By Evan Robb

To develop students’ reading proficiency and motivation to read, we need to make daily teacher read alouds, instructional and independent reading, and writing about reading the core of ELA classes. 

There is no quick fix for the reading challenges faced by many schools, but we live in a time when the allure of a quick fix can be very strong. Many educators look for a new program to create a pathway to improvement–a canned program. I have not seen one work.  My experience is administrators want to “fix” things, to check the box that something is being done. This thinking does not work; it will not make students into readers; it devalues the teacher as a professional. I have never seen a program create a love of reading.  

Balanced literacy focusing on students reading actual books and short stories should be the foundation of a school’s reading curriculum.  Does your school have a balanced reading and writing curriculum reflected in each ELA classroom? If you are an administrator are your words supporting balanced literacy or creating a roadblock to change? 

Read over my five indicators that are present in classrooms where balanced literacy is part of the reading culture. If you are a teacher, compare my five indicators to your practice. If you are an administrator, these indicators will give you a framework to assess where your school is and to consider possible next steps.

1. Teacher Reads Aloud: Yes, reading aloud is perfectly fine!  Teachers reading aloud is a great way to introduce students to different authors and genres and model how the teacher thinks about texts. Choose materials students will enjoy! This practice goes south when teachers read out loud for a longer period of time as this diminishes the opportunity for other reading instruction.  Tip: The read-aloud should be 10 – 15 minutes of a class. 
2. Instructional Reading: Teach students to comprehend and think deeply about instructional materials to enlarge their vocabulary, enlarge their prior knowledge, and develop understandings of complex concepts.  Great instructional reading teaches skills and strategies at a student’s instructional level. Tip: Whole class novels are not a great way to go. All students rarely read at the same level. 
3. Independent Reading: In addition to instructional reading, students should read thirty to fifty books a year–books they can read with 99% to 100% accuracy. Like sports, to improve reading, students practice skills and build automaticity in applying specific strategies. When students practice with feedback and support, they get better!  It is perfectly fine and beneficial to students to set aside fifteen to twenty minutes of independent reading at school. Reading in school is not a poor use of teachers’ instructional time as long as it is a balanced part of the learning experience for students. It’s important for administrators to understand that teachers are not wasting instructional time when students are silently reading. Tip: Independent reading should always be a homework assignment for students; I caution against getting hung up on how to hold students accountable. Trust students and know that some will not read. However, don’t abandon a practice that improves reading skills because of a few students.
4. Choice: Choice is empowering for students and adults too! Give students choice in independent reading materials and as much as possible with instructional texts. Choice results in motivation and engagement; students can explore their passions and interests. Tip: Students have more choices when schools use funds to purchase classroom libraries and more books for the school library.
5. Discourse: Make learning interactive, help students clarify their hunches, and provide opportunities for thinking and discussing texts with a partner and in small groups. Tip: In our high tech age, conversing about books will always be valued. 

These five ways to improve literacy provide a balanced framework for research-based practices that can help students develop positive attitudes toward reading.  A balanced literacy framework develops reading skills and strategies leading to reading stamina, critical thinking, proficiency and yes, a love of reading!

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by Marlena Gross-Taylor

As educators, we all endeavor to inspire. We want to inspire our students, fellow teachers and if in a leadership position, those that follow us. But have you ever considered the definition of the word inspire, particularly the Latin translation of insperitae, “to breathe”? If we as educators are to inspire and encourage creativity in others, then it’s imperative we prioritize our white space to recharge. 

So how do you carve out time for whitespace as an educator?

5 Ways to Take a Breath…

Reflection

Consider your daily routines so far this school year.  When are you able to have a moment to yourself without any obligations?  Maybe that’s the car ride to and from school or even those few moments before you start your day.  Choose a time that’s best for you and commit to reflecting on the present.  This is not a time to mentally run through your ever-growing to-do list, but rather reflect on what you’re grateful for or what inspires you each day? 

Planning

Just as we have to be intentional with embedding our standards in our lesson plans, we must be just as vigilant in planning white space.  A full calendar doesn’t necessarily reflect productivity.  Set aside time on your calendar to relax, daydream, and grab a cup of coffee with friends.  If you’re worried about those menial tasks that consume precious chunks of your time, like cleaning your house or bathing the dog, consider outsourcing those tasks in order to free up time for yourself.

Family

As educators, many times our families take the back seat to our students, school and community.  Early in my career, I had to live with the guilt of missing a few of my boys’ milestones because I was teaching and/or leading. Set clear boundaries between work and family and plan around those milestones even if it meant taking time off to attend a field trip or sporting event. 

Passions                             

I absolutely LOVE being an educator and accept the full responsibility of impacting children’s’ lives; however, teaching is not my only passion.  I literally turn into Betty White in the Snickers commercial if I go too long without curling in my favorite chair to read or tucked away in my office to write.  What is your passion? Better yet, how do you make time to engage in your passion?  Through our passions, we can deepen our connection with students.

White Space provides clarity allowing us to refocus on our purpose: to inspire and ignite the fire of the next generation and hopefully modeling the importance of taking a breath.

Marlena Gross-Taylor is Chief Academic Officer for Douglas County School District in Castle Rock, CO. She is also a consultant, founder of EduGladiators, and a blogger.

by Laura Robb  (names are pseudonyms)

“All we do is read a few chapters and do worksheets. We never ask questions. No discussions. I hate worksheet packets and memorizing vocab for tests. I haven’t heard what my friends are reading. I want to talk about our questions. We never talk about anything much in class.”  

            Sorel, an eighth-grader, wrote these words in his notebook near the end of the first semester when his teacher, Ms. Walters, asked students: What changes would you like to see in reading?  The responses of most students repeated thoughts similar to Sorel’s. To her credit, Ms. Walters heard and absorbed her students’ comments. She had noticed their lack of interest and recognized the need to change. To students’ credit, they were honest and their candid comments nudged Ms. Walters to ask for coaching and risk the challenges of change.  At the end of October, Ms. Walters invited me to help her bring inquiry and student-led discussions of different books into her reading curriculum.

Reading and discussing professional materials, watching videos, and having frequent conversations about Ms. Walter’s myriad questions related to planning and observing lessons, supported change. Gradually, she moved from “my class” to “our class” by negotiating with students learning expectations and deadline dates as well as offering choices in independent reading. This short literacy snapshot illustrates the power of questions as a tool that can drive changes and foster a self-evaluative stance.

Why Pose Questions?

Readers and writers ask questions. Scientists and historians ask questions. Administrators and teachers ask questions. Posing questions is a way of understanding information, data, and experiences. In addition, raising questions supports learners as they dig deeper into a topic and text. With practice, wondering can also develop students meta-cognition—the ability to think about their learning, know what they understand, and identify areas that require additional practice

Too often in classes, questioning is actually recitation where the teacher prompts students for the “one right answer” to questions he or she asks. However, to develop independent readers and thinkers, to develop analytical and critical thinking skills, students need to be in the driver’s seat when it comes to asking and answering questions. 

When quality, student-generated questions define a class, meaningful learning takes place—learning that defines reading, research, collaborative projects, literary discussions, and notebook writing. As students wonder to learn, they begin to raise questions while reading and generate questions to solve problems, to research a topic, to conduct interviews, etc.

When Do Students Ask Questions?

Opportunities abound throughout the day for students to pose questions. Here are a few:

Mini-lessons:  Invite students to jot questions they have while you present a mini-lesson and ask these when you’ve finished. Such questions clarify students’ understanding and help them absorb new ideas. In addition, students’ questions can offer you insights into what they do and don’t understand about a lesson. With this information, you can design interventions based on observed needs.

Teacher read alouds:  Pause during your read aloud and invite students to pose questions about conflict, theme, or how events connect. Reserving a few minutes for students to share and discuss their questions shows them how much you value their thinking.  You’ll also gather insights into ways students react and respond to the text; this information informs future think-alouds, mini-lessons, and interventions..

Setting goals: Help students understand that raising questions such as, Is there a strategy I should work on next? What do I have to do to reach this goal?” can improve their learning. Such questions can develop independence because they place students in charge of decision-making and developing a plan to reach a goal.

Self-evaluation: Questions can also drive students’ evaluation of their work over time. Ask them to review and pose questions about several notebook entries, their entire process for a piece of writing, several quizzes, and tests, or their participation in collaborative projects. Here’s a sampling of questions that students might ask: Did I improve? How do I know I made progress? Is there something I did that stands out? Why did I struggle? What did I do to cope with my struggles? Did I seek help from a peer or teacher if I couldn’t resolve the issue?

A result of self-evaluative questions is the development of meta-cognition, the ability of students to reflect on their written work, assessments, and collaborations. Often, the result is that students accept the need for additional practice from their teacher or a peer that can support their growth as learners, critical thinkers, and problem solvers.

Questioning the Author: Isabel Beck’s and Margaret G. McKeown’s strategy, questioning the author, provides students with questions for fiction and nonfiction texts. The questions help students link words, phrases, and ideas to construct meaning from a passage they find challenging. To question the author, students might ask: Why did the author use that word or phrase? How does the word or phrase connect to the information in the sentence or to information that came before the sentence? How does the paragraph or section connect to the title? The theme or the main idea? The previous paragraph?  I suggest you put these questions on index cards that students can access because the questions can develop independence in unpacking meaning from challenging passages. Inquiry-based learning: Before and during a unit of study, students generate questions that drive their reading, investigations, experiments, and discussions. Researchers like Jeffrey Wilhelm and Michael Smith, show that when student-generated questions steer the direction studies take, they are more engaged and motivated to learn. Inquiry fosters collaboration, understanding information, analyzing texts, and researching topics.

Students Write Discussion Questions: Teach students how to pose open-ended, interpretive questions and invite them to work as a team when reading an assigned or self-selected text. Open-ended questions have two or more answers. Verbs such as, why, how, evaluate, explain, compare/contrast can signal interpretive questions. Returning to a text to write open-ended questions deepens students’ knowledge of plot and information, but it also raises the level of discussions to critical thinking. In addition, discussing their own questions motivates and engages students in the reading and exchanging ideas.

The Teacher’s Role

Providing a model for students, one that shows them how to raise questions during diverse learning experiences is what teachers do. For most students, becoming a skilled questioner won’t happen quickly. However, turning the questioning process over to students gives them opportunities to practice and to make their studies more meaningful. Meaningful reflection by teachers and students-–reflection that considers improving questioning techniques and gathering feedback can create a learning environment that values students’ wonderings as a path to progress and independence in learning.

Laura has written many excellent books! Check out The Reading Intervention Toolkit

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By: Molly Ness PHD

Recently, my fourth-grade daughter and I were at our local recycling center, dropping off aluminum cans and plastic milk gallons. As we broke down our cardboard, we noticed an enormous stack of virtually brand-new children’s books. As I shook my head in frustration, my daughter asked me what was wrong.

“These books belong in the hands of young readers, or in a classroom library – not on the top of a recycling pile,” I explained. “Did you know that some children don’t have books in their homes or schools?”, I continued. Fortunate to grow up in a home and area rich with books and in a family of lifelong readers, this concept was incomprehensible to her. She furrowed her brow, “I don’t get it. How can kids not have books? How are they gonna read?” 

Her simple question was our impetus to launch a community book drive. With a few social media posts, some flip-lid trash cans, and many cardboard boxes, my daughter and I have collected nearly 4,000 books for Title I schools in our area. My daughter has become a young literacy activist, high schoolers (in need of fulfilling their required community service hours) box and distribute books, and we’ve made our community aware about our collective responsibility to take action in addressing book deserts.

The Devastating Impact of Book Deserts

Today, over 32 million children lack book access in their homes, schools, and communities. These students live in book deserts – high-poverty geographic areas that lack reading material. Recent research shows significant disparities in the availability of books between high-income and low-income neighborhoods, even within the same city; in a high-poverty area of Washington, DC (with poverty levels above 60%) there is one book per 833 children (Neuman & Moland, 2019).

            When books are not readily available, children suffer. As Neuman and colleagues (2019) explain, book deserts constrain young children’s opportunities to start school ready to learn. Without books, children miss out on chances to acquire vocabulary, content knowledge, and a myriad of literacy skills.  Furthermore, without books children miss out on the vast socioemotional benefits that comes from adult-child reading interaction.

How You Can Help #endbookdeserts

Whether you are a teacher living in an area flooded with books or you teach in a community that qualifies as a book desert, you can join forces with literacy warriors who aim to provide book access and equity. Here are just a few ideas on how to flood students with books:

• Seek Out & Visit Literacy-Rich Areas in Your Communities: Innovative people and programs – beyond our public libraries – are transforming community spaces into literacy hot spots. For example, laundromats are quickly becoming makeshift literacy spaces – as patrons tend to frequent the same laundromats, bring their young children, and spend an extended amount of time there. Embracing literacy as a keystone to healthy child development, Reach Out and Read provides families with books as a part of pediatric checkups. Book banks are gaining momentum, as epitomized by Bernie’s Book Bank in Chicago, and San Francisco’s Children’s Book Project, and Baltimore-based Maryland Book Bank.
• Get Creative Passionate literacy warriors who get books into the hands of their students don’t rest on school vacations or summer breaks and prove that where there’s a will, there’s a way. Teachers in Virginia ride bikes into students’ neighborhoods over the summer, armed with popsicles and books. In Michigan, teachers repurposed a dilapidated school bus into the Big Rockin’ Book Bus; throughout the summer, they deliver meals and books directly to students.
• Send Home Books From Your Classroom and / or School Libraries: Knowing that students might not have books at home, we need to be generous with the resources that we do have. Don’t lock away books in classroom and school libraries during school breaks and summer holidays. Don’t be afraid that some books might not make their way back to classroom shelves. Literacy guru Donalyn Miller says, “I’d rather lose a book than lose a reader.”
• Spread Book Culture: Overcoming book deserts takes more than just placing books in low-income areas. Create book culture by inviting authors to discuss their craft, develop welcoming spaces to discuss books, and constantly talk to and with students about what you are reading to showcase your reading identity. You might foster the reading habits of readers of all ages with cross-community virtual book clubs. In effort to promote a love of reading, ProjectLit provides high-quality, student-selected books worthy of discussion.
• Raise awareness to #EndBookDeserts: Many people outside of the field of education are simply unaware of the presence and impact of book deserts. You might work with local businesses, churches, and organizations to understand the challenge and inspire them to take action and begin a book collection, to help a teacher fulfill her Amazon wish list for classroom books, or donate their time to the many organizations that exist to distribute books.

Ultimately, all of us must champion children’s literacy rights, and be vocal advocates for the importance of book access. As we shine the light on the accessibility of books in our low-income urban and rural areas, we increase our ability to transform book deserts into book oases. When teachers come together – across both book deserts and book floods – all children increase the likelihood of becoming lifelong readers. For more information on the people and programs who work to end book deserts, visit www.endbookdeserts.com.

References:

Neuman, S. & Moland, N. (2019). Book deserts: The consequences of income segregation on children’s access to print. Urban Education, 54(1), 126-147.

Check out Molly’s Website!