and speak as Sandra, while the other students think about what they want to know about Sandra’s response in this particular moment. You might ask: Why do you think Sandra said no?  Should we ask her?  Can we have someone come up into our hotseat here and speak as Sandra?  To the rest of the class you might ask: What do we want to know from Sandra about her response at this moment?

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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DEVELOP INCLUSIVE CURRICULUM​
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LITERACY UNBOUND
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ENGAGE STUDENTS IN COMPLEX TEXTS

TAGS: CRISTINA ROMEO COMPTON, LITERACY UNBOUND, READING, STUDENT ENGAGEMENT
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Unpacking Challenging Texts: The Awakening

4/26/2021

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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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DOWNLOAD INVITATIONS TO CREATE
To access additional free K-12 resources from our team, please visit our Resources page. 
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REIMAGINE TEXTS AND TEACHING
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UNPACK UNFAMILIAR WORDS
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ENHANCE STUDENT BOOK CLUBS

TAGS: INVITATIONS TO CREATE, LITERACY UNBOUND, READING, RESOURCES, STUDENT ENGAGEMENT
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Book clubs that build 21st century skills

4/13/2021

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Breathe new life into book clubs and place students at the center of their reading experience.
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G. FAITH LITTLE
21st Century Learning & SEL Specialist
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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
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​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
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​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.
Book club component
21st century skills
Generate excitement
Global: Students engage in multiple perspectives by writing about what life might be like in [setting] for [characters].
Shared decision-making
Global: Students engage in real-world problem-solving by choosing from a list of short stories about bias.
Communicate expectations
Collaborative: Students generate effective and varied ways for expectations to be communicated so that all participants can be reached.

​Caring: Students consider the needs of each group member as they work.
Establish ground rules
Critical: Students write a response to established ground rules, sharing how they think each one supports a positive experience for themselves or their classmates and/or how a rule might be improved.
Lead by example
Caring: Students develop self-awareness by observing their teacher’s model of a transparent reading practice and making a personal connection.
Gather tools
Critical: Students evaluate which reading tools, templates, or conversation guides were most effective for them in the past.

Collaborative: Book club groups agree upon which tools to use or how to use all tools to benefit all members.
Anticipate tough conversations
Creative: Student facilitators imagine some issues that might come up during their conversations. Facilitators share their issues on a Google doc and comment on one another’s issue, jotting down questions or comments they might have ready to share.
Keep it student-centered
Collaborative: Students collaborate strategically by rotating roles during book club conversations. Teachers observe and provide an opportunity for students to reflect on their group’s progress and challenges.
Celebrate completion
Caring: Students develop self-confidence by sharing something that they learned and want to build on.
Sharing ideas
​Global: With teachers from all over the world connecting more easily and more often than ever, consider how you can share your ideas and get ideas from your colleagues in other communities, near and far.

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.
21st century skills (from above)
Next steps
Global: Students engage in multiple perspectives by writing about what life might be like in [setting] for [characters].
Students write on the following prompt: An announcement is made today that all girls will no longer be able to attend school, starting tomorrow. What does the day after tomorrow look like? Who is impacted, and how are they affected?
Global: Students engage in real-world problem-solving by choosing from a list of short stories about bias.
Compile 3-5 short stories. Distribute packet. Students choose one story to read prior to starting the book.
Collaborative: Students generate effective and varied ways for expectations to be communicated so that all participants can be reached.

​Caring: Students consider the needs of each group member as they work.
Students create a Google Doc for discussion roles & expectations. Within the doc, each student comments on at least one expectation, noting one benefit and identifying who is affected. Students are invited to suggest improvements to the list.
Critical: Students write a response to established ground rules, sharing how they think each one supports a positive experience for themselves or their classmates and/or how a rule might be improved.
Students create a Google Doc for ground rules. Within the doc, each student comments on at least one ground rule, noting an advantage and a potential challenge. Students are invited to suggest improvements to the list.
Caring: Students develop self-awareness by observing their teacher’s model of a transparent reading practice and making a personal connection.
Read aloud a short story on bias, showing how you annotate as you read. Write, in real time, on the prompt above and invite students to share low-inference observations about what you did.
Critical: Students evaluate which reading tools, templates, or conversation guides were most effective for them in the past.

Collaborative: Book club groups agree upon which tools to use or how to use all tools to benefit all members.
Students review the tools they’ve collected in their virtual binders over the past few months. Groups use a decision-making protocol to agree upon the tool or tools they will use for this book club.
Creative: Student facilitators imagine some issues that might come up during their conversations. Facilitators share their issues on a Google doc and comment on one another’s issue, jotting down questions or comments they might have ready to share.
​Build in time for facilitators to meet together for this step, and provide feedback on their ideas to support possible tough conversations.
Collaborative: Students collaborate strategically by rotating roles during book club conversations. Teachers observe and provide an opportunity for students to reflect on their group’s progress and challenges
Utilize a sticky note protocol for student reflection. Do this more than once during the unit — consider a pre- and post-reading reflection.
Caring: Students develop self-confidence by sharing something that they learned and want to build on.
Broadcast / forecast share-out using the prompts: one thing I learned while reading this book and one thing I want to do based on what I learned.
​Global: With teachers from all over the world connecting more easily and more often than ever, consider how you can share your ideas and get ideas from your colleagues in other communities, near and far.
Reach out to colleagues — within your school community, those you've met through PD opportunities, or those you've connected with virtually over the past year — and share how you're each dealing with challenging conversations.

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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UNPACK CHALLENGING TEXTS
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GLOBAL MINDSET FRAMEWORK
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LEVERAGING LITERACY AT HOME


TAGS: 21st CENTURY SKILLS, G. FAITH LITTLE, LITERACY, READING, RESOURCES
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Resource: Monitoring for Meaning

4/12/2021

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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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DOWNLOAD MONITORING FOR MEANING
To access additional free K-12 resources from our team, please visit our Resources page.
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LEVERAGING LITERACY AT HOME
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THE ABCs OF LITERACY
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DIFFERENTIATION: DIVERSIFYING READING


TAGS: LITERACY, READING, RESOURCES
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Unpacking Challenging Texts: "Everyday Use"

4/9/2021

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About the text
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​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
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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. 
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DOWNLOAD INVITATIONS TO CREATE
To access additional free K-12 resources from our team, please visit our Resources page. 
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ENGAGEMENT ACROSS CONTENT AREAS
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REIMAGINE TEXTS AND TEACHING
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TACKLE COMPLEX TEXTS


TAGS: INVITATIONS TO CREATE, LITERACY UNBOUND, READING, RESOURCES, STUDENT ENGAGEMENT
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Monitoring reading progress at home: Tips for parents

11/30/2020

2 Comments

 
Promising & practical strategies to help track the growth of children's literacy skills.
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CRISTINA ROMEO COMPTON
Elementary & Project-Based Learning Specialist

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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!
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TACKLING COMPLEX TEXTS
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THE ABCs OF LITERACY
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LEVERAGING LITERACY AT HOME

​TAGS:
 ASSESSMENT, CRISTINA ROMEO COMPTON, READING, REMOTE LEARNING
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The Center for Professional Education of Teachers (CPET) at Teachers College, Columbia University is devoted to advancing global capacities in teacher education, research, and whole school reform. CPET advocates for excellence and equity in education through direct service to youth and educators, innovative school projects, international research that examines and advocates the highest quality instructional and assessment practices today, and sustainable school partnerships that leverage current policy and mandates to raise literacy levels and embed collaborative communities of learning. Uniting theory and practice, CPET promotes rigorous and relevant scholarship and is committed to making excellent education accessible worldwide.
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