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Independent reading leads to an increased volume of reading. The more one reads, the better one reads. The more one reads, the more knowledge of words and language one acquires. The more one reads, the more fluent one becomes as a reader. The more one reads, the easier it becomes to sustain the mental effort necessary to comprehend complex texts. The more one reads, the more one learns about the people and happenings of our world.

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Miller is a highly respected expert on reading and YA books. This is her response to the report that came out in 2000. She gives an AMAZING list of articles and books that you SHOULD LOOK INTO!!!

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I’ve Got Research. Yes, I Do. I’ve Got Research. How About You?

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In 1847, Hungarian doctor, Ignaz Semmelweis made a remarkable discovery. When doctors washed their hands in a solution of chlorine and water, childbirth fever rates at Vienna General Hospital dropp…

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In our case, we're going to use the bins/columns to curate resources on things we want to learn more about in regards to teaching English. I've curated things in these bins that I find interesting and/or helpful on a variety of topics. During our weekly inquiry time, you'll be able to come here and read. You can pick and choose what to read, and you can find your own resources (please post here for others to use). Please feel free to add new columns with new topic headings as well.

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Teachers and school leaders need to abandon teaching students to embrace "grit." In my new book, We Want to Do More Than Survive, I spend an entire chapter explaining how these quick fixes pathologize African-American children and are inherently anti-black. I argue that the idea of grit seems harmless at face value-we can all agree that children need grit to be successful in life, regardless of how you define success-but is actually the educational equivalent of The Hunger Games.

Measuring African-American students' grit while removing no institutional barriers, then watching to see who beats the odds makes for great Hollywood movies (i.e., "Dangerous Minds," "The Blind Side," "Freedom Writers") and leaves us all feeling good because the gritty black kid made it out of the 'hood. But we fail to acknowledge the hundreds of kids who are left behind because we are rooting for what we are told is an anomaly. However, if teachers knew how enslaved Africans made it to the United States and how we as African-Americans fight every day to matter in this country, I believe they would understand why questioning whether African-American kids have grit is not only trivial but also deeply hurtful.

This year marks 400 years since the first documented Africans arrived on U.S. soil in Point Comfort, Va. When we teach about slavery, if allowed to teach it at all, we frame it as a thing that happened to Africa. There is often no mention of Africa before slavery or what enslaved Africans endured to arrive in bondage in the New Americas. To revisit that history is to tell a story of terror, trauma, labor, and, of course, grit.

My revelations about Africa and grit came when I traveled to Ghana in December, especially when I arrived at Assin Manso "Ancestral" Slave River Park (also referred to as the "Last Bath"). After walking hundreds of miles in shackles, captured Africans arrived at the Last Bath, home to the Donko Nsuo, which literally means slave river. There, they were inspected, fed, branded with hot-iron steel, and given the last bath they would receive until they arrived, months later, in the New Americas. Africans who did not survive the trip to the Last Bath were left as prey, tied to trees to be eaten alive by wild animals. Those who made it to the Last Bath were beyond strong; they were determined to live. Once they left the Last Bath, they still had to travel another 34 miles on foot in shackles to the coast of Ghana to be housed in dungeons.

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"White Teachers Need Anti-Racist Therapy"

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"Dear White Teachers: You Can't Love Your Black Students If You Don't Know Them"

There were approximately 40 dungeons in Ghana, West Africa. Though they are often referred to as castles, they are a far cry from the stuff of legends and fairy tales. I visited the Cape Coast dungeon, which stands on a site first occupied by the Portuguese in the mid-1500s. The Swedish, Dutch, and British all at one point in history controlled this site of terror, as they fought each other for the ability to profit from the sale of human bodies.

From the outside, the Cape Coast dungeon looks like a grand tourist attraction with large white walls, lush trees, and the sound of huge waves slamming into the rocks along the coastline. But that beauty is all a façade to hide some of the most hideous and unthinkable terrors of which human beings are capable.

Up to 1,000 male and 500 female enslaved Africans could be jammed into the dungeons at any given time. In dark, poorly ventilated holding cells in the pits of the Cape Coast dungeon, after walking upwards of 200 miles to get there, men and women were held captive in their own waste and served just enough food to keep them alive. The women were routinely raped.

Above the dungeon where the men were held was a church. Next to that sanctuary was a small, dark cell waiting for anyone who resisted their fate. In this hole, they would receive no food, no water, no reminder of the sun. They were simply left to die. After walking hundreds of miles and spending weeks in the dungeons, those who were still alive walked through the "Doors of No Return" to be loaded on ships as cargo. They were shackled to prevent rebellions that were, amazingly, common. After all they endured, all the attempts to weaken their bodies and their spirits, they still fought.

The African bodies that arrived in this country were superhuman. They survived diseases, starvation, beatings, and the human loss of never returning home again.

The Character Lab, founded by grit guru Angela Duckworth, defines grit as "perseverance and passion for long-term goals." Revising an essay repeatedly or not quitting a sport in the middle of the season, according to the Character Lab, are examples of gritty behavior.

But what if your long-term goal is fighting to live, fighting racism? Is 400 years long enough? You cannot measure this type of grit, nor should you ignore it. African-Americans are resilient and gritty because we have to be to survive, but it is misleading, naive, and dangerous to remove our history on both sides of the water from the conversation about grit.

We have rebelled, fought, confronted, pleaded with the courts, marched, protested, and boycotted all just to survive the United States of America. Grit is in our DNA. Ghana taught me that. But grit alone will not overthrow oppressive systems of power. We need teachers, school leaders, and policymakers who have grit for justice. We need educators who understand the legacy of African-Americans' grit-that we have survived because of it, and the surviving is not enough. Black people and brown people deserve the right to use their grit to thrive, not just survive.

Related Video

In 2016, Bettina L. Love, the author of this Commentary, spoke to Education Week about African-American girls and discipline. Here's what she had to say:

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'Grit Is in Our DNA': Why Teaching Grit Is Inherently Anti-Black (Opinion)

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Teachers and school leaders need to abandon teaching students to embrace "grit." In my new book, We Want to Do More Than Survive, I spend an entire chapter explaining how these quick fixes pathologize African-American children and are inherently anti-black.

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For years teachers have been looking for ways to improve the academic performance of all students, especially students of color and those from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. While some of these efforts have been successful, many more have had lackluster results.

In the past, we've explored different approaches teachers can take to do a better job of reaching all students: interviews with Dena Simmons, Zaretta Hammond, Pedro Noguera, and Hedreich Nichols, to name a few. In these conversations, we looked at more effective ways of relating to students, strategies for working toward equity outside the classroom, and instructional methods that are more culturally responsive.

This post continues that work with a fresh response to the question of how to better serve diverse students. It's a framework that deals directly with the curriculum side of things, the standards, the actual content we teach in our classrooms. The framework is called Historically Responsive Literacy, and it was developed by Dr. Gholdy Muhammad, a professor, a former middle school educator, and the author of the book Cultivating Genius: An Equity Framework for Culturally and Historically Responsive Literacy, where she makes the case for this framework.

In short, Muhammad believes we're not reaching many of our students, especially Black students, because our curricula and standards are lacking. The emphasis in our current standards is mainly on skills-skills that can be measured easily on standardized tests-and not a whole lot else. Some teachers go beyond the tested material, pushing students to think critically, exploring social emotional competencies, and designing opportunities for inquiry-based learning; unfortunately, the standards themselves don't require those things.

But there was a time in history when a more complete, more human form of "curriculum" did exist, and it energized and inspired its students-all of them Black men and women-to read, write, speak, and publish with the kind of passion and dedication we would want all of our students to have about learning. This curriculum evolved within the Black literary societies of the 19th century. These groups met regularly to read, write about, and discuss a wide range of texts and ideas. Their goals were far loftier than basic skill development or scores on a test, and engagement-to borrow a term we use in modern education-was at an all-time high.

These societies were the inspiration for Muhammad's Historically Responsive Literacy framework, a four-layered pedagogical model that places skills on an equal plane with three other learning pursuits: identity, intellect, and criticality.

The framework was designed with Black students in mind, but it will benefit all students. Muhammad explains it this way: "If we start with Blackness (which we have not traditionally done in schooling) or the group of people who have uniquely survived the harshest oppressions in this country, then we begin to understand ways to get literacy education right for all" (p. 22).

In our interview, she unpacks all four layers of her framework and helps us understand what it looks like to implement them in the classroom. What follows is a summary of our conversation.

First, Two Clarifications

Is Historically Responsive Literacy Just for "Literacy" Teachers?

No. In the book, Muhammad explains that in the past, "literacy was synonymous with education, so although I name 'literacy,' these four pursuits can be used and layered with math, science, ELA, social studies, or physical education/health" (p. 57).

In other words, this is not just a framework for ELA teachers, and in the book, Muhammad explores how to implement HRL in many different subject areas.

Is HRL different from Culturally Responsive Teaching?

Think of HRL as living under the broader umbrella of Culturally Responsive Teaching, which includes relationship-building, instructional strategies, and curriculum. "My work is taking a more historic look back and putting a practical model to the theory," Muhammad says.

The Four Layers of Historically Responsive Literacy

Historically Responsive Literacy is built on four layers, four "learning pursuits" that Muhammad believes should receive equal priority

1. Identity

For students to be fully engaged in school they must first find it relevant, and that starts with identity.

"Identity is who you say you are, who others say you are... (and) who you desire to be," Muhammad says. "I feel like children are trying to make sense of all three areas, and the curriculum and the pedagogy should be an opportunity for students to know themselves."

Muhammad believes this is especially important for children of color because "when we look at representation in children's literature, in society oftentimes, and historically, they are invisible or represented in negative ways. So the classroom needs to be a space for students to affirm and celebrate and validate who they are, so that they know they are enough, so they know they are brilliant and excellent and beautiful. Because society doesn't tell us that all the time."

Along with self-knowledge, the learning pursuit of identity should also include knowledge of others who are different from ourselves. "When students learn about the lives of other people," Muhammad says, "they are less prone to hate, to treat them in harmful or hurtful ways."

What it looks like in the classroom: Start by asking yourself, "How does my teaching and learning help students to learn about themselves and about others?"

From there, plan instruction and write learning goals to satisfy that question. Muhammad gives an example from science. "Some teachers have written it (in language like) Students will understand their environmental identity and their roles and responsibilities regarding the planet. Then in the lesson or unit there are opportunities for students to deeply reflect about how they recycle or (whether) they take care of the earth and the planet and the environment."

Finally, be sure to assess for it. "Kids know that if my teacher values it that she or he or they are going to test it," Muhammad says. "You can assess it in discussion, in a quiz, or a summative kind of test at the end: What are five things you can do to take care of the planet? Or Name five roles that humans play on climate change. So it could be a qualitative or a quantitative assessment, but if you value it enough, you can assess it."

2. Skills

So much of our current curricula and standards already focus on skills, so this part of the framework is nothing new; what's important is to not throw it out when the other three layers are added.

Muhammad explains that this abandonment of skills is a common problem when new approaches to schooling are introduced. "That's a way of thinking that we have to dismantle," she says. "Sometimes we think that when we add identity or when we add voice and freedom of expression, that somehow we don't focus on skills at all. But that's just simply not true. You can have it all. You can have voice and fun and engagement and skills."

What it looks like in the classroom: Teaching skills is more or less what you'd expect typical school content to be, what our current standards are already prescribing. "In math it can be learning equations. In ELA it can be citing textual evidence. In social studies, it can be questioning the source. In physical education it can be learning to play basketball."

So the skills themselves may be taught in whatever way works best for your students. The difference now is that in terms of class time and assessment, their weight will be equal to that of the other three layers.

3. Intellect

Along with identifying the skills students need to acquire, Muhammad urges us to ask What do we want our students to become smarter about?

Because our recent standards have been so skills-driven, knowledge has fallen by the wayside in a lot of schools, and that can strip away the joy that comes from simply learning new things about the world. But the Black Literary Societies of the 19th century valued knowledge as a vital part of a person's development. "So I'm pushing this idea of intellectualism," Muhammad says, "of treating young people as if they are scholars and intellectuals and thinkers."

She sees the loss of intellectualism even in how we prepare and treat teachers. "It's like we're sucking the power out of them by telling them to read a script in a curriculum. We need to go back to teacher as intellectual, teacher as scholar, reserving the field for the brightest among us who are knowledge-seekers."

And Muhammad's definition of intellectualism goes beyond simply gathering facts. "Intellectualism is when you do something with that knowledge, where you apply it somehow, in your discussion, in your activism, in your actions."

What it looks like in the classroom: When developing lessons and units, ask yourself, "How does my teaching and learning help to teach students new knowledge and concepts? New histories, new people, places, and things?"

Muhammad cautions teachers not to confuse skills for knowledge. "You shouldn't say they became smarter about equations or citing textual evidence," she says. "That's not intellect. Those are skills."

4. Criticality

"Criticality is helping students to read, write and think in active ways," Muhammad explains, "as opposed to passive-when you ask a question and there's one correct answer, and you just take it in. We don't want them to be passive consumers of knowledge. We want them to question what they hear on the news."

"We see the word critical and sometimes our minds can go to critical thinking," she continues. "But it's more than just deep and analytical thinking. Criticality is deep and analytical thinking to understand power, equity, anti-racism and other anti-oppressions. This is where we help students to be woke."

This fourth layer is essential "because oppression exists in the world. Period. We want students to leave our schools not contributing to more oppression or wrongdoing and hurt in their relationships and with strangers. We also don't want them to be silent. If they see oppression, we want them to actively respond to it."

What it looks like in the classroom: "With criticality," Muhammad says, "the teacher is asking, How does my teaching and learning help students to understand power, equity, anti-racism and anti-oppression? So (students are) reading, writing, thinking in active ways to understand power, inequality, equity, oppression. They're investigating different standpoints, especially the marginalized point of view, and reading between the lines. In other words, reading for what's not being said and for what's not there.

The brilliance of the framework is revealed when Muhammad explains that the four layers are not separate, but progressive, each one building on the layers that came before it, starting with identity: "They see themselves, they validate themselves, they're learning about other people, which creates a safe space to learn the skills. If you learn the skills, you can learn the intellect. You cannot learn the intellectualism without first having those skills to do so. If you have the intellectualism and that knowledge, you can critique the knowledge. Because of all the layers that came before it, you now have the capacity to disrupt and to dismantle. If you're just woke without the identity and the skills and the intellect, you're not going to be able to make change in ways that you could with those things."

Tough, but Possible

Making this kind of shift-especially if our standards still don't reflect these four layers-will not be an easy task to take on. This concern has been expressed when Muhammad presents her framework to teachers. But despite its challenges, she feels this type of curriculum is exactly what any parent would want for their child.

"It's not a matter or a question of if it's tough," she says. "The question is, is it possible? Everything is tough. And if you had your own child, if you're a parent, parents are going to equally value the beautiful ways that their child loves themselves: identity, the skills they have, the intellect they have, and the social consciousness they have. I don't see parents saying No, let's just talk about my child's reading skills. They talk about their emotional intelligence, they talk about the whole child."

"And that's what we're trying to get to," she says. "This is humanizing work."

Come back for more.
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Historically Responsive Literacy: A More Complete Education for All Students

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Based on the work of 19th century Black literary societies, this fresh approach to curriculum focuses on identity, skills, intellect, and criticality.

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"....well, I didn't finish any books last year..."She turns to me and smiles.

"What do you mean?" I ask, not sure I have heard her correctly, after all, I know what amazing work they do in 6th grade.

"....I just stopped reading them, I didn't finish them. I got bored..."

She puts the book down that she is abandoning and starts to look for a new one.

I love book abandonment. It is something I preach should be a taught skill to all kids, a right even. If you don't like the book, don't read it, it's as simple as that when it comes to building a love of reading. And yet, this year, we have been exposed to a new level of book abandonment. A whole group of kids who never, according to their own recollection, finished a book of their own choosing last year. Not one, not two kids, but many. And they really don't like reading. And the pandemic shutdown didn't help their habits in any way.

Perhaps you have a group like this as well?

And it is not for lack of trying. Many of my students will pick up a book to try, some gladly, some more reluctantly, but many simply don't find that right book. That book that transports them further into the pages than they have ever been. And I see it in my own reading habits that seem to have been altered by the pandemic. My attention span is shortened, my stamina for making it through slower part is nonexistent at times. I look at my own shelves and see more work rather than adventures waiting to happen. Books are no longer calling my name as loudly as my TV or gaming console.

So how do you re-establish, protect or create the joy of reading, when you really need students to experience a whole book from start to finish? When you know that somehow our readers need to stick with a book but you don't want it to be out of force because that typically doesn't change habits long-term but instead just cements the pre-existing tenuous relationship to reading?

In conferring with many of my students, the obvious place to start is their book selection process. When I ask them how they find their next read, many of them confess to only doing a few things, mainly look at the cover and then start it. They grab and go, often a new book every day or every couple of days. They go into it thinking that as long as they grab a book then that is all they need to do right now or that is all the have space for right now. And yet, in this hurried book shopping, often with pressure from the teachers in the room giving limited time comes one of our missed opportunities. When book shopping is not given enough time, the conversations that need to happen with our serial book abandoners have no room to take hold and grow. It doesn't allow them to leisurely browse, to flip through the pages, to consider things like the length of the book, the font, the text size, whether it is a stand alone or a series. They haven't reflected much on their likes or dislikes and what draws them into stay for longer periods of time. And so when their book shopping results in yet another less than stellar book, it just adds further proof to the notion that all books are boring, that reading sucks.

So reading identity is once again where we start. How well do they know themselves as readers? What do they like to read? What is their reading pace? What do they abandon? Is there a pattern? Are they aware of their own habits at all? Have they had pleasurable reading experiences at any point? If yes, what was it? If no, why not? I start by interviewing them and taking notes, then I also have them reflect on themselves as readers and we track this information. I also check in with them more, how are they doing with the book? How are they liking it? Getting kids to recognize that book selection carries many components starts with a reflection of self and where they are on their journey.

Book selection comes next. What are their book shopping habits? We refer to the lesson we did at the beginning of the year and help them book shop. Who are their book people? How do they find books to read? What are their preferences? What is on their to-be-read list already? How do they browse a book to try it on? Thinking of all of this can help them with their next selection. COVID has added an additional layer of complication to this and so we have been browsing books by me pulling them out and acting as concierge of sorts, spreading opened books out in the room so they can read the blurbs, see the font and text size, helping them glance without touching. Opening up our room to more book discussion and recognizing where everyone is on their journey. Slowing down and making space for all of this may seem like wasted time but it is exactly what needs to happen.

Track their abandonment. While all students are expected to write down finished or abandoned titles, we are finding that many of our serial abandoners do not, so we will help them do that. This is so they can start to see their own patterns; when did they abandon a book, why did they abandon it? How far were they? What type of book was it? What strategies did they use before they abandoned it? They can track this on this form or we can simply discuss when we have our reading conferences, This is only something we will do with these serial abandoners, not students who abandon a book once in a while. What can they discover about themselves as they look at this information? I also know that some of our serial book abandoners are not on our radar yet, so this survey will help us identify them so we can help. We often then set goals together, if they are in a pattern to only give a book 20 pages then how long do they want to try this one. Looking at their own patterns and habits help them discover where they can tweak and try new things.

Teach them stamina strategies. Many of our students give up on books the minute they slow down or "get boring" as they would say. They don't see the need for slower parts to keep the story going. They also, often, miss the nuances of these "slower" parts and don't see the importance of them. So a few stamina strategies we will teach are asking why the story is slowing down and paying attention to what they have just figured out about the characters. Another is to skim the "boring" parts for now so they can get back to the story. While this is a not a long-term solution, it does help keep them in the book and hopefully also helps them see that the book does pick up again. They can also switch the way they interact with the text, perhaps they can read these sections aloud, or listen to an audio version for those parts. I have also had kids successfully read two books at the same time, declaring that when one book got boring they simply switched to the other one. This ping-pong between books may seem counterproductive but for some of my most set in their ways abandoners, it changed their reading.

Realize we are in this for the long haul. Too often our gut reaction is to restrict. To select books for the students to read no matter what. To set up rules where they are not allowed to abandon the next book they select or determine how many pages they mus read, and yet, I worry about the longevity of these solutions. What are they really teaching? So instead, we must dedicate the time and patience it takes to truly change these habits. We surround students with incredible books, we book talk recommendations, we give them time to read, and we give them our attention. We continue to let them choose even if we are wondering how developed their abilities to choose the correct book are. Becoming a reader who reads for pleasure, or who at least can get through a book and not hate it, does not always happen quickly. We have to remember this as we try to help students fundamentally change their habits with books. Restricting them in order to help them stick with a book can end up doing more damage than good as students don't get to experience the incredible satisfaction of having selected a book and then actually finishing it. And so realizing too that we may not see the fruits of the labor we invest into our students' reading lives come to fruition is also part of the journey we need to be on. Because recognizing that when a child abandons book after book after book is not a weakness but rather an opportunity to study and reflect further on their journey as readers invites us into this work more delicately. It reminds us at the core that we all carry emotions within us when we read or not read and that for many what may seem as an easy decision or a cop out is instead a way to shield themselves from more negative experiences.

I know that this year, I will once again be transformed as a teacher, I already have been. That these kids that I am lucky enough to teach will push me in ways I haven't been pushed before. My hope, what I really hope happens, is for every child to walk out of room 203 thinking; perhaps reading is not so bad after all. Perhaps there are books in the world for me. A small hope, but a necessary one.
I am excited to be heading out on the road again to be with other educators in-district or at conferences, while continuing my virtual consulting and speaking as well. If you would like me to be a part of your professional development, please reach out. I am here to help.

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When They Abandon Book After Book After Book

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"....well, I didn't finish any books last year..."She turns to me and smiles. "What do you mean?" I ask, not sure I have heard her correctly, after all, I know what amazing work they do in 6th grade. "....I just stopped reading them, I didn't finish them. I got bored..."

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The play about the Salem witch trials presents a moral dilemma, but it's another canonical work centering the white, Christian, male perspective. Here are suggestions for discussion and alternate works.

Arthur Miller's 1953 play The Crucible has long been considered a part of the canon for American literature courses. Students are drawn in by the drama that accompanies hearsay, controversy, and public scandal. This makes sense, because if there is one thing all secondary teachers know, high school is full of all of these things.

Miller's play about the Salem witch trials of 1692-3 was conceived as an allegory for McCarthyism in the United States. Teachers often include the work on syllabi for courses because it parallels studies of American history, which is taught in 10th or 11th grade. The internet is full of lessons about the play's central themes and its historical connections to McCarthyism, mass hysteria, religious persecution, scapegoating, and the ills of living in a patriarchal society.

In June 2018, the DisruptTexts community, through the guidance of its four co-founders (Tricia Ebarvia, Lorena Germán, Dr. Kim Parker, and Julia E. Torres) engaged in a Twitter chat about The Crucible. Through the chat summary, educators can read about the way the community is using the text as an entry point to discuss prison reform, white feminism, and how the work is one of too many pieces of canonical literature that disproportionately center the white, Christian, male perspective. More critical discourse comes through discussing Arthur Miller's caricature of Blackness with the character Tituba, an enslaved woman accused of witchcraft, and the problematic way in which Indigenous people on whose land the play's action takes place, are essentially absent from the narrative.

Though the play presents a moral dilemma, it's one that belongs to some cultural groups, not all, and the almost exclusively all-white cast of characters is strictly divided into men who are inherently good, even when they "exercise bad judgment," and women who are inherently evil.

By teaching The Crucible, educators can introduce students to the McCarthy era and examine propaganda, hearsay, and fake news. However, the question we come back to often in discussion about canonical works and their place in modern society is: What could be used instead?

READ: Weeding Out Racism's Invisible Roots: Rethinking Children's Classics | Opinion

Creating an education system that reflects and responds to students' needs requires educators to de-center and disrupt systems of power and oppression that place their worldview over those of the oppressed and marginalized. Even if a course includes the critical components of examining the racism, sexism, erasure of Native people and centering of a white, male, Christian, patriarchal society, the play is still a work written by a dead, white, male author.

So, what are some alternates and companion reads? Ntozake Shange's play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf allows plenty of space for students to talk about women, specifically Black women, living, loving, and trying to survive in a society that is fundamentally racist and sexist. Reading The Thanksgiving Play and What Would Crazy Horse Do by Larissa FastHorse, students can think about the idea of "wokeness" and how good intentions planted in the soil of ignorance can often grow strange and bitter fruit. Benjamin Benne's Alma (or #nowall) is a commentary on the trials and tribulations that often come between the "American Dream" and those who seek it, as well as the divide between documented and undocumented citizens, especially when these labels are held by people in the same family. Furthermore, Benne's play In His Hands; or the gay christian play explores the intersections of religion and identity. Read more at the New Play Exchange, "the world's largest digital library of scripts by living writers."

In addition, Claudia Rankine's new play Help looks at racial invisibility and white male privilege, and though it isn't available yet for educators to read, the New York Times article, " I Wanted To Know What White Men Thought About Their Privilege, So I Asked," is a fascinating introduction while we wait.

When educators are looking to evaluate the relevance of canonical works and their place in today's classrooms, they can consider these questions:

Whom does your curriculum center? What identities or voices are marginalized or erased altogether?

What are the norms and values of your community? How can you problematize or push back against them in order to expand the worldview of students and young people within it?

What new knowledge will teachers and students need to critically examine themselves and your chosen text?

How will the text you've chosen amplify and center the work of living creators so that students can see themselves?

What will you need to unlearn (what assumptions or understandings can you let go of) in order to make room for new knowledge?

Julia E. Torres is a cofounder of DisruptTexts and a librarian and ELA educator serving students and teachers in the Far Northeast region of Denver Public Schools.

READ: Little House, Big Problem: What To Do with "Classic" Books That Are Also Racist

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The play about the Salem witch trials presents a moral dilemma, but it's another canonical work centering the white, Christian, male perspective. Here are suggestions for discussion and alternate works. Arthur Miller's 1953 play The Crucible has long been considered a part of the canon for American literature courses.

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He Wants to Save Classics From Whiteness. Can the Field Survive? (Published 2021)

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Dan-el Padilla Peralta thinks classicists should knock ancient Greece and Rome off their pedestal — even if that means destroying their discipline.

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This has an overview, examples, templates

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Workshop Protocol to integrate reading/writing in each lesson

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As a follow-up to our November 2017 #NCTEchat, Using Mentor Texts, we asked our social media community to share some of ...

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For years teachers have been looking for ways to improve the academic performance of all students, especially students of color and those from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. While some of these efforts have been successful, many more have had lackluster results.

In the past, we've explored different approaches teachers can take to do a better job of reaching all students: interviews with Dena Simmons, Zaretta Hammond, Pedro Noguera, and Hedreich Nichols, to name a few. In these conversations, we looked at more effective ways of relating to students, strategies for working toward equity outside the classroom, and instructional methods that are more culturally responsive.

This post continues that work with a fresh response to the question of how to better serve diverse students. It's a framework that deals directly with the curriculum side of things, the standards, the actual content we teach in our classrooms. The framework is called Historically Responsive Literacy, and it was developed by Dr. Gholdy Muhammad, a professor, a former middle school educator, and the author of the book Cultivating Genius: An Equity Framework for Culturally and Historically Responsive Literacy, where she makes the case for this framework.

In short, Muhammad believes we're not reaching many of our students, especially Black students, because our curricula and standards are lacking. The emphasis in our current standards is mainly on skills-skills that can be measured easily on standardized tests-and not a whole lot else. Some teachers go beyond the tested material, pushing students to think critically, exploring social emotional competencies, and designing opportunities for inquiry-based learning; unfortunately, the standards themselves don't require those things.

But there was a time in history when a more complete, more human form of "curriculum" did exist, and it energized and inspired its students-all of them Black men and women-to read, write, speak, and publish with the kind of passion and dedication we would want all of our students to have about learning. This curriculum evolved within the Black literary societies of the 19th century. These groups met regularly to read, write about, and discuss a wide range of texts and ideas. Their goals were far loftier than basic skill development or scores on a test, and engagement-to borrow a term we use in modern education-was at an all-time high.

These societies were the inspiration for Muhammad's Historically Responsive Literacy framework, a four-layered pedagogical model that places skills on an equal plane with three other learning pursuits: identity, intellect, and criticality.

The framework was designed with Black students in mind, but it will benefit all students. Muhammad explains it this way: "If we start with Blackness (which we have not traditionally done in schooling) or the group of people who have uniquely survived the harshest oppressions in this country, then we begin to understand ways to get literacy education right for all" (p. 22).

In our interview, she unpacks all four layers of her framework and helps us understand what it looks like to implement them in the classroom. What follows is a summary of our conversation.

First, Two Clarifications

Is Historically Responsive Literacy Just for "Literacy" Teachers?

No. In the book, Muhammad explains that in the past, "literacy was synonymous with education, so although I name 'literacy,' these four pursuits can be used and layered with math, science, ELA, social studies, or physical education/health" (p. 57).

In other words, this is not just a framework for ELA teachers, and in the book, Muhammad explores how to implement HRL in many different subject areas.

Is HRL different from Culturally Responsive Teaching?

Think of HRL as living under the broader umbrella of Culturally Responsive Teaching, which includes relationship-building, instructional strategies, and curriculum. "My work is taking a more historic look back and putting a practical model to the theory," Muhammad says.

The Four Layers of Historically Responsive Literacy

Historically Responsive Literacy is built on four layers, four "learning pursuits" that Muhammad believes should receive equal priority

1. Identity

For students to be fully engaged in school they must first find it relevant, and that starts with identity.

"Identity is who you say you are, who others say you are... (and) who you desire to be," Muhammad says. "I feel like children are trying to make sense of all three areas, and the curriculum and the pedagogy should be an opportunity for students to know themselves."

Muhammad believes this is especially important for children of color because "when we look at representation in children's literature, in society oftentimes, and historically, they are invisible or represented in negative ways. So the classroom needs to be a space for students to affirm and celebrate and validate who they are, so that they know they are enough, so they know they are brilliant and excellent and beautiful. Because society doesn't tell us that all the time."

Along with self-knowledge, the learning pursuit of identity should also include knowledge of others who are different from ourselves. "When students learn about the lives of other people," Muhammad says, "they are less prone to hate, to treat them in harmful or hurtful ways."

What it looks like in the classroom: Start by asking yourself, "How does my teaching and learning help students to learn about themselves and about others?"

From there, plan instruction and write learning goals to satisfy that question. Muhammad gives an example from science. "Some teachers have written it (in language like) Students will understand their environmental identity and their roles and responsibilities regarding the planet. Then in the lesson or unit there are opportunities for students to deeply reflect about how they recycle or (whether) they take care of the earth and the planet and the environment."

Finally, be sure to assess for it. "Kids know that if my teacher values it that she or he or they are going to test it," Muhammad says. "You can assess it in discussion, in a quiz, or a summative kind of test at the end: What are five things you can do to take care of the planet? Or Name five roles that humans play on climate change. So it could be a qualitative or a quantitative assessment, but if you value it enough, you can assess it."

2. Skills

So much of our current curricula and standards already focus on skills, so this part of the framework is nothing new; what's important is to not throw it out when the other three layers are added.

Muhammad explains that this abandonment of skills is a common problem when new approaches to schooling are introduced. "That's a way of thinking that we have to dismantle," she says. "Sometimes we think that when we add identity or when we add voice and freedom of expression, that somehow we don't focus on skills at all. But that's just simply not true. You can have it all. You can have voice and fun and engagement and skills."

What it looks like in the classroom: Teaching skills is more or less what you'd expect typical school content to be, what our current standards are already prescribing. "In math it can be learning equations. In ELA it can be citing textual evidence. In social studies, it can be questioning the source. In physical education it can be learning to play basketball."

So the skills themselves may be taught in whatever way works best for your students. The difference now is that in terms of class time and assessment, their weight will be equal to that of the other three layers.

3. Intellect

Along with identifying the skills students need to acquire, Muhammad urges us to ask What do we want our students to become smarter about?

Because our recent standards have been so skills-driven, knowledge has fallen by the wayside in a lot of schools, and that can strip away the joy that comes from simply learning new things about the world. But the Black Literary Societies of the 19th century valued knowledge as a vital part of a person's development. "So I'm pushing this idea of intellectualism," Muhammad says, "of treating young people as if they are scholars and intellectuals and thinkers."

She sees the loss of intellectualism even in how we prepare and treat teachers. "It's like we're sucking the power out of them by telling them to read a script in a curriculum. We need to go back to teacher as intellectual, teacher as scholar, reserving the field for the brightest among us who are knowledge-seekers."

And Muhammad's definition of intellectualism goes beyond simply gathering facts. "Intellectualism is when you do something with that knowledge, where you apply it somehow, in your discussion, in your activism, in your actions."

What it looks like in the classroom: When developing lessons and units, ask yourself, "How does my teaching and learning help to teach students new knowledge and concepts? New histories, new people, places, and things?"

Muhammad cautions teachers not to confuse skills for knowledge. "You shouldn't say they became smarter about equations or citing textual evidence," she says. "That's not intellect. Those are skills."

4. Criticality

"Criticality is helping students to read, write and think in active ways," Muhammad explains, "as opposed to passive-when you ask a question and there's one correct answer, and you just take it in. We don't want them to be passive consumers of knowledge. We want them to question what they hear on the news."

"We see the word critical and sometimes our minds can go to critical thinking," she continues. "But it's more than just deep and analytical thinking. Criticality is deep and analytical thinking to understand power, equity, anti-racism and other anti-oppressions. This is where we help students to be woke."

This fourth layer is essential "because oppression exists in the world. Period. We want students to leave our schools not contributing to more oppression or wrongdoing and hurt in their relationships and with strangers. We also don't want them to be silent. If they see oppression, we want them to actively respond to it."

What it looks like in the classroom: "With criticality," Muhammad says, "the teacher is asking, How does my teaching and learning help students to understand power, equity, anti-racism and anti-oppression? So (students are) reading, writing, thinking in active ways to understand power, inequality, equity, oppression. They're investigating different standpoints, especially the marginalized point of view, and reading between the lines. In other words, reading for what's not being said and for what's not there.

The brilliance of the framework is revealed when Muhammad explains that the four layers are not separate, but progressive, each one building on the layers that came before it, starting with identity: "They see themselves, they validate themselves, they're learning about other people, which creates a safe space to learn the skills. If you learn the skills, you can learn the intellect. You cannot learn the intellectualism without first having those skills to do so. If you have the intellectualism and that knowledge, you can critique the knowledge. Because of all the layers that came before it, you now have the capacity to disrupt and to dismantle. If you're just woke without the identity and the skills and the intellect, you're not going to be able to make change in ways that you could with those things."

Tough, but Possible

Making this kind of shift-especially if our standards still don't reflect these four layers-will not be an easy task to take on. This concern has been expressed when Muhammad presents her framework to teachers. But despite its challenges, she feels this type of curriculum is exactly what any parent would want for their child.

"It's not a matter or a question of if it's tough," she says. "The question is, is it possible? Everything is tough. And if you had your own child, if you're a parent, parents are going to equally value the beautiful ways that their child loves themselves: identity, the skills they have, the intellect they have, and the social consciousness they have. I don't see parents saying No, let's just talk about my child's reading skills. They talk about their emotional intelligence, they talk about the whole child."

"And that's what we're trying to get to," she says. "This is humanizing work."

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Historically Responsive Literacy: A More Complete Education for All Students

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Based on the work of 19th century Black literary societies, this fresh approach to curriculum focuses on identity, skills, intellect, and criticality.

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Examining the cultural narrative around these ideologies

As with most things in education, context can be everything. A skill taught in isolation from meaningful context, for example, is rarely learned, and often becomes grist for blaming the student for his lack of learning rather than analyzing the teacher's instructional design. Read a mediocre piece of student writing after five pieces of poor writing in a row, and the mediocre piece will glow brightly in comparison. Now take a look at the last decade's intense interest in developing student grit and a growth mindset. What seems so positive an enterprise changes its hue in a different context, even to the point of doing harm.

To be clear, the intent of grit and growth mindset-"stick-to-itiveness," tenacity, self-discipline, resilience-are all positive attributes for students to develop, unless applied, of course, to the pursuit of destructive habits or criminal tasks. Over emphasis on students' degrees of grit and growth mindset as the keys to their academic success, however, can perpetuate harmful stereotypes, racism, and classism. Before we call for faculty-wide grit and growth mindset programs, we are wise to take a moment, dive deeply, and examine the cultural narratives we perpetuate with students and each other when putting so much focus on these two ideologies.

Very Brief Background

For most educators, it was Carol Dweck, Paul Tough, and Angela Duckworth, catalyzed by the emotional intelligence and self-regulation research from Daniel Goleman, who gave grit and growth mindset traction in the modern classroom. Of course, these themes have been around for centuries with Aesop, Horatio Alger, Homer, and Mabel C. Bragg, who wrote the first popular version of The Little Engine that Could. Recently, however, there is new research vitality in these areas, which boosts their credibility, and we've been fixated on these attributes through a political lens in our national debates, particularly as we discuss immigration, housing loans, medical coverage, and tax codes.

In her Brainology post for the National Association for Independent Schools (2008), Stanford professor and psychologist, Carol Dweck, described the essence of her growth mindset research:
"Many students believe that intelligence is fixed, that each person has a certain amount and that's that. We call this a fixed mindset, and ... students with this mindset worry about how much of this fixed intelligence they possess. A fixed mindset makes challenges threatening for students (because they believe that their fixed ability may not be up to the task) and it makes mistakes and failures demoralizing (because they believe that such setbacks reflect badly on their level of fixed intelligence)."
Fixed intelligence students choose to do things that make them look smart, she said, but growth mindset students do things that help them learn, and this dramatically changes their academic trajectories. Dweck added that growth mindset students see, "confronting challenges, profiting from mistakes, and persevering in the face of setbacks," as ways to become smarter, and that it is within their control to achieve higher levels of performance. One of the distinguishing practices that helps teachers discern between the two is whether to ask, "Show of hands: Who got that one right?" when surveying the class after reviewing a homework problem, or to ask instead, "Who had an interesting challenge and was able to resolve it? Let's hear that story."

Just as importantly, according to Dweck, was the way these two groups perceived effort:
"Those with a growth mindset had a very straightforward ... idea of effort-the idea that the harder you work, the more your ability will grow and that even geniuses have had to work hard for their accomplishments. In contrast, the students with the fixed mindset believed that if you worked hard it meant that you didn't have ability, and that things would just come naturally to you if you did. This means that every time something is hard for them and requires effort, it's ... a threat[.] ... Those with growth mindsets reported that, after a setback in school, they would simply study more or study differently the next time. But those with fixed mindsets were more likely to say that they would feel dumb, study less the next time, and seriously consider cheating."
Duckworth and Tough's, "grit," ideology refers to a person's capacity to work toward long term goals and not give in to short term distractions and temptations, thereby building academic and personal stamina, especially when things are challenging for students. Duckworth and Tough declared that grit was the key to student success and should receive overt instruction.

These are very simplistic descriptions of both ideologies, of course; interested educators should read further on both. The focus of this writing, however, is to make educators aware of the rising racist and classist concerns associated with both approaches, which can be uncomfortable.

Cautions

In a recent study from researchers at Michigan State University and Case Western Reserve University (Burgoyne, et al, 2018), two meta-analyses indicated that growth mindset practices didn't have the positive academic impact that schools and commercial programs employing those practices claimed they had. The study used grade-point averages, course grades, course exams, and standardized test scores, such as the SAT, as their indicators of growth mindset's impact on academic achievement, and the strong correlations just weren't there. They did say, however, that when there was an impact, it was stronger with children and adolescents than with adults, and that students who had high risks of failing benefited the most from growth mindset interventions. The authors of the study noted, too, that all researchers in the studies did not control carefully for growth mindset specifically, so more research was needed.

The research presented in Duckworth and Tough's books on grit has also received significant critique, finding it lacking proper research protocols (see Kohn, Thomas, Socol, among others), making their conclusions suspect. These concerns themselves are enough to warrant a closer look, but they are not the most compelling reason to question grit and growth mindset, as there is much more in play here.

Respected professor and writer, Paul Thomas (@plthomasEdD) posted the Burgoyne report last month on a blog called, "Debunked!" I responded to the blog, indicating that posting the piece under the title, "Debunked!" was misleading since it wasn't fully debunked in the research study, and that there were some positives with growth mindset worth incorporating with other elements that help teachers create hope, not blame. Thomas disagreed with me, posting his thoughtful response (see References for the URL).

Here is where he convicts me every time and has done so for more than a decade: Thomas points to the deficit thinking that is inescapable with grit and growth mindset-The idea that students who do not demonstrate white, well-resourced definitions of perseverance with curriculum that may or may not be meaningful to them, in a larger system that is often operated with intentional and unintentional bias against their success, and to act upon those perseverance ideals daily are somehow less disciplined than others, diminished in a way, and that teachers must "fix" what's wrong in them, (i.e., personal character and maturity) and not fix their environments and the controlling narratives of those in power that perpetuate this constant diminished state.

Author and educator Richard Cash agrees, referring to deficit thinking as the, "spoken and unspoken assumptions about a student's lack of self-regulation, ability, or aptitude. The most devastating impact of deficit thinking is when differences-particularly socio-cultural differences-are perceived as inferior, dysfunctional, or deviant ... Typically, schools are designed to 'fix' students who are achieving poorly or misbehaving. However, by blaming students, we exonerate ourselves as the possible cause-using the symptom to overlook the source" (June 2018).

Thomas ties it to his critique of grit/growth mindset: "Both growth mindset and grit ... mistake growth mindset/grit as the dominant or even exclusive quality causing success in student learning (ignoring the power of systemic influences) and then create an environment in which some students (too often black, brown, and poor) are defined in deficit terms-that they lack growth mindset/grit." He adds, "[S]tudents are better served by equity practices couched in efforts to alleviate the systemic forces that shape how they live and learn regardless of their character."

In a separate post, he argues that it is particularly harmful, yet typically American, thinking to assume that students' success and failure is driven solely by individual character and behavior, when actually, so much of any one individual's success or failure is driven by social forces, environment of birth, and systemic biases. He recommends Sendhil Mullainathan's Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much to clarify this point, as do I-It's a thoughtful read.

Thomas and others claim that growth mindset/grit programs, "disproportionately target racial minorities and impoverished students, reinforcing that most of the struggles within these groups academically are attributable to deficits in those students ... linked to race and social class ... [which] perpetuate race and class stereotypes, and as a result, work against inclusive pedagogy and culturally relevant pedagogy" (Thomas, 2018).

Thomas promotes author and educator Paul Gorski's assertion that, "Equity literate educators ... reject deficit views that focus on fixing marginalized students rather than fixing the conditions that marginalize students, and understand the structural barriers that cheat some people out of the opportunities enjoyed by other people."

At the Equity Literacy Institute, Gorski is clear: "We must avoid being lulled by popular 'diversity' approaches and frameworks that pose no threat to inequity-that sometimes are popular because they are no real threat to inequity." (December 9, 2017) Among Gorski's equity principles in that post are these statements:
"'Equity' approaches that fail to directly confront inequity play a significant role in sustaining inequity. Educational outcome disparities are not the result of deficiencies in marginalized communities' cultures, mindsets, or grittiness, but rather of inequities. Equity initiatives focus, not on fixing marginalized people, but on fixing the conditions that marginalize people."
Gorski reminds us that, "Compared with schools with low percentages of students experiencing poverty, schools with high percentages of students experiencing poverty are more likely to have: less access to school nurses and college counselors;

more limited access to computers and the Internet;

inadequate learning facilities such as science labs;

more teacher vacancies and substitute teachers;

more teachers unlicensed in their subject areas;

less rigorous and student-centered curricula;

inoperative or dirty student bathrooms;

less access to preventive healthcare;

serious teacher turnover problems;

higher student-to-teacher ratios;

insufficient classroom materials;

less access to stable housing;

fewer extracurricular programs;

fewer experienced teachers;

lower teacher salaries;

larger class sizes; and

less funding.

He adds pointedly, "So, explain to me how we can meaningfully respond to the impacts of these conditions by completely ignoring these injustices while 'fixing' the mindsets, cultures, or grittiness of students or families experiencing poverty."

"Allostatic Load" refers to the, "cost of chronic exposure to elevated or fluctuating endocrine or neural responses resulting from chronic or repeated challenges that the individual experiences as stressful." ( www.sciencedirect.com/topics/immunology-and-microbiology/allostatic-load) Many teachers are unaware of the negative effects that such allostatic loads, i.e. ceaseless stressors such as the ones listed in Gorski's list above, inflict on our bodies and minds, especially in individuals who live in poverty, are challenged by an alcoholic parent, or who people of color bearing the hourly burden of proving worth, full rights under the law, educating whites about their perspectives, are legitimate/trusted shoppers, and are of benign intent.

In his blog, however, educator/writer, Ira Socol, writes, "[H]igh allostatic load factors do not mean that a child comes to school 'disadvantaged.' Rather, their advantages are simply not respected nor exploited by the school. The damaged children described by the "young Peter's" narration are all brilliant, all incredible observers of their worlds, and are all incredibly capable." (2013) Talking about grit specifically, he adds, "[W]hat Tough and his friends want these kids to possess is willing compliance, not "grit" nor "character."

Author, Alfie Kohn, affirms Cash, Thomas, and Socol in his critique of growth mindset:
"The message of [focusing on the mindsets of individuals] has always been to adjust yourself to conditions as you find them because those conditions are immutable; all you can do is decide on the spirit in which to approach them.... Social psychologists use the term "fundamental attribution error" to mean paying so much attention to personality and attitudes that we overlook how profoundly the social environment affects what we do and who we are... Why, for example, do relatively few young women choose to study or work in the fields of math and science? Is it because of entrenched sexism and "the way the science career structure works"? Well, to someone sold on Dweck's formula, the answer is no: It's "all a matter of mindset." We need only "shift widespread perceptions over to the 'growth mindset'"-that is, to the perceptions of girls and women who are just trapped by their own faulty thinking. This is similar to the perspective that encourages us to blame a "culture of poverty" in the inner city rather than examine economic and political barriers-a very appealing explanation to those who benefit from those barriers and would rather fault their victims for failing to pull themselves up by their mindset." (2015)
In a separate critique of grit, Kohn notes research weaknesses and skewed priorities in Duckworth's work, wondering here about the merits of her goals:

"Duckworth reported that [National Spelling Bee contestants] performed better in that competition if they were higher in grit, 'whereas spellers higher in openness to experience-defined as preferring using their imagination, playing with ideas, and otherwise enjoying a complex mental life-perform[ed] worse.' She also found that the most effective preparation strategy was, 'solitary deliberate practice activities' rather than, say, reading books. ... If enjoying a complex mental life (or reading for pleasure) interferes with performance in a one-shot contest to see who can spell more obscure words correctly-and if sufficient grittiness to spend time alone memorizing lists of words helps to achieve that goal-this is regarded as an argument in favor of grit. Presumably it also argues against having a complex mental life or engaging in leisure reading.

"Driving the study of student performance conducted by Duckworth was ... [her] belief that underachievement isn't explained by structural factors-social, economic, or even educational. Rather, [she] insisted it should be attributed to the students themselves and their, 'failure to exercise self-discipline.'"

Poignantly, Kohn poses, "The most impressive educational activists are those who struggle to replace a system geared to memorizing facts and taking tests with one dedicated to exploring ideas.... By contrast, those enamored of grit look at the same status quo and ask: How can we get kids to put up with it?"

What Does All This Mean for Conscientious Educators of Middle School Students?

This is not a call to abandon all efforts to help students develop those positive tenets of grit and growth mindset programs, such as self-discipline, voice, responsibility for one's choices, personal tenacity, initiative, authenticity, and self-efficacy. Heck, this description alone is probably 90% of a middle school teacher's daily job description.

Instead, this is a call to recognize that we are very different people depending on our circumstances, and that those circumstances, some of which are not actually in our control, yet are renewed each year by unintentional and intentional bias in those with power and influence, significantly affect our capacity to act upon the advice and teaching provided. If we were a member of a suspect class in our community and impoverished or even slightly so, wondering how to pay the medical bills, get food on the table, get our brother, Micky, off meth, get Mom out of her depression, and pay the rent, we might not remember to get those 100 index cards for Monday's class or have the capacity to start the four week project on the day it is assigned. And no, we might not be as willing to take creative risks in learning or take one train, two buses, and a complex transfer to get across town for the study group on Thursday. And then to be blamed for our lack of gumption?

It's also a call to recognize that students who are challenged by poverty or being people of color in biased communities don't lack grit or tenacity. They have plenty of it; that's how they survive. We lose all credibility by harping on it as the root to a student's problems. What these students lack are the resources, time, and support needed to maneuver, extend energy, and find hope in the instructional demands placed on them. Socol writes,
"[A]ll the children living and learning in relative affluence are afforded slack by the accidents of their birth: "Slack" is the term identified by Mullainathan and Shafir as the space created by abundance that allows any person access to more of her/his cognitive and emotional resources ... this is what kids need. Slack ... the moments when necessity is not the sole driver. 'The cost [of 'scarcity'-the primary element in 'grit theory'] is an undue focus on the necessity at hand, which leads to a lack of curiosity about wider issues, and an inability to imagine longer-term consequences. The effect of this scarcity-generated 'loss of bandwidth' has catastrophic results ... ' The Guardian writes in a book review on the topic." (2014)
And in this audit of our own thinking, perhaps we can do as Thomas suggests, "[S]et aside the assumption that low student achievement is primarily caused by a lack of effort and engagement as well as that high student achievement is a consequence of mostly effort and engagement," and that we resist the idea that, " ... life for black/brown and poor people is going to be hard so we need to make them extra 'gritty' to survive and excel."

To these ideas, I add these specific responses:

Get to really know students and their neighborhoods. Yes, visit homes, attend community events, get informed, and watch more than one news channel or source for more information on challenges to their communities. Let's not make it the student's responsibility to teach us. And, with whatever system works for us, let's remember their personal and family milestones, as they share them with us: birthdays, Quinceañera, bar/bat mitzvahs, Tae-Kwan-do competition, band/Lego/robotic/forensic competition, new graphic comic designed, big sister enlisted in the navy, brother finally out of jail, dog/cat recently died, did four pull-ups in gym class, tried out for the school play.

Accept and honor the full individual the student really is, not categorize him in terms of the degree to which he satisfies our description of successful older students from our own cultures. Let's choose to see difference from us and our culture as strength, not something less than preferred, and let these individuals know they make good company. Be genuinely interested in their cultures and hobbies as you can, and find ways to invite that collected knowledge into weekly learning. Students will engage if they feel they are contributing. How might our interactions with students and lesson designs be turning students into passive recipients rather than active creators? Instead of being about sense-making and the delivery of knowledge to students, let's make sure our lessons transition students' learning into personal processing and meaning-making as well.

At every turn, give students proof that hope is warranted. Are there word choices, policies, practices, and attitudes from us that come across to students as adversarial ("Gotcha!"), or do we come across in all things as advocates for them as individuals? There are common sense things that engender such hope: Allowing re-do's on both formative and summative assessments for full credit, encouraging divergent thinking and problem-solving with no academic penalty when they don't turn out as planned (only analysis of went awry, then starting over with our full support), discipline done in private, recoverability after cheating or plagiarizing, modeling and facilitating constructive responses to failures and mistakes, zero sarcasm directed at students or situations, complete erasure of earlier indicators of incompetency from later and more current reports of competency (no more averaging of grades), no holding grudges, cognitive coaching instead of judging, teacher follow-through on promises made, student reflective analysis of choices (He made this decision, and it had this result; is that what he wanted to achieve?), daily, visible proof that we will not humiliate the student nor will we let him humiliate himself, and visible proof weekly that progress is being made ("You once here, but look where you are now!).

Let's also do an equity, class, and racial audit of our attitudes towards students from cultures different from our own to see them as fully dimensionalized individuals, worth knowing. And let's do the same audit with all audio-visuals in our presentations and classrooms: Students of different colors, religions, cultures, sexual orientations, and socio-economic status portrayed doing thoughtful, competent things, representing the very best of humanity. If it's in sight, it's in mind.

Actively investigate and dismantle those inequities that our students face daily, "Changing the conditions," as Gorski says above, "that marginalize people." We can start with equal access laws in our community that limit some students from getting an education or working due to pregnancy or immigration status. Limit or remove learning experiences that require students to purchase materials. We can work on equal pay laws for teenage girls and women in the community, as well as fund girls' sports to the same level we do boys' sports. We can make sure every single student has the necessary technology and in and out of school access to a reliable Internet Service Provider, if it's required by the schools. We can provide child care for all parent meetings. We can provide students interested in taking advanced courses with additional tutoring supports to make a successful go of them, and we can formally teach reading to middle schoolers who may have not been able to learn to read when they were younger. Finally, we can confront and end the bias in colleagues, students, and parents about career and tech ed courses that aren't necessarily associated with university-bound students but are just as intellectual demanding and personally maturing and meaningful as more traditional courses, if not more so.

We can avoid automatically blaming our students' inattention in class or lack of academic performance on their personal character flaws as associated in our minds with people of that color, culture, religion, or socio-economic status. We can stop judging students of a certain color, religion, culture, or socio-economic status as less likely to be capable or interested in academic work, simply due to perceived stereotypes of people with that skin color, culture, religion or socio-economic status. One of the greatest gifts we give students is to honor what they bring to learning's table as valuable, not dismiss their circumstance as irrelevant, or to respond punitively when their responses to extended learning demands are different than how those without so many challenges respond to those same demands.

We can provide real skill training to all students in middle school on executive function skills and personal self-efficacy. It's the nature of the age, not the class or race, to need these learning experiences at exactly this age. This means we dismantle all practices related to grades and grading to teach self-discipline, timeliness, task analysis, and impulsivity/distractibility control

Finally, let's train all teachers in cognitive coaching and descriptive feedback, which both emphasize reflection on decisions, their impact, setting goals, not invoking ego through judgment, active engagement in learning, self-monitoring, being flexible, taking responsibility, and revision from new perspective. You know, that hope stuff.

While growth mindset and grit have many thoughtful advocates we all respect deeply, looking at each ideology's research, principles, and practices with a critical eye is warranted. Considering the critic's concerns with each one regarding race, inequity, and classism is reasonable. With so much dividing us these days politically, culturally, and economically, we can come together here and pull the camera back on these topics to reveal their larger context and have informed discussions. With such perspective, the call to get it right becomes even more urgent.

References

Cash, R.M. (2018). Reframing deficit thinking: How to change perceptions for the better. Retrieved from https://freespiritpublishingblog.com/2018/06/18/
reframing-deficit-thinking-how-to-change-perceptions-for-the-better/

Dweck, C.S. (2008). Brainology. Retrieved from https://www.nais.org/magazine/independent-school/
winter-2008/brainology/

Gorski, P.C. & Swalwell, K. (2015). Equity literacy for all. Educational Leadership, 72(6), 34-40.

Gorski, P.C. (2018, May 16). If you are still on the "grit" or "mindset of poverty" bandwagon, consider this. Facebook post, retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/pgorski/posts/10160292488845534

Kohn, A. (2014). GRIT: A skeptical look at the latest educational fad," adapted from The myth of the spoiled child, Independent School, Retrieved from https://www.alfiekohn.org/article/grit/

Kohn, A. (2015). The perils of "growth mindset" education: Why we're trying to fix our kids when we should be fixing the system, Retrieved from https://www.salon.com/2015/08
/16/the_education_fad_thats_hurting_our_kids_what_you_need
_to_know_about_growth_mindset_theory_a

nd_the_harmful_lessons_it_imparts/

Mullainathan, S., & Shafir, E. Scarcity: Why having too little means so much. Picador.

Sisk, V.F., Burgoyne, A.P., Sun, J., Butler, J. L., & Macnamara, B.N. (2018). "To what extent and under which circumstances are growth mind-sets important to academic achievement? Two meta-analyses." Psychological Science, 29(4), 549-571. doi: 10.1177/0956797617739704

Socol, I. (2014) Grit, Part 2 - Is "slack" what kids need?" Retrieved from http://speedchange.blogspot.com
/2014/01/grit-part-2-is-slack-what-kids-need.html

Socol, I. (2013). Paul Tough v. Peter Høeg - or - The advantages and limits of 'research.' Retrieved from http://speedchange.blogspot.com/2013/12/
paul-tough-v-peter-heg-or-advantages.html

Thomas, P. L. (2018, May 26). More on rejecting growth mindset, grit. Retrieved from https://medium.com/@plthomasedd/
more-on-rejecting-growth-mindset-grit-52e5eb47374e

Thomas, P.L. (2017, September 17). Rejecting growth mindset and grit at three levels. Retrieved from https://radicalscholarship.wordpress.com/2017/09/21/
rejecting-growth-mindset-and-grit-at-three-levels/

Thomas, P. L. (2016, May 11). Rejecting "grit" while embracing effort, engagement. Retrieved from https://radicalscholarship.wordpress.com/2016/05/11/
rejecting-grit-while-embracing-effort-engagement/

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Grit and Growth Mindset: Deficit Thinking? - AMLE

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While growth mindset and grit have many thoughtful advocates, looking at each ideology's research, principles, and practices with a critical eye is warranted, particularly in regards to race, inequity, and classism. Rick Wormeli pulls the camera back on these topics to reveal their larger context.

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Introducing: Nice White Parents (Published 2020)

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A new five-part series about building a better school system, and what gets in the way. New episodes of “Nice White Parents” are available here, brought to you by Serial Productions and The New York Times.

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Teaching Great Writing One Sentence at a Time (Published 2019)

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An English teacher tells us how she uses mentor sentences from The New York Times to teach grammar application, vocabulary, style and more.

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Ta-Nehisi Coates on words that don't belong to everyone | We Were Eight Years In Power Book Tour

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A flexible program for middle and high schools based on the real-world writing found in newspapers, from editorials and reviews to personal narratives and analysis essays.

Update, Sept. 8, 2020: We have announced our 2020-21 writing curriculum.
The New York Times publishes more than 1,400 articles and Opinion pieces every week, on topics ranging from science to sports, politics to pop culture, foreign affairs to food and fashion. They're written by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists here at The Times, but also by outside contributors, from authors like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, statesmen like President Barack Obama and artists like Meek Mill and Angelina Jolie.

How can teachers take this incredible breadth of material and use it with their students? Our mission at the Learning Network for over two decades has been to help you do just that. But this year, we're taking that mission a bit further.

The writing curriculum detailed below is both a road map for teachers and an invitation to students. For teachers, we've pulled together the many writing-related features we already offer, added new ones, and organized them all into seven distinct units. Each focuses on a different genre of writing that you can find not just in The Times but also in all kinds of real-world sources both in print and online.

But our main goal is to offer young people a global audience - to, in effect, invite them to add their voices to the larger conversation at The Times about issues facing our world today. Through the opportunities for publication woven throughout each unit, we hope to encourage students to go beyond simply being media consumers to become media creators themselves.

So have a look, and see if you can find a way to include any of these opportunities in your curriculum this year, whether to help students tell stories, express opinions, investigate ideas, analyze art or make connections. We can't wait to hear what your students have to say!

Writing prompts to help students try out related skills.

We publish two writing prompts every school day, and we also have thematic collections of more than 1,000 prompts published in the past. Your students might consider responding to these prompts on our site and using our public forums as a kind of "rehearsal space" for practicing voice and technique.

Daily opportunities to practice writing for an authentic audience.
If a student submits a comment on our site, it will be read by Times editors, who approve each one before it gets published. Submitting a comment also gives students an audience of fellow teenagers from around the world who might read and respond to their work. Each week, we call out our favorite comments and honor dozens of students by name in our Thursday " Current Events Conversation " feature.

Guided practice with mentor texts.

Each unit we publish will be accompanied by Times models of the genre. And each mentor text we showcase will include short exercises that spotlight an element of the genre, show students how it works, and invite them to practice that same move in their own work.

Teaching ideas and webinars.
Our webinars offer practical how-to's featuring Learning Network editors as well as teachers who use The Times in their classrooms. Our lesson plans (limited to five per month for nonsubscribers) offer teaching ideas and links to additional resources in The Times and elsewhere.

A contest that can act as a culminating project.

Over the years we've heard from many teachers that our contests serve as final projects in their classes, and this curriculum came about in large part because we want to help teachers " plan backwards " to support those projects.

All contest entries are considered by experts, whether Times journalists, outside educators from partner organizations, or professional practitioners in a related field. Winning means being published on our site, and, perhaps, in the print edition of The New York Times.

Below are the seven units we will offer in the 2019-20 school year. The personal narrative unit link is live so you can get started, and we'll add the links for the other six units throughout the year.

September-October

While The Times is known for its award-winning journalism, the paper also has a robust tradition of publishing personal essays on topics like love, family, life on campus and navigating anxiety. And on our site, our daily writing prompts have long invited students to tell us their stories, too. We have a new collection of 550 Prompts for Narrative and Personal Writing that do just that.

In this unit we draw on many of these resources, plus some of the 1,000-plus personal essays from the Magazine's long-running Lives column, to help students find their own "short, memorable stories" and tell them well. Our related mentor-text lessons will help them practice skills like writing with voice, using details to show rather than tell, structuring a narrative arc and more.

As a final project, we invite students to send finished essays to our new Personal Narrative Essay Contest, the first contest of the school year.

November-DECEMBER

Helen Deng, 14, reviewed the TV show "The Good Place." She writes, "The plot may be unpredictable, but its overarching theme of ethics becomes consistently more important and insightful in this age." Credit... Jeff Minton for The New York Times

Book reports and literary essays have long been staples of language arts classrooms, but this unit encourages students to learn how to critique art in other genres as well.

In our new Mentor Texts series, we will feature the work of Times critics to help students understand the elements of a successful review. We'll also spotlight the work of teenage contest winners from previous years.

As a culminating project, we invite students to send us their own reviews of a book, movie, restaurant, album, theatrical production, video game, dance performance, TV show, art exhibition or any other kind of work The Times critiques.

December-January

In this unit, we invite students to write about the connections they see between what they're studying in school and the world outside the classroom.

As we write in the annual announcement for our related contest:
So you're studying the Civil War - or Shakespeare, or evolution or "The Bluest Eye." Why? What does it have to do with your life and the lives of those around you? Why should you remember it once you've turned in that paper or taken that test?
Winners of this contest from past years have written about similarities between the #MeToo movement and Newton's first two laws of motion; climate change and a concerto; social media apps and George Orwell's "1984"; and more.

To support this year's contest, we will be publishing a mentor-text guided practice that spotlights writing from The Times and from our past contest winners that teenagers can learn from and emulate.

January-February

This unit invites students to take any STEM-related discovery, process or idea that interests them and write about it in a way that makes it understandable and engaging for a general audience.

The short pieces in the Trilobites column of the Science Times, which unearth "fascinating morsels of science" each week, are our chief models to demonstrate how skilled writers can elucidate complex topics.

At the end of the unit, we invite teenagers to submit their own writing to a new STEM writing contest to show us what they've learned.

February-March

The demand for evidence-based argumentative writing is now woven into school assignments across the curriculum and grade levels, and you couldn't ask for better real-world examples than what you can find in The Times Opinion section.

This unit will, like our others, be supported with writing prompts, mentor-text lesson plans, webinars and more. We'll also focus on the winning teenage writing we've received over the six years we've run our related contest.

At a time when media literacy is more important than ever, we also hope that our annual Student Editorial Contest can serve as a final project that encourages students to broaden their information diets with a range of reliable sources, and learn from a variety of perspectives on their chosen issue.

Update: March, 2020: To help students working from home this spring, we now have an Argumentative Unit for Students Doing Remote Learning.

April-May

Our writing units so far have all asked for essays of one kind or another, but this spring contest invites students to do what journalists at The Times do every day: make multimedia to tell a story, investigate an issue or communicate a concept.

Our annual podcast contest gives students the freedom to talk about anything they want in any form they like. In the past we've had winners who've done personal narratives, local travelogues, opinion pieces, interviews with community members, local investigative journalism and descriptions of scientific discoveries.

This year we will help support the contest with great examples from The Times and around the web, as well as with mentor texts by teenagers that offer guided practice in understanding elements and techniques.

June-August

At a time when teachers are looking for ways to offer students more "voice and choice," this unit, based on our annual summer contest, offers both.

Every year since 2010 we have invited teenagers around the world to add The New York Times to their summer reading lists and, so far, nearly 60,000 have. Every week for 10 weeks, we ask participants to choose something in The Times that has sparked their interest, then tell us why. At the end of the week, judges from the Times newsroom pick favorite responses, and we publish them on our site.

And we've used our new Mentor Text feature to spotlight the work of past winners, explain why newsroom judges admired their thinking, and provide four steps to helping any student write better reader-responses.

Because this is our most open-ended contest - students can choose whatever they like, and react however they like - it has proved over the years to be a useful place for young writers to hone their voices, practice skills and take risks. Join us!

As always, we welcome your feedback and suggestions. And if your school or district is interested in learning more about how to use our resources to teach writing, let us know. Our email is LNFeedback@nytimes.com.

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Teach Writing With The New York Times: A Free School-Year Curriculum in 7 Units (Published 2019)

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A flexible program for middle and high schools based on the real-world writing found in newspapers, from editorials and reviews to personal narratives and analysis essays. Update, Sept. 8, 2020: We have announced our 2020-21 writing curriculum.

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What separates NC State University from other schools? The same thing that connects it to every corner of North Carolina: NC State Extension. Working hand-in-hand with our partners at N.C. A&T and 101 local governments, we conduct groundbreaking research that addresses real-world issues in communities across the state.

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Listen to this post as a podcast:
When I worked with student teachers on developing effective lesson plans, one thing I always asked them to revise was the phrase "We will discuss."
We will discuss the video. We will discuss the story. We will discuss our results.
Every time I saw it in a lesson plan, I would add a note: "What format will you use? What questions will you ask? How will you ensure that all students participate?" I was pretty sure that We will discuss actually meant the teacher would do most of the talking; He would throw out a couple of questions like "So what did you think about the video?" or "What was the theme of the story?" and a few students would respond, resulting in something that looked like a discussion, but was ultimately just a conversation between the teacher and a handful of extroverted students; a classic case of Fisheye Teaching.

The problem wasn't them; in most of the classrooms where they'd sat as students, that's exactly what a class discussion looked like. They didn't know any other "formats." I have only ever been familiar with a few myself. But when teachers began contacting me recently asking for a more comprehensive list, I knew it was time to do some serious research.

So here they are: 15 formats for structuring a class discussion to make it more engaging, more organized, more equitable, and more academically challenging. If you've struggled to find effective ways to develop students' speaking and listening skills, this is your lucky day.

I've separated the strategies into three groups. The first batch contains the higher-prep strategies, formats that require teachers to do some planning or gathering of materials ahead of time. Next come the low-prep strategies, which can be used on the fly when you have a few extra minutes or just want your students to get more active. Note that these are not strict categories; it's certainly possible to simplify or add more meat to any of these structures and still make them work. The last group is the ongoing strategies. These are smaller techniques that can be integrated with other instructional strategies and don't really stand alone. For each strategy, you'll find a list of other names it sometimes goes by, a description of its basic structure, and an explanation of variations that exist, if any. To watch each strategy in action, click on its name and a new window will open with a video that demonstrates it.

Enjoy!
a.k.a. Chat Stations
Basic Structure: Stations or posters are set up around the classroom, on the walls or on tables. Small groups of students travel from station to station together, performing some kind of task or responding to a prompt, either of which will result in a conversation.

Variations: Some Gallery Walks stay true to the term gallery, where groups of students create informative posters, then act as tour guides or docents, giving other students a short presentation about their poster and conducting a Q&A about it. In Starr Sackstein's high school classroom, her stations consisted of video tutorials created by the students themselves. Before I knew the term Gallery Walk, I shared a strategy similar to it called Chat Stations, where the teacher prepares discussion prompts or content-related tasks and sets them up around the room for students to visit in small groups.
a.k.a. Values Continuum, Forced Debate, Physical Barometer, This or That
Basic Structure: A statement that has two possible responses-agree or disagree-is read out loud. Depending on whether they agree or disagree with this statement, students move to one side of the room or the other. From that spot, students take turns defending their positions.

Variations: Often a Philosophical Chairs debate will be based around a text or group of texts students have read ahead of time; students are required to cite textual evidence to support their claims and usually hold the texts in their hands during the discussion. Some teachers set up one hot seat to represent each side, and students must take turns in the seat. In less formal variations (which require less prep), a teacher may simply read provocative statements students are likely to disagree on, and a debate can occur spontaneously without a text to refer to (I call this variation This or That in my classroom icebreakers post). Teachers may also opt to offer a continuum of choices, ranging from "Strongly Agree" on one side of the room, all the way to "Strongly Disagree" on the other, and have students place themselves along that continuum based on the strength of their convictions.

Basic Structure: Students are divided into 4 groups. Three of these groups are assigned to represent specific points of view. Members of the fourth group are designated as "provocateurs," tasked with making sure the discussion keeps going and stays challenging. One person from each group (the "speaker") sits in a desk facing speakers from the other groups, so they form a square in the center of the room. Behind each speaker, the remaining group members are seated: two right behind the speaker, then three behind them, and so on, forming a kind of triangle. From above, this would look like a pinwheel. The four speakers introduce and discuss questions they prepared ahead of time (this preparation is done with their groups). After some time passes, new students rotate from the seats behind the speaker into the center seats and continue the conversation.

Variations: When high school English teacher Sarah Brown Wessling introduced this strategy in the featured video (click Pinwheel Discussion above), she used it as a device for talking about literature, where each group represented a different author, plus one provocateur group. But in the comments that follow the video, Wessling adds that she also uses the strategy with non-fiction, where students represent authors of different non-fiction texts or are assigned to take on different perspectives about an issue.
a.k.a. Socratic Circles
Basic Structure: Students prepare by reading a text or group of texts and writing some higher-order discussion questions about the text. On seminar day, students sit in a circle and an introductory, open-ended question is posed by the teacher or student discussion leader. From there, students continue the conversation, prompting one another to support their claims with textual evidence. There is no particular order to how students speak, but they are encouraged to respectfully share the floor with others. Discussion is meant to happen naturally and students do not need to raise their hands to speak. This overview of Socratic Seminar from the website Facing History and Ourselves provides a list of appropriate questions, plus more information about how to prepare for a seminar.

Variations: If students are beginners, the teacher may write the discussion questions, or the question creation can be a joint effort. For larger classes, teachers may need to set up seminars in more of a fishbowl-like arrangement, dividing students into one inner circle that will participate in the discussion, and one outer circle that silently observes, takes notes, and may eventually trade places with those in the inner circle, sometimes all at once, and sometimes by "tapping in" as the urge strikes them.
a.k.a. Affinity Diagramming
Basic Structure: Give students a broad question or problem that is likely to result in lots of different ideas, such as "What were the impacts of the Great Depression?" or "What literary works should every person read?" Have students generate responses by writing ideas on post-it notes (one idea per note) and placing them in no particular arrangement on a wall, whiteboard, or chart paper. Once lots of ideas have been generated, have students begin grouping them into similar categories, then label the categories and discuss why the ideas fit within them, how the categories relate to one another, and so on.

Variations: Some teachers have students do much of this exercise-recording their ideas and arranging them into categories- without talking at first. In other variations, participants are asked to re-combine the ideas into new, different categories after the first round of organization occurs. Often, this activity serves as a good pre-writing exercise, after which students will write some kind of analysis or position paper.
a.k.a. Speed Dating
Basic Structure: Students form two circles, one inside circle and one outside circle. Each student on the inside is paired with a student on the outside; they face each other. The teacher poses a question to the whole group and pairs discuss their responses with each other. Then the teacher signals students to rotate: Students on the outside circle move one space to the right so they are standing in front of a new person (or sitting, as they are in the video). Now the teacher poses a new question, and the process is repeated.

Variations: Instead of two circles, students could also form two straight lines facing one another. Instead of "rotating" to switch partners, one line just slides over one spot, and the leftover person on the end comes around to the beginning of the line. Some teachers use this strategy to have students teach one piece of content to their fellow students, making it less of a discussion strategy and more of a peer teaching format. In fact, many of these protocols could be used for peer teaching as well.

Basic Structure: Another great idea from Sarah Brown Wessling, this is a small-group discussion strategy that gives students exposure to more of their peers' ideas and prevents the stagnation that can happen when a group doesn't happen to have the right chemistry. Students are placed into a few groups of 4-6 students each and are given a discussion question to talk about. After sufficient time has passed for the discussion to develop, one or two students from each group rotate to a different group, while the other group members remain where they are. Once in their new group, they will discuss a different, but related question, and they may also share some of the key points from their last group's conversation. For the next rotation, students who have not rotated before may be chosen to move, resulting in groups that are continually evolving.

Basic Structure: Two students sit facing each other in the center of the room; the remaining students sit in a circle around them. The two central students have a conversation based on a pre-determined topic and often using specific skills the class is practicing (such as asking follow-up questions, paraphrasing, or elaborating on another person's point). Students on the outside observe, take notes, or perform some other discussion-related task assigned by the teacher.

Variations: One variation of this strategy allows students in the outer circle to trade places with those in the fishbowl, doing kind of a relay-style discussion, or they may periodically "coach" the fishbowl talkers from the sidelines. Teachers may also opt to have students in the outside circle grade the participants' conversation with a rubric, then give feedback on what they saw in a debriefing afterward, as mentioned in the featured video.

Basic Structure: One student assumes the role of a book character, significant figure in history, or concept (such as a tornado, an animal, or the Titanic). Sitting in front of the rest of the class, the student responds to classmates' questions while staying in character in that role.

Variations: Give more students the opportunity to be in the hot seat while increasing everyone's participation by having students do hot seat discussions in small groups, where one person per group acts as the "character" and three or four others ask them questions. In another variation, several students could form a panel of different characters, taking questions from the class all together and interacting with one another like guests on a TV talk show.
a.k.a. Pyramid Discussion
Basic Structure: Students begin in pairs, responding to a discussion question only with a single partner. After each person has had a chance to share their ideas, the pair joins another pair, creating a group of four. Pairs share their ideas with the pair they just joined. Next, groups of four join together to form groups of eight, and so on, until the whole class is joined up in one large discussion.

Variations: This structure could simply be used to share ideas on a topic, or students could be required to reach consensus every time they join up with a new group.

Whereas the other formats in this list have a distinct shape-specific activities you do with students-the strategies in this section are more like plug-ins, working discussion into other instructional activities and improving the quality and reach of existing conversations.

One of the limitations of discussion is that rich, face-to-face conversations can only happen when all parties are available, so we're limited to the time we have in class. With a tool like Voxer, those limitations disappear. Like a private voice mailbox that you set up with just one person or a group (but SOOOO much easier), Voxer allows users to have conversations at whatever time is most convenient for each participant. So a group of four students can "discuss" a topic from 3pm until bedtime-asynchronously-each member contributing whenever they have a moment, and if the teacher makes herself part of the group, she can listen in, offer feedback, or contribute her own discussion points. Voxer is also invaluable for collaborating on projects and for having one-on-one discussions with students, parents, and your own colleagues. Like many other educators, Peter DeWitt took a while to really understand the potential of Voxer, but in this EdWeek piece, he explains what turned him around.

A backchannel is a conversation that happens right alongside another activity. The first time I saw a backchannel in action was at my first unconference: While those of us in the audience listened to presenters and watched a few short video clips, a separate screen was up beside the main screen, projecting something called TodaysMeet (update: TodaysMeet has shut down. Use YoTeach! instead.) It looked a lot like those chat rooms from back in the day, basically a blank screen where people would contribute a few lines of text, the lines stacking up one after the other, no other bells or whistles. Anyone in the room could participate in this conversation on their phone, laptop, or tablet, asking questions, offering commentary, and sharing links to related resources without ever interrupting the flow of the presentations. This kind of tool allows for a completely silent discussion, one that doesn't have to move at a super-fast pace, and it gives students who may be reluctant to speak up or who process their thoughts more slowly a chance to fully contribute. For a deeper discussion of how this kind of tool can be used, read this thoughtful overview of using backchannel discussions in the classroom by Edutopia's Beth Holland.
a.k.a. Accountable Talk
Talk moves are sentence frames we supply to our students that help them express ideas and interact with one another in respectful, academically appropriate ways. From kindergarten all the way through college, students can benefit from explicit instruction in the skills of summarizing another person's argument before presenting an alternate view, asking clarifying questions, and expressing agreement or partial agreement with the stance of another participant. Talk moves can be incorporated into any of the other discussion formats listed here.

Whole Brain Teaching is a set of teaching and classroom management methods that has grown in popularity over the past 10 years. One of WBT's foundational techniques is Teach-OK, a peer teaching strategy that begins with the teacher spending a few minutes introducing a concept to the class. Next, the teacher says Teach!, the class responds with Okay!, and pairs of students take turns re-teaching the concept to each other. It's a bit like think-pair-share, but it's faster-paced, it focuses more on re-teaching than general sharing, and students are encouraged to use gestures to animate their discussion. Although WBT is most popular in elementary schools, this featured video shows the creator of WBT, Chris Biffle, using it quite successfully with college students. I have also used Teach-OK with college students, and most of my students said they were happy for a change from the sit-and-listen they were used to in college classrooms.

An oldie but a goodie, think-pair-share can be used any time you want to plug interactivity into a lesson: Simply have students think about their response to a question, form a pair with another person, discuss their response, then share it with the larger group. Because I feel this strategy has so many uses and can be way more powerful than we give it credit for, I devoted a whole post to think-pair-share; everything you need to know about it is right there.

TWO MORE YOU'LL LOVE

Since writing this post, I have learned about two more discussion strategies that teachers are finding to be incredibly effective and powerful for getting students to talk, especially about books and other texts:

This protocol has students come up with their own Thoughts, lingering Questions, and Epiphanies from an assigned reading. Teachers who have used this method say it has generated some of the richest conversations they have ever heard from students!

This strategy places students into one-on-one conversations, getting them to learn each others' names better and create a track record of what they talked about. Excellent for classes where you want to assess for discussion and help students get more comfortable with each other.

So what else do you have? I would like to think this is a pretty complete list, but I'm sure more strategies are out there. If you use a discussion strategy that's not mentioned here, please share it below.

Come back for more.
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The Big List of Class Discussion Strategies

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Here they are: 15 formats for structuring a class discussion to make it more engaging, more organized, more equitable, and more academically challenging.

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Two States. Eight Textbooks. Two American Stories. (Published 2020)

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We analyzed some of the most popular social studies textbooks used in California and Texas. Here’s how political divides shape what students learn about the nation’s history.

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How much time is spent in your classroom or school on instructions versus instruction? Let's do some math. If a middle or high school teacher spends 10 minutes every 50-minute period on instructions for 180 days, then 36 full class periods were spent on delivering directions. If an elementary teacher spends 5 minutes explaining what will happen during the day, 10 minutes explaining what students will do in their centers or stations, and then another 5 minutes reviewing various tasks during math, science, and social studies, this would result in about 45 minutes per day (or more) on instructions, which equates to 22 days each school year. Individually, these minutes don't seem like a lot, but when you add them up, providing instructions consumes valuable minutes dedicated to tasks other than learning.

Of course, students deserve to know what is expected of them and it is necessary to spend some time explaining tasks and expectations. If all the instructions were totally understood by students on the first go-around, then this might be a good investment of time. But how often do students ask clarifying questions right after the teacher has just finished explaining a task? And how many students need additional information about the instructions as they complete a task, activity, or assignment?

Doug once observed a 3rd grade class in which the teacher spent 13 minutes explaining what students would do at each of the learning stations. She didn't start these instructions until four minutes after the students returned from recess. These were all new tasks that the students had not completed before. When the teacher released them to start working, Marco asked which center he was supposed to go to, Jiovanni raised his hand because he did not understand the vocabulary task, and Karina wandered around the room looking for her journal. By the time the students started the tasks, 17 minutes had elapsed.

Yet in another class, the teacher immediately went into action when the students entered the classroom. She reminded them of their tasks, all of which were familiar. She asked them to move to their stations and begin work. She then called four students by name and had them meet her at her desk. The students were engaged in their learning task within two minutes of entering the room.

To maximize the amount of time students have for learning, highly accomplished teachers, like the one in the example just described, do three things differently. First, they start on time. Second, they use every minute allocated for instruction. And third, they rely on a set of instructional practices that students know and understand.

1. Start on Time

This seems easy enough in principle, but it can be hard to implement. In a study of high school teachers' use of time, Doug documented that students spent 17 percent of their instructional minutes waiting for something to happen (Fisher, 2009). Teachers spent valuable time taking attendance, organizing materials, or just waiting for the bell to ring after they'd finished teaching. Students had learned that it was OK to be late-"nothing happens for the first five minutes at least," more than one student told Doug.

Highly accomplished teachers know that every minute is valuable and thus start as soon as possible. These teachers demonstrate a sense of urgency for learning, and their students notice it. Based on our observations, there are a number of tasks that teachers can apply to ensure that minutes are used well, even if they have to take attendance. For example:

In a 5th grade classroom, students start each learning block with a "do now" task or problem. The teacher circulates around the room looking over students' shoulders as they complete the task so she knows what to model when they come back together. She identifies errors, based on their work, to focus her instruction.

In an algebra classroom, students start with a challenge task. They can work individually or collaboratively to solve the problem written on the board, which is based on previously learned content but applied in a way that is somewhat unfamiliar to them.

Following lunch, a class of 2nd grade students know to always get out their writing journals and look to the image displayed on the whiteboard. Their teacher uses this time to develop students' descriptive writing.

These are samples of tools that we have observed teachers using to ensure that students are engaged in learning tasks from the start. It is easy for busy educators to forget about these types of routines. We could all use a little reminder to ensure that students are not just waiting around, but rather are engaged in instruction.

2. Soak Up Every Minute

Sometimes lessons run short. It happens to all of us. But when it does and there aren't any plans, instructional time is squandered. Educator Madeline Hunter had a solution for this. She coined the term "sponge activity" to describe "learning activities that soak up precious time that would otherwise be lost" (Hunter, 2004, p. 117). She believed that sponge activities should (1) focus on review of previously learned material, and (2) provide distributed practice opportunities. Accomplished teachers have a collection of strategies at their disposal that they can use to "sponge up" any remaining minutes. For instance:

In one kindergarten classroom, when there are a few minutes remaining in a lesson, a teacher leads students in familiar rhyming songs, letter games, and practice at blending sounds.

In a 3rd grade class, students play "Stump the Teacher" by asking her questions about the content, which can include spelling certain words. The trick here is that the student must be able to furnish an answer. Because it is a familiar sponge routine, students have questions prepared in advance to use when there are a few extra minutes.

In their biology class, a group of students plays "Survivor" at the end of each period. Some days, students write down three new vocabulary words they learned, other days they focus on three things they learned in general, and still other days they jot down questions they have related to the content. When they have their three items ready, each student stands up. The teacher calls on students at random, and they share one item and cross it off their list. There are no repeats, so students have to listen to know which of their items has already been shared. The last person to have an idea is the survivor for the day.

In a middle school history class, students practice identifying states with the abbreviations used by the postal service. The teacher has laminated copies of a map of the United States at the ready and students use markers to write down the abbreviations. They've turned this into a competition and like to race each other to see who can identify the most states correctly in one minute. The mathematics teacher heard about this practice and liked it so much that she has her students complete as many math facts as possible in a game she calls "a minute of math madness."

Again, these are examples of tools that teachers have used to ensure that time is spent learning. There are countless other options that meet Hunter's definition of a "sponge activity," and all of them are a better use of time than students packing backpacks and waiting to be dismissed.

3. Establish Routines and Use Them

There is no one right way to teach and there are no instructional strategies that guarantee all students will learn. Having said that, it is important to note that changing instructional routines too often is confusing for students. In addition, valuable minutes have to be spent letting students know what is expected of them. This is all too common in elementary classrooms when teachers introduce new centers or stations. In an effort to "keep it fresh," they change the tasks weekly or biweekly. As a result, students rarely get good at them.

Consider the time savings when a 2nd grade teacher introduced a listening station and then used it every day, changing the content but not the task. She set expectations for the listening station and invested time up-front so that students would understand how to use the equipment and the products expected of them. But then she never had to do that again. For weeks, her students engaged with content at the listening station without any additional time spent on the instructions for completing tasks.

Similarly, consider the high school teacher whose students needed practice with reading for information. He developed a routine that involved students logging into the learning management system, choosing an article, reading it, answering a few comprehension questions, and then responding in writing. He modeled each step in the process and demonstrated what success looked like. Then he had his students practice while he observed them. He noted and addressed some errors. The whole thing took about 25 minutes. Now every day, students know that they are expected to read for information and write from the source. The novelty is not in the task, but rather in the readings.

In some cases, routines are established schoolwide and thus, once taught, can be used by others. The teachers at an elementary school we are familiar with agreed on three collaborative learning routines per grade level. They agreed that every teacher at a given grade level would teach his or her students how to apply the three new routines and that students would have extensive practice with these routines. Teachers could teach other routines, but these three were nonnegotiable. For example, the kindergarten team agreed to use the following routines:

Because students learned and practiced these three routines, the kindergarten team at this school found that instruction was seamless, even when there was a substitute. Further, the media specialist and art teacher were able to use these routines as well. Over time, the team realized that the first day of 1st grade next year would be more efficient because their students already understood ways for collaborating, regardless of which teacher they had.

In another example, the teachers at Health Sciences High in San Diego agreed to five collaborative routines that all students would know. Of course, teachers could use other routines, but doing so would waste valuable time on instructions. They identified:

The point is not to replicate these specific routines, but rather to consider the impact of routines on the balance between instruction and instructions. When students know what is expected of them, they are more likely to focus on what they are being taught rather than how they are being taught.

Deceptively Simple

We recognize that there are lots of bright and shiny ideas for improving student learning outcomes. The ideas in this article may seem simple, but they are invaluable. Skilled teachers understand that time is precious and that decisions about how to use time reflect their values and expectations. Spending too much time on instructions, or, worse, having students wait for something to happen, does not send the message that learning is important or that we value every allotted minute. Highly accomplished teachers understand that they can use time to their advantage and that their students will learn more as a result.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
How much time is spent in your classroom or school on instructions versus instruction? Let's do some math. If a middle or high school teacher spends 10 minutes every 50-minute period on instructions for 180 days, then 36 full class periods were spent on delivering directions. If an elementary teache

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
How much time is spent in your classroom or school on instructions versus instruction? Let's do some math. If a middle or high school teacher spends 10 minutes every 50-minute period on instructions for 180 days, then 36 full class periods were spent on delivering directions. If an elementary teacher spends 5 minutes explaining what will happen during the day, 10 minutes explaining what students will do in their centers or stations, and then another 5 minutes reviewing various tasks during math, science, and social studies, this would result in about 45 minutes per day (or more) on instructions, which equates to 22 days each school year. Individually, these minutes don't seem like a lot, but when you add them up, providing instructions consumes valuable minutes dedicated to tasks other than learning.

Of course, students deserve to know what is expected of them and it is necessary to spend some time explaining tasks and expectations. If all the instructions were totally understood by students on the first go-around, then this might be a good investment of time. But how often do students ask clarifying questions right after the teacher has just finished explaining a task? And how many students need additional information about the instructions as they complete a task, activity, or assignment?

Doug once observed a 3rd grade class in which the teacher spent 13 minutes explaining what students would do at each of the learning stations. She didn't start these instructions until four minutes after the students returned from recess. These were all new tasks that the students had not completed before. When the teacher released them to start working, Marco asked which center he was supposed to go to, Jiovanni raised his hand because he did not understand the vocabulary task, and Karina wandered around the room looking for her journal. By the time the students started the tasks, 17 minutes had elapsed.

Yet in another class, the teacher immediately went into action when the students entered the classroom. She reminded them of their tasks, all of which were familiar. She asked them to move to their stations and begin work. She then called four students by name and had them meet her at her desk. The students were engaged in their learning task within two minutes of entering the room.

To maximize the amount of time students have for learning, highly accomplished teachers, like the one in the example just described, do three things differently. First, they start on time. Second, they use every minute allocated for instruction. And third, they rely on a set of instructional practices that students know and understand.

1. Start on Time

This seems easy enough in principle, but it can be hard to implement. In a study of high school teachers' use of time, Doug documented that students spent 17 percent of their instructional minutes waiting for something to happen (Fisher, 2009). Teachers spent valuable time taking attendance, organizing materials, or just waiting for the bell to ring after they'd finished teaching. Students had learned that it was OK to be late-"nothing happens for the first five minutes at least," more than one student told Doug.

Highly accomplished teachers know that every minute is valuable and thus start as soon as possible. These teachers demonstrate a sense of urgency for learning, and their students notice it. Based on our observations, there are a number of tasks that teachers can apply to ensure that minutes are used well, even if they have to take attendance. For example:

In a 5th grade classroom, students start each learning block with a "do now" task or problem. The teacher circulates around the room looking over students' shoulders as they complete the task so she knows what to model when they come back together. She identifies errors, based on their work, to focus her instruction.

In an algebra classroom, students start with a challenge task. They can work individually or collaboratively to solve the problem written on the board, which is based on previously learned content but applied in a way that is somewhat unfamiliar to them.

Following lunch, a class of 2nd grade students know to always get out their writing journals and look to the image displayed on the whiteboard. Their teacher uses this time to develop students' descriptive writing.

These are samples of tools that we have observed teachers using to ensure that students are engaged in learning tasks from the start. It is easy for busy educators to forget about these types of routines. We could all use a little reminder to ensure that students are not just waiting around, but rather are engaged in instruction.

2. Soak Up Every Minute

Sometimes lessons run short. It happens to all of us. But when it does and there aren't any plans, instructional time is squandered. Educator Madeline Hunter had a solution for this. She coined the term "sponge activity" to describe "learning activities that soak up precious time that would otherwise be lost" (Hunter, 2004, p. 117). She believed that sponge activities should (1) focus on review of previously learned material, and (2) provide distributed practice opportunities. Accomplished teachers have a collection of strategies at their disposal that they can use to "sponge up" any remaining minutes. For instance:

In one kindergarten classroom, when there are a few minutes remaining in a lesson, a teacher leads students in familiar rhyming songs, letter games, and practice at blending sounds.

In a 3rd grade class, students play "Stump the Teacher" by asking her questions about the content, which can include spelling certain words. The trick here is that the student must be able to furnish an answer. Because it is a familiar sponge routine, students have questions prepared in advance to use when there are a few extra minutes.

In their biology class, a group of students plays "Survivor" at the end of each period. Some days, students write down three new vocabulary words they learned, other days they focus on three things they learned in general, and still other days they jot down questions they have related to the content. When they have their three items ready, each student stands up. The teacher calls on students at random, and they share one item and cross it off their list. There are no repeats, so students have to listen to know which of their items has already been shared. The last person to have an idea is the survivor for the day.

In a middle school history class, students practice identifying states with the abbreviations used by the postal service. The teacher has laminated copies of a map of the United States at the ready and students use markers to write down the abbreviations. They've turned this into a competition and like to race each other to see who can identify the most states correctly in one minute. The mathematics teacher heard about this practice and liked it so much that she has her students complete as many math facts as possible in a game she calls "a minute of math madness."

Again, these are examples of tools that teachers have used to ensure that time is spent learning. There are countless other options that meet Hunter's definition of a "sponge activity," and all of them are a better use of time than students packing backpacks and waiting to be dismissed.

3. Establish Routines and Use Them

There is no one right way to teach and there are no instructional strategies that guarantee all students will learn. Having said that, it is important to note that changing instructional routines too often is confusing for students. In addition, valuable minutes have to be spent letting students know what is expected of them. This is all too common in elementary classrooms when teachers introduce new centers or stations. In an effort to "keep it fresh," they change the tasks weekly or biweekly. As a result, students rarely get good at them.

Consider the time savings when a 2nd grade teacher introduced a listening station and then used it every day, changing the content but not the task. She set expectations for the listening station and invested time up-front so that students would understand how to use the equipment and the products expected of them. But then she never had to do that again. For weeks, her students engaged with content at the listening station without any additional time spent on the instructions for completing tasks.

Similarly, consider the high school teacher whose students needed practice with reading for information. He developed a routine that involved students logging into the learning management system, choosing an article, reading it, answering a few comprehension questions, and then responding in writing. He modeled each step in the process and demonstrated what success looked like. Then he had his students practice while he observed them. He noted and addressed some errors. The whole thing took about 25 minutes. Now every day, students know that they are expected to read for information and write from the source. The novelty is not in the task, but rather in the readings.

In some cases, routines are established schoolwide and thus, once taught, can be used by others. The teachers at an elementary school we are familiar with agreed on three collaborative learning routines per grade level. They agreed that every teacher at a given grade level would teach his or her students how to apply the three new routines and that students would have extensive practice with these routines. Teachers could teach other routines, but these three were nonnegotiable. For example, the kindergarten team agreed to use the following routines:

Because students learned and practiced these three routines, the kindergarten team at this school found that instruction was seamless, even when there was a substitute. Further, the media specialist and art teacher were able to use these routines as well. Over time, the team realized that the first day of 1st grade next year would be more efficient because their students already understood ways for collaborating, regardless of which teacher they had.

In another example, the teachers at Health Sciences High in San Diego agreed to five collaborative routines that all students would know. Of course, teachers could use other routines, but doing so would waste valuable time on instructions. They identified:

The point is not to replicate these specific routines, but rather to consider the impact of routines on the balance between instruction and instructions. When students know what is expected of them, they are more likely to focus on what they are being taught rather than how they are being taught.

Deceptively Simple

We recognize that there are lots of bright and shiny ideas for improving student learning outcomes. The ideas in this article may seem simple, but they are invaluable. Skilled teachers understand that time is precious and that decisions about how to use time reflect their values and expectations. Spending too much time on instructions, or, worse, having students wait for something to happen, does not send the message that learning is important or that we value every allotted minute. Highly accomplished teachers understand that they can use time to their advantage and that their students will learn more as a result.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
How much time is spent in your classroom or school on instructions versus instruction? Let's do some math. If a middle or high school teacher spends 10 minutes every 50-minute period on instructions for 180 days, then 36 full class periods were spent on delivering directions. If an elementary teache

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Idea in Brief

The Challenge

Managers today are bombarded with calls to give feedback-constantly, directly, and critically. But it turns out that telling people what we think of their performance and how they can do better is not the best way to help them excel and, in fact, can hinder development.

The Reality

Research shows that, first, we aren't the reliable raters of other people's performance that we think we are; second, criticism inhibits the brain's ability to learn; and, third, excellence is idiosyncratic, can't be defined in advance, and isn't the opposite of failure. Managers can't "correct" a person's way to excellence.

The Solution

Managers need to help their team members see what's working, stopping them with a "Yes! That!" and sharing their experience of what the person did well.

The debate about feedback at work isn't new. Since at least the middle of the last century, the question of how to get employees to improve has generated a good deal of opinion and research. But recently the discussion has taken on new intensity. The ongoing experiment in "radical transparency" at Bridgewater Associates and the culture at Netflix, which the Wall Street Journal recently described as "encouraging harsh feedback" and subjecting workers to "intense and awkward" real-time 360s, are but two examples of the overriding belief that the way to increase performance in companies is through rigorous, frequent, candid, pervasive, and often critical feedback.

A version of this article appeared in the March-April 2019 issue of Harvard Business Review.

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Why Feedback Rarely Does What It's Meant To

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For years managers have been encouraged to candidly praise and criticize just about everything workers do. But it turns out that feedback does not help employees thrive. First, research shows that people can't reliably rate the performance of others: More than 50% of your rating of someone reflects your characteristics, not hers.

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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: The danger of a single story

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Our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice -- and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.

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Think of a time in your life when you felt most successful or engaged as a reader. Maybe it was a favorite book, or a topic you researched, a book club, or positive feedback you received from a teacher. When you remember this experience, try to name what conditions, exactly, made you feel successful.

Recently, a group of teachers created this list:

Positive feedback

High interest books

Choice of what to read

Plenty of time to read at your own pace

Conversations about a book

Seeing other people react

Connecting with a character

Feeling just the right amount of challenge

Books that were page-turners

Researching a topic for a real-life purpose, solving a real-life problem

Having a comfy spot

The above list generated from teachers' own experience complements what researcher Brian Cambourne calls the Eight Conditions of Learning. These conditions of learning undergird the reading workshop, and are integral in helping students become lifelong readers.

In reading workshop, you might consider the conditions of learning in this way:

Immersion

Surround children with high interest, quality literature.

Demonstration

Model reading and writing for children; read-aloud a variety of texts, write notes and lists, stories and all kinds of texts together.

Engagement

Set up a low-risk environment so that children can see themselves as readers and writers. Make books and other materials easily accessible for children.

Expectations

Make expectations realistic, meeting students where they are along a progression of stages of literacy learning.

Responsibility

Giving students choice over what they read, the materials they use, and the strategies they use to read hands responsibility over to children.

Approximation

Create an environment where children can make mistakes and try out new learning.

Practice

Provide plenty of time for children to read and write often and engage in lots of conversation.

Response

Provide meaningful feedback that children can learn from.

You can find out much more about Cambourne's Conditions of Learning straight from him, at his website.

Reading workshop provides a framework in which we can create the conditions students need to become lifelong readers. This Wednesday join host Brooke Geller to chat about ways you can foster a lifelong love of reading.

Each Wednesday night at 7:30 pm EST the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project hosts a Twitter chat using the hashtag #TCRWP.

Not on Twitter? Take Heinemann's free Twitter for Educators course here.

Elizabeth Moore, literacy consultant and coauthor of two books in the Units of Study for Teaching Writing and Units of Study for Teaching Reading series, has been a first grade teacher, fifth grader teacher, literacy coach, and lead staff developer at TCRWP. She has also served as an adjunct instructor in the Department of Curriculum and Teaching at Teachers College, Columbia University. Currently she lives in the mountains of northern Vermont where she finds adventure around every corner.

She can be found writing on Two Writing Teachers and on Twitter at @BethMooreSchool

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Reading Workshop: The Key to Building Lifelong Readers

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Think of a time in your life when you felt most successful or engaged as a reader. Maybe it was a favorite book, or a topic you researched, a book club, or positive feedback you received from a teacher. When you remember this experience, try to name what conditions, exactly, made you feel successful.

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by Heinemann Fellow Julie Kwon Jee

Looking back on my high school experience, I believe there could have been a lot more diverse texts. I believe that a lot of the texts I read were just the traditional texts that students have been reading for years and years.
-Alyson S., former student

Thank you for bringing these issues to the department's attention. Change is hard and when things have been entrenched for hundreds of years, it is even harder.
-Michael R., colleague

My twelfth graders dutifully called out the names of some of the texts they had read in previous years for English class as I wrote them down one by one: The Great Gatsby, Hamlet, Maus, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Crucible, Of Mice and Men, Lord of the Flies, And Then There Were None, Romeo and Juliet, Fahrenheit 451, Farewell to Manzanar. The titles filled the whiteboards around my classroom. I thought of the books we would be reading during the 2019-2020 school year-The Oedipus Cycle, Macbeth, Everything I Never Told You, The Road, and No Exit. One title by an author of color on the boards. One title by an author of color on my list. I felt frustrated and overwhelmed.

On paper, it looked like progress. The intent behind my Heinemann action research project seemed to have merit-diversify the summer reading lists and the curriculum for my twelve AP Literature students. When I looked at the list in June 2018, out of forty-six titles, only five were by authors of color. White heterosexual voices dominated while BIPOC (Black, indigenous, people of color) and/or LGBTQ+ authors were rare. My seniors were eager to work on improving this ratio, so over the course of the 2018-2019 school year (as documented in our Instagram account), they moved outside their comfort zones and chose books by and about diverse authors and characters. I, along with my wonderful school librarian and an amazing local bookseller, did numerous book talks. In the classroom, my students worked on independent reading journey projects and book stacks ( student sample 1 and student sample 2) inspired by NCTE's Build Your Stack posts. We audited our classroom library and took note of the voices that were featured and those that needed to be represented better. The feedback was enthusiastic, and in June 2019, the final results for my first year looked promising-we expanded the summer reading titles by almost 50 percent and added diverse authors across every grade level. The new lists looked good. I felt good.

But then I didn't.

Student body (as of 2017):

High school faculty (as of 2017):

The vast majority of the books that my colleagues and I teach are written by white authors. To a certain extent, this reflects our demographics. As of 2017, 74 percent of the student body at my high school identify as white; twelve percent identify as Hispanic, eight percent identify as Black, four percent identify as Asian, two percent identify as multiracial, and less than one percent identify as Native Pacific Islander or Native American. Ninety-five percent of the teachers at my school identify as white. The changes in the summer reading lists represent a positive shift toward introducing and validating diverse perspectives, but these documents are merely glanced at by students (often under duress) during the break and then put away for the remainder of the school year. It was easy for me and my seniors to celebrate the addition of these titles, but what lasting changes were accomplished? The change is incremental, when our approach and its effect should really be seismic in nature.

After numerous conversations and hours spent listening to fellow educators in my department and on Twitter through phenomenal chats including #DisruptTexts, #TheBOOKCHAT, and #ClearTheAir, I knew that a deeper dive into the issues of the centering of white supremacy and the lack of representation of LGBTQ+/BIPOC identities was and is necessary. There also needs to be a synchronous look at our own identities and how they have affected who we are and how we approach and study literature. I know this will be an ongoing process for me, as I continue to learn and fail and work to move past my biases about what literature is. I am not alone in this. I know many of my colleagues are making efforts to expand their classroom libraries and read titles that reflect experiences they may not be familiar with. I know many teachers in my school are exploring which factors (i.e., racial identity, socioeconomic upbringing, etc.) have shaped their teaching selves and their approaches with their students.

In my classroom, my next step is to help my students continue to dig deeper and analyze how their identities have affected their literary experiences through reflective work like autoethnographies and honest discussions. Instead of focusing on "results," this school year I'm taking a step back and revisiting my research question: In what ways does a continuous exploration of identity via literature and personal reflection increase engagement and encourage students to become active participants in choosing the books they read both inside and outside their classrooms? I'm realizing the continuous nature of this journey is not something that can be confined to a school year or even two. We will need to delve into who we are, examine the factors that shaped us, and dissect our understanding of the relationship between the two. Only then will we realize the significance of the works we are bringing into our reading lives.

In a survey about the importance of diverse texts from this past November, a response from one of my current seniors struck a chord. It reminded me that thoughtful actions have a powerful impact:

A classroom should be a place where a student can feel safe and recognized for what they do and who they are, whether they like learning or not. Having curriculum emphasize diversity, in this case through texts, is an extremely easy and powerful way to accomplish this. If a student was reading something or being taught something even part of them can identify with, it makes them feel not alone, special even. This would also provide less empathetic students different POV's. If this is put into action from a young age, I believe it will eliminate a big population of the school that generates hate on students who are "different." Empathy is necessary, and including diverse texts will achieve this.
-Kyle D., current student

Over the course of my action research project, my students, like Kyle, have taught me how vital it is to not only bring diverse voices into our classrooms but to understand why they're necessary. Yes, my students and I will benefit from having diverse books in my classroom library, my curriculum, and the summer reading list, but we also need to put in the work to understand the framework that created a mostly homogenous literary canon in the first place. It is only then we can start to dismantle the prejudices and biases that narrow our view of literature and the work we do in our classrooms. As we continue our journey, we need to remember that reading not only reflects and sustains our humanity, but it is also an invitation to center and validate voices that are unfamiliar to us, which, in turn, combats ignorance and hate.

Follow our progress on the Heinemann blog and on Instagram @mrs_jee_ponders.

Julie Kwon Jee is a National Board Certified Teacher dedicated to creating safe classroom environments where students flourish and become lifelong readers and writers. She currently teaches literature, writing composition, and AP English Literature at Arlington High School in LaGrangeville, NY. Julie serves on several teams and committees in her school district, is a founding organizer at EdCamp Hudson Valley, and is a member of the Hudson Valley Writing Project (part of the National Writing Project). Julie is a pioneer in integrating technology and digital tools into literacy learning, and in 2013 was nominated as one of 40 top innovators in education by the Center for Digital Education. Through her robust range of work, Julie seeks to lead by empowering others and bringing equity into the classroom. Follow Julie on Twitter @mrsjjee

***

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Looking Beyond the Surface: Examining Why We Read What We Read

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by Heinemann Fellow Julie Kwon Jee Looking back on my high school experience, I believe there could have been a lot more diverse texts. I believe that a lot of the texts I read were just the traditional texts that students have been reading for years and years.-Alyson S., former student Thank you for bringing these issues to the department's attention.

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Poetry and lessons for children of all ages by Amy Ludwig VanDerwater for classrooms or homeschools to teach literacy and writing workshop instruction

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The Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Festival (July 23 - July 25, 2021) is virtual this year and we are convening for 3 days of arts education and performance.

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Welcome to Poetry 180. Poetry can and should be an important part of our daily lives. Poems can inspire and make us think about what it means to be a member of the human race. By just spending a few minutes reading a poem each day, new worlds can be revealed.

Poetry 180 is designed to make it easy for students to hear or read a poem on each of the 180 days of the school year. I have selected the poems you will find here with high school students in mind. They are intended to be listened to, and I suggest that all members of the school community be included as readers. A great time for the readings would be following the end of daily announcements over the public address system.

Listening to poetry can encourage students and other learners to become members of the circle of readers for whom poetry is a vital source of pleasure. I hope Poetry 180 becomes an important and enriching part of the school day.

Billy Collins
Former Poet Laureate of the United States
Learn more about Billy Collins

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Poetry 180 | Poet Laureate Projects | Poet Laureate | Poetry & Literature | Programs | Library of Congress

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In an effort to make poetry an active part in the daily experience of American high school students, this project, launched in 2002 during Billy Collins' tenure as Poet Laureate, gives students a chance to read or listen to a poem on each of the 180 days of the school year.

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Poetry, social justice

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Read the latest updates about Split This Rock's ongoing response to COVID-19/coronavirus, including important information regarding Poetry Festival 2020 and local programming.

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Not just history at all!

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"I believe in the power of Facing History."

-Durias D., Facing History Alum

"I went to a Facing History workshop and it opened my eyes."

-Tareeq R., Educator

Facing History & Ourselves
uses lessons of history
to challenge teachers
and their students
to stand up to bigotry and hate.

Facing History & Ourselves is more than our name. It is an active and continuous process that calls on each of us to connect the choices of the past to those we face today. To build a more just and equitable future, we must face our history in all its complexity, Are you ready to face history with us?

Learn how you can experience Facing History

Facing History has thousands of research-based resources and professional learning events to support Social Studies and English Language Arts education.

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And hopefully, they will always remember what happened to us and make sure that it won't happen again.

Sonia Weitz, Holocaust survivor and poet

Sign up to download the PDF version of our textbook, Holocaust and Human Behavior.

Facing History students are 94% more likely than their peers to report that their class motivated them to learn.

92% of Facing History teachers agree that Facing History helps their students stand up for what they believe even when others disagree.

91% of elective teachers agree or strongly agree that their Facing History course promoted their students' abilities to ground reading, writing, and speaking in evidence from text.

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Facing History & Ourselves uses lessons of history to challenge teachers and their students to stand up to bigotry and hate.

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Podcast: Five minutes of poetry every weekday

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The Slowdown podcast hosted by Major Jackson delivers a different way to see the world - through poetry

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Why Read at All?

The more students read, the better their skills get. Kids who develop a personal reading habit acquire a host of verbal skills that nonreaders do not, including comprehension, fluency, and vocabulary. On this point, federal standards ( Common Core Standards in English and Language Arts) and academic experts ( Columbia University Teachers College Reading and Writing Project) and teachers' organizations ( National Council of Teachers of English) agree: "The more one reads, the better one reads. The more one reads, the more knowledge of words and language one acquires. The more one reads, the more fluent one becomes as a reader. The more one reads, the easier it becomes to sustain the mental effort necessary to comprehend complex texts." Likewise research at Carnegie Mellon concludes that good readers are not "born" but "made."

Reading seems to change the physical wiring of a person's brain. It's also a way to build the mental structures that allow us to exercise top-down control over our own attention. See Maryanne Wolfe's Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (New York: Harper, 2007) or Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011). More startlingly, a 2014 Emory University study suggests that a person's brain increases physical connectivity after reading even a single novel. For more on literacy and changes in the physiology of the brain, see the latest from Scientific American.

Deep reading is an active mental exercise, not a passive one ( Washington University study).

Reading, particularly of literary fiction, seems to increase empathy. See The New School study. Science Magazine reports that reading improves Theory of Mind, which is the understanding that other people hold beliefs and desires different from your own, and authors like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie remind us that stories are a key way of understanding one another's complicated lives. Maryanne Wolf makes this argument beautifully in her new book Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World. When we lose reading, we lose the "cognitive patience" to enter someone else's world.

Lastly, the budding field of Bibliotherapy maintains that reading is a key factor of mental well-being, that the ability to construct nuanced stories, including our own story, is a part of creating identity, part of creating the self. The American Library Association offers several resources on the topic. Or you can read these overviews from The New Yorker and the BBC ("Can You Read Yourself Happy?"). You can also read this lyrical and compelling article from the fabulist novelist Salman Rushdie. For a more in-depth discussion, see Janet Alsup's A Case for Teaching Literature in the Secondary School: Why Reading Fiction Matters in an Age of Scientific Objectivity and Standardization (Routledge 2015).

Choice Matters

Kids get hooked on reading by reading books they love. It's about choice. How do we know?

For the best summary on leisure reading, (also known as recreational reading, pleasure reading, free voluntary reading, and independent reading), see the statement from the National Council of Teachers of English or the 2014 position paper from the International Literacy Association. The key researchers on this topic are the linguist Stephen D. Krashen (University of Southern California) and the educator Richard Allington (University of Tennessee). Dr. Krashen documents the benefits of "junk reading" in Junk Food is Bad for You, But Junk Reading is Good for You and in a plethora of research on his website or in his books Free Voluntary Reading (Libraries Unlimited) and The Power of Reading: Insights from the Research (Libraries Unlimited). Dr. Allington recommends Six elements of effective reading instruction [that] don't require much time or money-just educators' decision to put them in place.

Earlier, in 2000, Bernice E. Cullinan reviewed the available research on independent reading in Independent Reading and School Achievement, commissioned by the US Department of Education. She concluded that the volume of free reading students do "has consistently been found to relate to achievement in vocabulary, reading comprehension, verbal fluency, and general information. Students' reading achievement correlates with success in school and the amount of independent reading they do."

For more research on the importance of reading for pleasure, see Dr. Allington's book What Really Matters for Struggling Readers: Designing Research-Based Programs (Allyn and Bacon) or B. Moss's Creating Lifelong Readers Through Independent Reading, or the classic 1988 study by Anderson, Wilson and Fielding that correlates independent reading with achievement in a startling graph. NCTE authors Wilhelm and Smith share a more recent study about pleasure reading. We also recommend Revisiting Silent Reading: New Directions for Teachers and Researchers (International Reading Association) by E.H. Hiebert and D. R. Reutzel and The Voice of Evidence in Reading Research by P. McCardle and V. Chhabra (Paul Brookes).

In the Classroom

Quantity matters as much as choice. Teachers College Reading and Writing Project recommends that students should be reading 35-45 minutes a day. Independent reading helps students become more facile readers and contributes to overall school achievement, especially when schools set aside time for it in class. In one inspiring article, reading expert Penny Kittle suggests that high school students should "inhale books at a rate of 12-25 a semester." And educators Kylene Beers and Bob Probstshow a direct correlation between reading time and class percentile in this startling chart from their new book Disruptive Thinking: Why How We Read Matters. Students of all ages understand the concept of personal practice when it comes to music or sports. The very same principles apply to reading (and writing): if we expect every reading session to be assessed, then our students cannot possibly be doing enough of it. And, as with music and sports, students are most motivated when they find joy in the activity.

Most states' ESSA standards, as well as Common Core before that, do not include a required reading list but instead allow schools and teachers to make their own decisions based upon example texts. Traditional approaches may emphasize reading difficult texts with the close mentorship of teachers, but other experts are advocating for a balance between the books students read with the class and those they read on their own. Teachers College Reading and Writing Project recommends students read books they can understand on their own, "with at least 96% fluency, accuracy, and comprehension." Reading a book that's too challenging doesn't necessarily increase fluency. Students benefit more from reading books they can understand than they do from being tutored in books that are too hard for them.

The challenge educators face is twofold: even those students who love reading as children often drop the habit as teenagers. We educators have to ask two questions: 1) how best to create readers and 2) how best to keep them reading. The answer to both questions may not be the same.

It's also worth noting that getting high scores on reading tests is not the same as having a personal reading habit. A student's ability to "analyze" passages doesn't mean that student reads outside school. They may never crack a book after graduation. But there does appear to be cause and effect in the other direction: a personal reading habit has actually been shown to increase students' abilities to "analyze" and also to raise their test scores in almost all subject areas. ( See Cullinan's 2000 study commissioned by the US Department of Education.)

Educator and reading maven Donalyn Miller emphasizes four crucial elements for creating successful readers: 1) time to read in school 2) access to books that are intellectually and culturally accessible 3) choice and 4) reading community.

Loose Canon™ is built to facilitate independent reading, book clubs, literature circles, or any other pedagogy in which students discuss their reading with one another, conferring with the teacher individually or together. Reading promotes conversation, and conversation promotes reading.

For a list of what not to do, here's a short article about the ways in which classrooms can stifle students' love of reading, from Pernille Ripp. (You'll note that there's discussion among elementary school teachers about the role of reading logs.) Or see Kelly Gallagher's more substantial book Readicide in secondary school.

NCTE makes a good case for reading choice in secondary schools. So does this quick article from Nancy Barile. Here too Heather Wolpert-Gawron summarizes the case for student choice as effective pedagogy. And, as time passes, more educators like Katie Sluiter advocate for reading choice as a matter of social justice.

Finally, for more about ways to hold students of all ages accountable, see Loose Canon's page on classroom activities and strategies or the page of assessment ideas.

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Why Reading Choice Matters: the Research on Independent Reading

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The more students read, the better their skills get. Kids who develop a personal reading habit acquire a host of verbal skills that nonreaders do not, including comprehension, fluency, and vocabulary.

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One of the great cruelties and great glories of creative work is the wild discrepancy of timelines between vision and execution. When we dream up a project, we invariably underestimate the amount of time and effort required to make it a reality. Rather than a cognitive bug, perhaps this is the supreme coping mechanism of the creative mind - if we could see clearly the toil ahead at the outset of any creative endeavor, we might be too dispirited to begin, too reluctant to gamble between the heroic and the foolish, too paralyzed to walk the long and tenuous tightrope of hope and fear by which any worthwhile destination is reached.

If eight years ago, someone had told me that A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader (public library) would take eight years, I would have laughed, then cried, then promptly let go of the dream. And yet here it is, all these unfathomable years later, a reality - a collection of original letters to the children of today and tomorrow about why we read and what books do for the human spirit, composed by 121 of the most interesting and inspiring humans in our world: Jane Goodall, Yo-Yo Ma, Jacqueline Woodson, Ursula K. Le Guin, Mary Oliver, Neil Gaiman, Amanda Palmer, Rebecca Solnit, Elizabeth Gilbert, Shonda Rhimes, Alain de Botton, James Gleick, Anne Lamott, Diane Ackerman, Judy Blume, Eve Ensler, David Byrne, Sylvia Earle, Richard Branson, Daniel Handler, Marina Abramović, Regina Spektor, Elizabeth Alexander, Adam Gopnik, Debbie Millman, Dani Shapiro, Tim Ferriss, Ann Patchett, a 98-year-old Holocaust survivor, Italy's first woman in space, and many more immensely accomplished and largehearted artists, writers, scientists, philosophers, entrepreneurs, musicians, and adventurers whose character has been shaped by a life of reading.

Accompanying each letter is an original illustration by a prominent artist in response to the text - including beloved children's book illustrators like Sophie Blackall, Oliver Jeffers, Isabelle Arsenault, Jon Klassen, Shaun Tan, Olivier Tallec, Christian Robinson, Marianne Dubuc, Lisa Brown, Carson Ellis, Mo Willems, Peter Brown, and Maira Kalman.

Punctuating the book are a handful of full-page spreads by celebrated cartoonists and visual storytellers, including Chris Ware, Roz Chast, and Art Spiegelman.

Because this project was born of a deep concern for the future of books and a love of literature as a pillar of democratic society, we are donating 100% of proceeds from the book to the New York public library system in gratitude for their noble work in stewarding literature and democratizing access to the written record of human experience. The gesture is inspired in large part by James Baldwin's moving recollection of how he used the library to read his way from Harlem to the literary pantheon and Ursula K. Le Guin's insistence that "a great library is freedom." (Le Guin is one of four contributors we lost between the outset of the project and its completion. As far as I am aware, at the time of printing, her lovely poem-letter for this book is her last published work.)

Below is my introduction, as it appears in the book, detailing the project's improbable origin story and optimistic cultural aspiration:

When asked in a famous questionnaire devised by the great French writer Marcel Proust about his idea of perfect happiness, David Bowie answered simply: "Reading."

Growing up in communist Bulgaria, the daughter of an engineer father and a librarian mother who defected to computer software, I don't recall being much of an early reader - a literary debt I seem to have spent the rest of my life repaying. But some of my happiest memories are of being read to - most deliciously by my grandmother. I remember her reading Alice's Adventures in Wonderland to me, long before I was able to appreciate the allegorical genius of this story written by a brilliant logician.

My grandmother, an engineer herself, had and still has an enormous library of classical literature, twentieth-century novels, and - my favorite as a child - various encyclopedias and atlases. But it wasn't until I was older, when she told me about her father, that I came to understand the role of books in her life - not as mere intellectual decoration, but as a vital life force, as "meat and medicine and flame and flight and flower," in the words of the poet Gwendolyn Brooks.

My great-grandfather had been an astronomer and a mathematician who, in the thick of Bulgaria's communist dictatorship, taught himself English by hacking into the suppressed frequency of the BBC World Service and reading smuggled copies of The Catcher in the Rye, Little Women, The Grapes of Wrath, and a whole lot of Dickens and Hemingway. This middle-aged rebel would underline words in red ink, then write their Bulgarian translations or English synonyms in the margins. By the time he was fifty, he had become fluent. When his nine grandchildren were entrusted to his care, he set about passing on his insurgent legacy by teaching them English. When the kids grew hungry during their afternoon walks in the park, he wouldn't hand out the sandwiches until they were able to ask in proper Queen's English.

I never met my great-grandfather - he died days before I was born - but I came to love him through my grandmother's recollections. Around the time when she first began regaling me with them, unbeknownst to me, a young American woman named Claudia - a philosophy graduate student at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research in New York - began visiting libraries and universities across Eastern and Central Europe on various foundation grants as a representative of a Graduate Faculty program designed to support libraries and scholars throughout that region after nearly half a century of intellectual isolation. She visited libraries to talk about the social sciences and humanities, and to learn how local collections worked. She met with librarians - the keepers of the keys - who would show her beautiful illustrated books, illuminated manuscripts, incunabula, and rare journal archives. And she began to seek out picture-books from local bookstores, perhaps even some that my grandmother was reading to me at that very time.

Years later, that young woman would become an independent publisher of beautiful, unusual, conceptual children's books - the kind I would go on to celebrate in my own adult life, having transplanted myself from Bulgaria to Brooklyn, in no small part thanks to a life of reading.

And so it was that a package arrived in my Brooklyn mailbox one day, containing three exquisite wordless picture books by a French artist - not "children's" books so much as visual works of philosophy, telling thoughtful and sensitive stories of love, loss, loneliness, and redemption. Enchanted, I looked for the sender and was astonished to find an address in the building next door. Enchanted Lion Books, it said. How perfect, I thought.

The sender's name was Claudia Zoe Bedrick, the publisher. Apparently, we had been working at adjacent studios on the same Brooklyn block. And so Claudia and I finally met, having orbited each other unwittingly for decades, around the shared sun of story and image.

The dawn of our fast friendship was also a peculiar point in culture. Those were the early days of ebooks and the golden age of social media, when the very notion of reading - of intellectual, emotional, and spiritual surrender to a cohesive thread of thought composed by another human being, through which your own interior world can undergo a symphonic transformation - was becoming tattered by the fragment fetishism of the web. Even those of us who partook in the medium openheartedly and optimistically were beginning to feel the chill of its looming shadow.

Once again, I found myself torn between two worlds - not ideologies as starkly recognizable as the Bulgarian communism of my childhood and the American capitalism of my adulthood, but distinct paradigms nonetheless. I reconciled them - a subjective, personal reconciliation, to be sure - by spending my days reading books, mostly tomes of timeless splendor written long ago by people dead and often forgotten, then writing about them on the Internet, which I came to use as one giant margin for annotating my readings, my thoughts, and my search for meaning. Although I have always been agnostic about the medium of reading - I refuse to believe that reading Aristotle on a tablet or listening to Susan Sontag in an audiobook is necessarily inferior to reading from a printed book - I was beginning to worry, as was Claudia, about what reading itself, as a relationship to one's own mind and not a relationship to the matter of silicon or pulped wood, might look like for the generations
to come.

I took solace in a beautiful 1930 essay by Hermann Hesse titled "The Magic of the Book," in which the Nobel laureate argued that no matter how much our technology may evolve, reading will remain an elemental human hunger. Decades before the Internet as we know it existed, Hesse wrote: "We need not fear a future elimination of the book. On the contrary, the more that certain needs for entertainment and education are satisfied through other inventions, the more the book will win back in dignity and authority."

Animated by a shared ardor for that "dignity and authority" of the written word, Claudia and I decided to do something about it - which is, of course, always the only acceptable form of complaint - not by fear-mongering or by waving the moralizing should-wand, but by demonstrating as plainly yet passionately as possible that a life of reading is a richer, nobler, larger, more shimmering life. And what better way of doing that than by inviting people cherished for having such lives - celebrated artists, writers, scientists, and cultural heroes of various stripes - to share their stories and sentiments about how reading shaped them? After all, we read what we are as much as we are what we read.

So began an eight-year adventure of reaching out to some of the people we most admired, inviting each to write a short letter to the young readers of today and tomorrow about how reading sculpted their character and their destiny. We then paired each letter with an illustrator, artist, or graphic designer to bring its message to life visually.

We decided that we would donate all the proceeds from the project to our local New York public library system, because libraries are bastions of democracy and oxygen for the life of the mind, which, as my great-grandfather knew, is our single most ferocious frontier of resistance to inequality and injustice.

Looking back on this labor of love, I am filled with gladness and gratitude for the 121 letters we received - the poetic, the playful, the deeply personal - from contributors as varied as scientists like Jane Goodall and Janna Levin, musicians like Yo-Yo Ma and Amanda Palmer, writers like Jacqueline Woodson and Neil Gaiman, artists like Marina Abramović and Chris Ware, to philosophers, composers, poets, astrophysicists, actors, a 98-year-old Holocaust survivor, Italy's first woman in space, and many more remarkable humans whose splendor of spirit cannot be contained in the shorthand descriptors we often use to condense a person's character and cultural contribution.

From these micro-memoirs and reflections by lifelong readers who have made extraordinary lives for themselves emerges a kind of encyclopedia of personhood, an atlas of possibility for the land of being mapped through the land of literature.

Because this is a 250-page love letter to literature drawn from the body of culture, present and past, we decided to tuck into it - quite literally: in the endpapers - a special wink at the most impassioned bibliophiles. Here is my short note on it, as it appears in the back matter of the book:

ENDPAPER NOTE
"I'm not sure that anybody thinks about endpaper except publishers, and probably not more than 1800 people in the United States have ever heard the word 'endpaper,'" E.B. White wrote to his editor, the visionary Ursula Nordstrom, before insisting that the endpapers of his Charlotte's Web be beautiful. The loveliest of books are touched by the author's thoughtfulness and care in every detail.

A Velocity of Being borrows its endpapers from one of the most imaginative details an author ever slipped into a book.

In 1759, Laurence Sterne began composing The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman - a seven-volume novel that would take him a decade to complete and would revolutionize the art of storytelling. Midway through the third volume, he placed a single marbled page - a shock of swirling color, strange and beautiful against the black-and-white of the book. Sterne himself considered it the "motley emblem" of his work, imbued with meaning open to interpretation but never fully penetrable. It was a small revolution - aesthetically, because the craft of marbling, developed in the Middle East, was a curious novelty in mid-18th-century Britain; conceptually, because the fluid dynamics of the dyes make each marbling unique and irreplicable, like each reading of a book, colored by the dynamics we bring to it, the swirl of its meaning co-created by author and reader.

Years ago, when A Velocity of Being was still an untitled baby of a project, my then-partner and I had the fortune of acquiring one of the handful of surviving first editions of Tristram Shandy at the New York Antiquarian Book Fair. As I marveled at this centuries-old marbled page, I knew instantly that it would make the perfect endpaper - aesthetically and symbolically, a "motley emblem" of the joy and ever-swirling meaning of literature itself.

I invite you to enjoy A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader and gift it to every reader in your life, young and grown, knowing that each copy will contribute to the thriving of the public library system that ensures equal access to books for all, and that the letters and art on these pages will - I hope, I trust - long outlive us all, delighting and inspiring generations to come.
UPDATE: Read some of the individual letters, including ones by Jane Goodall, Alain de Botton, Rebecca Solnit, and Jacqueline Woodson, here. A dozen illustrators from the book have kindly given us permission to make beautiful prints of their artwork, all proceeds from which, like those from the book itself, benefit the public library system - please enjoy.

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A Velocity of Being: Illustrated Letters to Children about Why We Read by 121 of the Most Inspiring Humans in Our World

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One of the great cruelties and great glories of creative work is the wild discrepancy of timelines between vision and execution. When we dream up a project, we invariably underestimate the amount of time and effort required to make it a reality.

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Pear Deck & Facing History Team Up! Interactive lessons using literature with identity, community, perspective themes. Also, opening and closing routines.

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As we return to school this year, Pear Deck has partnered with Facing History and Ourselves to help build community and trust within classrooms - both physical and virtual. With these ready-to-teach, interactive lessons, educators can foster a sense of belonging and prioritize social-emotional learning from the first day of school.

Facing History and Ourselves uses lessons of history to challenge teachers and their students to stand up to bigotry and hate. Our resources address racism, antisemitism, and prejudice at pivotal moments in history; we help students connect choices made in the past to those they will confront in their own lives. Facing our collective history and how it informs our attitudes and behaviors allows us to choose a world of equity and justice.

Pear Deck was founded by educators on a mission to help teachers create powerful learning moments for every student, every day. With solutions rooted in active learning and formative assessment, we make it easy for you to connect with learners of every age and ability. When that happens, more students participate and learn, classroom community improves, and you'll know you're making a difference.

New to Pear Deck?
Get started in three easy steps.

Click on one of the Decks below to get a preview of the Deck and make a copy for Google Slides or Microsoft PowerPoint Online.

Once the presentation is open in Google Slides or PowerPoint Online, open the Pear Deck Add-on through the Add-ons menu in Google Slides or the Add-ins menu in Microsoft PowerPoint. You can edit the existing questions or add your own custom questions from the slide library. You can also use it exactly as it is!

Click the 'Present Lesson' button to start your interactive lesson!

Activities for the First Days of School

While the opening weeks of school are always a time for building community and focusing on social-emotional learning, this is especially crucial as the 2021-22 school year begins. Educators need to consider how they can create welcoming environments that prioritize care, relationships, and community, regardless of how and where their students are learning. Students will be more likely to engage, take risks, and support each other if they feel a sense of trust and belonging among the group members and with their teacher.

This collection of activities address three important goals for the beginning of the school year: reorienting students to school, getting to know each other and building relationships, and creating classroom community.
Click through to each activity to preview the slides, learn more about the Facing History and Ourselves curriculum, and get your ready-to-teach copy.

Opening and Closing Routines

Routines can be a key component of a safe and reflective classroom community, especially at a time when students' lives and learning have been disrupted by public health crises, racial injustice and violence, social protest, and a continuously unpredictable news cycle. Setting aside five to ten minutes at the beginning and/or end of class to welcome students to the learning space, gauge their emotional well-being, and nurture community can help students experience school as a crucial part of their day that is predictable, meaningful, and supportive.
Click through to each activity to preview the slides, learn more about the Facing History and Ourselves curriculum, and get your ready-to-teach copy.

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Facing History and Ourselves + Pear Deck - Pear Deck

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As we return to school this year, Pear Deck has partnered with Facing History and Ourselves to help build community and trust within classrooms - both physical and virtual. With these ready-to-teach, interactive lessons, educators can foster a sense of belonging and prioritize social-emotional learn

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When I want every student to speak in a capacity more involved than Think-Pair-Share yet more efficient than pop-up debate, I tend to use something I call Conversation Challenge.

Conversation Challenge is simply a way of framing small group discussions. Instead of only saying, "Discuss [insert prompt here] about [insert text here]," I add one additional structure: each group's objective is to keep the discussion going for the full X minutes they'll be given. (Typically, X = 4 or less for my ninth graders.) Also, every student must speak at least one time.

I think it's useful to see what we're talking about, so below, you'll find a Conversation Challenge that took place in my classroom last week.

Here's some additional context for you:

This is my last 10 minutes with my students for the week, and I'm using the time to have students discuss the Gallagher-esque article of the week that they received on Tuesday. (Video of me introducing that article, along with more classroom example videos of article-based lessons, can be found in Part III of the Teaching with Articles Workshop.)

It's February, so at this point students are quite familiar with how Conversation Challenges work - yet, perhaps like your students, I find that many of my kids still struggle to carry conversations on topics they don't choose.

This is the first time we've had a small group discussion on the primary races. (Therefore, even though the structure of Conversation Challenge is familiar to them, the content of this particular challenge is new territory.)

Here's the video: ( click here if you don't see it below)

Here's why I let this strategy into my very limited repertoire:

It's much quicker than pop-up debate, yet more formal than Think-Pair-Share. I needed a middle ground between those two things.

It gives my students a different way to exercise speaking/listening autonomy than pop-up debate does.

The time element gives my kids a clear understanding of what it looks like to "win."

Finally, the efficiency of Conversation Challenge means my kids will get lots of reps overcoming conversational weaknesses they may have.

Questions? Feel free to ask in the comments.

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Conversation Challenge: an Efficient, Simple Small-Group Discussion Strategy - Dave Stuart Jr.

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When I want every student to speak in a capacity more involved than Think-Pair-Share yet more efficient than pop-up debate, I tend to use something I call Conversation Challenge. Conversation Challenge is simply a way of framing small group discussions.

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Tell Me Who You Are: Sharing Our Stories of Race, Culture, & Identity

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Tell Me Who You Are: Sharing Our Stories of Race, Culture, & Identity [Guo, Winona, Vulchi, Priya] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Tell Me Who You Are: Sharing Our Stories of Race, Culture, & Identity

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Read on the Blog

One of my favorite creative writing teachers in college introduced me to the iceberg theory of character design. I'm sure many of you likely know it, but, if not, here is a quick primer:

The basic idea is that 90% of the mass of an iceberg sits below the waterline, and much like the secretive iceberg, the theory argues that when an author creates a character, she should only show a fraction of what she creates on the page. The logic is that the hidden, unseen depths will help the characters to feel more authentic and complete because, just like with the people around us, there will be much to deduce and infer.

I've always loved this lesson because I've found it to be so true, and not just when it comes to crafting characters. The world around us is awash with icebergs. Nearly everything we see, buy, consume, and do has so much more beneath the surface than can be seen above water.

As someone who writes regularly about his own practice as an educator, I've also come to find that my teaching is a land of icebergs too. So much of what I do and assign goes so much deeper than what can be seen on the surface--often to depths I didn't realize until I sat to examine them in writing.

And of the icebergs in my practice, I've found few that go down further than student-self assessment, which is a suggestion that has been around for a long time and yet it is still relatively rare in practice, even in classes that otherwise put lots of emphasis on student voice and autonomy. In today's post, I want to explore its depths and why if you make one change this year in particular, increasing the amount of student self-assessment should maybe be it.

I encountered the concept of student self-assessment early in my career, but for many years I dismissed it for the following reasons:

When it comes to assessment, it is pretty apparent that the teacher--as the expert, neutral party, and one with the most experience--is likely in the best position to accurately assess the student.

Having students "assess" their work, only to have the teacher turn around and change the assessment if the teacher doesn't agree, can feel more like an act of disingenuous theater meant to create buy-in than a true act of valuing student voice.

Given how often teacher expertise is dismissed, the insinuation that students could assess themselves as accurately as I could, felt less like a good policy and more like another slight.

Looking at these reasons now, I still see a lot of truth in them. Teachers probably are in the best position most of the time to accurately assess student skills, student self-assessment that is instantly changed when a teacher doesn't agree is probably going to come across as disingenuous and pointless to students, and the suggestion that others (often it is computers) can better assess our students is still often trotted out in a way that feels like a subtle insult against teachers. Even still, I have come to the conclusion that one of the biggest thing our students need this fall after 18 months of pandemic teaching is to engage in lots of meaningful self-assessment. Here is why:

Student Self-Assessment Is One of the Most Empowering Teaching Tools We Have

As I said above, I used to think that student self-assessment was adults pretending to value student input, when in reality the important decisions had already been made. And in many situations, when it is poorly used, that is indeed the case.

But when we trust and train students (more on these later), student self-assessment is actually one of the most empowering things we can do as a teacher. This is because assessment is generally one of the least empowering things we do in school. In most situations, students turn in a paper and project and then wait for the grade that comes down from on high. Few, if any, other classroom moments reinforce whose class this ultimately is.

How disempowering that model of assessment can be is maybe best seen in how little understanding students often have concerning the criteria of even the biggest assignments. For many years it was not uncommon for my students to readily admit they never really looked at my rubrics or for their work to readily admit this for them. Looking back on it, there is a certain sense to this too. If assessment is only up to the teacher, one can see why students might not invest a lot of mental time and energy into it.

But when students play a significant role in assessment, that type of minimal level of understanding isn't an option because the students need to understand the criteria to offer an accurate assessment. Further, if we ask students to explain their assessments (more on that later too), we are also asking them to engage in meaningful metacognitive reflection, after which better and faster learning tends to follow.

Student Self-Assessment Is One of the Most Powerful Time-Saving Tools We Have

I get to talk to a lot of teachers about how we respond to student writing, and I've found that the vast majority of teachers understand this. Where the trouble lies is that between formative feedback and summative grades/responses, only one is required by 99% of teacher contracts (hint, it is the summative). And to score a student paper and discuss those scores, even if it only takes 5 minutes per paper, requires an investment of nearly 14 hours when taken on the scale of the 165 students I had last semester. This leaves little time for meaningful formative feedback, even if I know it is better.

When I first learned about how much more powerful formative feedback is than summative, I first tried to limit the time I spent with summative papers by returning them entirely blank with the exception the score. This no-final-comments approach did save me a lot of time, but it also felt cold, detached, and authoritative in a way that contrasted with my Interested Reader approach. Before long, the aloofness of these blank papers meant that I couldn't help but to cheat my own system by leaving little comments here and there that discussed and justified my grades. The amount of these little "cheats" increased with each round of papers and by the semester's end my summative comments (and the time it took to give them) had swelled to its normal length again.

In the end, the answer to what at the time seemed like a no-win dilemma between sacrificing a dozen or more hours discussing and contextualizing the scores I was required to give and returning scored papers in a way that felt aloof and disinterested was by leaning into meaningful student-self assessment.

When students self-assess, the responsibility of contextualizing their scores falls on them, not us. This is convenient because they are the ones who need that information the most and because at that point we simply need to sign-off on their explanations, allowing us a lot more time to invest into formative feedback.

Student Self-Assessment Is Our Best Defense Against Grading Harm

I can still remember writing a paper in 7th grade that I was sure would receive an A. I can also recall the B that met me upon its return and how that one grade stopped my up-to-that-point regular writing habit in its tracks for many years. This sort of experience, where one grade will change a student's trajectory or a piece of their identity, is horrifyingly common, and I suspect many of you can recall similar experiences in your own education, if not your own classrooms.

When students assess first though, the teacher gets a window into how the students view themselves. This window can help teachers to carefully calibrate their responses to minimize the harm that regardless of the assessment model, can and regularly does follow grading/scoring.

When I talk about these advantages, two of the three (more on the third in a moment) biggest questions I get are generally the following:

1. Given that assessments are serious--and in many cases our very jobs depend on them--how do we give students meaningful say while making sure that their assessments are in line with our assessments?

2. How can we get students to seriously engage in the process--as opposed to just give themselves As or 4s or whatever the top of your scoring system is?

The answer to both is similar to the answer for how to do peer response or self-editing well: Students are generally remarkably good at and thoughtful about assessing their own skills and knowledge, but only if they have the proper tools and training.

This is why I now do the following before students do any assessment at all:

1. As a class, we discuss why self-assessment is important, and I share with them the same reasons I give above. We also discuss what success looks like (here is a great blog post from Sarah Zerwin describing her early attempts to discuss what success looks like in her classes) and I allow students to ask questions about and even push back against how we will be doing it in class.

2. Students do a number of activities designed to help them to understand the criteria of each piece and gain the vocabulary of and confidence needed for self-assessment. We co-construct student-friendly rubrics from our district ones, engage in peer response, and read lots and lots of mentor texts.

3. When it comes time for the self-assessment, I am very clear regarding how I want them to do it. Here are the questions I generally use:

The other big question I get when I talk about student self-assessment is what to do when there is a disagreement concerning a score. Given the wide range of parties that will be viewing and using the grades that I am required to give, I do feel that is important that I agree with student scores. And while the vast majority of assessments from well-trained students nearly identically match my own assessment, there are rare times where a student's assessment differs from my own. In those moments, here is what I do:

In moments of minor disagreement I try to hear what the student is saying. I find that if I try to hear what they have to say, they often say something that is worth hearing, and at times their assessments can even shift my initial thoughts, which feels ok to me.

Sometimes I will change scores in minor ways, especially if there is a teachable moment or I can nudge students to see a strength they didn't know they had. When I do very minor changes, I generally use an audio program like Mote to briefly explain myself, as it is both faster than writing and I find the human voice helps to continue the idea that assessment in my class is part of a wider conversation, not an edict delivered from on high.

In moments of more significant disagreement (and generally in the very rare situation that a student's assessment is much higher than mine would be; most students once trained tend to be harder on themselves than I would be), I strive to have a conversation with students before putting any scores down. These conversations tend to work best when I hear the student out first with an open mind before expressing my own viewpoint. The almost universal outcome for these conversations though is that instead of a student getting high scores that I don't fully agree with or me giving them low scores that they don't agree with, we come up with a plan to revise the piece so the scores match the ones they desire. This brings me to my last point, which is that...

Students can always revise a paper for higher scores in my classes. In terms of these optional revisions, I would offer them even if I didn't have students self-assess because it doesn't slam the door on learning and makes risks easier to take. Still, when it comes to student self-assessment, the option to revise makes the assessments less high-stakes and therefore lowers the incentive for students to inflate their scores. The revisions also add almost nothing to my paper load because revision history enables me to see all changes a student made, and the students will be the ones doing the re-assessment, meaning all I have to do is sign off on new scores, which usually takes no more than a manner of seconds.

The title of this post argues that, if you don't already, this is the year to start using meaningful self-assessment. I have been saying this to every group of teachers I've spoken to this summer, and when I boil it down, there are three reasons I've been so vocal about this topic. First, it is worth noting that on John Hattie's massive list of factors that accelerate student learning, meaningful student self-assessment is at the very top (due in large part to the advantages above) and a great many students will need acceleration this year like never before. The second is that millions of students will be entering buildings for the first time in a very long time and anything we can do to empower them and better understand how they are doing is probably worth our effort. The third reason, and most crucial for my approach this fall, is that when teachers no longer have to spend hundreds of hours over the year justifying our scores, we can reclaim that as essential teaching space, and in it we can do those small but mighty things that we don't always have time to do otherwise: check-in with students regularly as they are drafting in the pursuit of developing a meaningful partnership, celebrate students and student growth once they finish a piece, and generally keep up a dialogue where we cultivate both students' beliefs in the value of the class and the value that they have inside themselves.

Thanks as always for reading, and yours in teaching,

Matt

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Why This Is the Year to Get Serious About Student Self-Assessment

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Read on the Blog One of my favorite creative writing teachers in college introduced me to the iceberg theory of character design.

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https://youtu.be/dqTTojTija8

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The Benefits of Independent Reading in the Classroom

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The Benefits of Independent Reading in the Classroom

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Features of an Effective Independent Reading Library Program

If you want to establish an independent reading library program, there are research-backed characteristics that will help make it effective. Here are seven of those traits, discussed in depth in this white paper:

1. An Extensive Collection of Appealing Books

The quality of books matters more than a large number of them. Experts recommend that the minimum size of an effective classroom library include about 10 high-quality books per studen t.

2. A Wide Variety of Genres

It is essential that students are exposed to different types of literature (e.g., fantasy, historical fiction, realistic fiction, myths, autobiographies and biographies, memoir, narrative non-fiction, expository non-fiction, etc.) to allow students to understand the characteristics of each and aid in their reading achievement.

3. A Wide Variety of Text Difficulty Levels That Are Matched to Students' Abilities

Students simply having more time to read will not improve their skills. In fact, according to studies, struggling readers challenged by difficult texts may not receive the practice they need to improve their reading skills. Teachers must ensure that they guide students toward appropriate levels of text difficulty to motivate them to read.

4. Allows for Student Choice-but Provides Guidance in Selections

Students more than likely need help from their teachers, especially if they are struggling readers and need guidance on what they may enjoy and want to learn more about through an introduction to various genres. Guidance from teachers ensures that reading is happening and that the literature is suited for students' level of reading. Eventually, students should build the confidence to select appropriate texts that suit their reading levels and personal interests.

5. Provides Dedicated Time to Read as a Regular Activity

If teachers provide students with regular opportunities to read for uninterrupted blocks of time ( at least 15 to 30 minutes per reading session), students will increase their reading ability. The frequency of reading sessions also impacts an independent reading program's success.

6. Addresses Important Physical and Environmental Conditions

There should be a designated reading area within the classroom that is quiet and comfortable. Additionally, an excellent classroom library should be organized with labeled shelves or tubs (by genre and difficulty level).

7. Does Not Replace Comprehensive, Core Programs

An independent reading program should be an essential part of the broader English Language Arts curriculum. Not only should students have time to read independently, but they should also gain necessary skills through direct instruction and practice of core reading skills.

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There are various benefits of independent reading, including improving your students' fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. Read more about how you can empower your students to become lifelong readers by providing an independent reading library.

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Reading independently, with friends near or far, or even with school clubs or online communities is a powerful part of growing and learning. When you read fiction, you enter a new world, a new community, and a new perspective that allows you to increase your own awareness and empathy within the world around you. American author Theodore Giesel (famously known as Dr. Seuss) wrote it best: "The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you go."

The benefits of independent reading are plentiful. Reading encourages you to think critically, question the world, and be more culturally conscious. Studies of independent reading not only highlight its importance but also incorporate the benefits and effects it has on each individual learner in school, at home, and in life. While independent reading is one major part of a differentiated and modern approach to education, it is by no means new to the world of education. Many studies and theories stem from practicing teachers who use these innovative approaches to help their students acquire a variety of proven benefits. There are so many things students can gain from reading independently - check out this list for some of the most impactful effects of reading.

Abundant language acquisition

There is strong evidence that links reading for pleasure with educational or academic success. Reading improves literacy in any language. Whether students are reading a book in their first language or a new, target language, they will gain from independent reading. Students acquire more vocabulary by reading new books than they would by simply memorizing lists of words. In fact, according to researchers, vocabulary acquisition is directly correlated to the amount of minutes students read each night.

Stronger analytical and critical thinking

Reading new books is a way to encounter new worlds and new perspectives. When reading, students use their identities, past experiences, ideas, opinions, and values to interpret texts in their own way. But sometimes, stories shape our perspectives, too. Finding a great book to connect with on an emotional level can challenge the schema and prejudices that may already exist in our minds. When reading, students are constantly connecting, making inferences and questioning what they are reading within both the book's reality and their own reality.

Better writing skills

Writing and reading go hand in hand. Students don't always need to annotate their books or write analytical responses to what they read for pleasure. But, as a reader, students take in both the content of the story and the way it is written. We may not know it, but while we read we notice the proper grammatical phrases, the similes, or the symbolism throughout a text. Students may start noticing these things or patterns in the way they communicate and write on their own. The more we read, the better we get at reading and writing - both of which are important life skills.

Improved focus and concentration

Sustained silent reading is a really fantastic practice. The more engaged students are with a text, the more a book draws them in and captures their interest. As we practice reading, we get less distracted by our phones, the things going on around us, or the to-do list swirling in our heads. Being fully immersed in a book is a way to practice staying focused on one thing at a time. Improved concentration on a book that's enjoyable to read can be transferred to other tasks that might not be as fun, like homework or studying for an exam.

Stress and anxiety reduction

Most students in this day and age experience a wide variety of mental or emotional health issues, one of the most common being anxiety. No matter how much stress students have due to academics, personal relationships, or university applications, reading can reduce the anxieties of everyday life. Reading helps students know and understand that they are not alone. Novels where narrators or characters are experiencing similar emotions help students to recognize and improve their overall personal, emotional, and mental well-being.

Increased empathy towards others

Getting into the mind of a character is a great way for students to feel new emotions and have new experiences. Reading allows students to understand different perspectives and walk in someone else's shoes. Even if the characters are fictional, the experiences they have, troubles they face, and emotions they feel, can feel real. This helps students become more empathetic and considerate people.

Higher open-mindedness and global thinking

There are so many different books in the world that can help us to become more open-minded. Books can open our worlds in ways we never imagine possible. They can take us to fantastical worlds, other countries, other schools, other homes - places that truly expand our worldviews. In an international community like EF Academy, students have had so many incredible experiences already. But it's important for students to recognize these experiences are influenced by their own unique perspectives. Reading allows them to view the world they think they already know from a variety of different vantage points.

A great source of entertainment and community

Many people like to buy books - but remember that we can find lots of books and reading material for free. Take advantage of local libraries, where you can borrow books for a few weeks at a time. Students who live in a residential school like EF Academy can also borrow books from teachers, residential advisors and friends. Reading can be a fun way for students to build camaraderie and community among the peers and adults surrounding them. And in an international community, sharing ideas, perspectives and stories is an awesome way to get to know new friends and broaden horizons.

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The many benefits of independent reading ‹ EF Academy Blog ‹ EF Academy Blog

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The benefits of independent reading are plentiful. Reading encourages you to think critically, question the world, and be more culturally conscious.

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Revive High School Independent Reading - English Teacher Blog

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I want my high school English students to become better readers and to enjoy reading, so I only use these non-graded activities for independent reading…

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Article Discussing Choice Reading versus the "Classics"

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Article Discussing Choice Reading versus the "Classics"

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The day I arrive for the school-wide "Read-In" this past spring, teenagers and books are covering every available surface in Jarred Amato's English classroom at Maplewood High School in Nashville, Tennessee-flung across lived-in couches, desks, and chairs. But there's not a book one might traditionally identify as a "classic" in sight, and that's by design.

In the middle of the room, a group of girls are cracking open the third installment of March, the graphic novel by Rep. John Lewis and Andrew Aydin about the civil rights movement, when a student pushes his way through. "Hey, get out of my way," he says playfully to the girls, grabbing a copy off the top of the stack. "I've wanted to read March!"

Things weren't always this way. Four years ago, when Amato arrived at Maplewood High, he assigned his freshmen Lord of the Flies -a staple of high school lit classes for more than 50 years-but he couldn't get students to read the book. "It's a classic for some reason, but I don't know what that reason is. Because it's not good," says Calvin, a graduating senior, who laughed when I asked if he finished it.

Frustrated, Amato surveyed students about their reading preferences and found that most didn't know: They almost never read outside of school and generally had negative attitudes about reading. Many students felt like the books they were assigned at school didn't reflect their experiences, and featured characters who didn't look, think, or talk like them.

The issue of a disconnect between young readers and the books they're assigned isn't new, though. Like previous generations, American middle and high school students have continued to spend English class reading from a similar and familiar list from the English and American literature canon: Steinbeck, Dickens, Fitzgerald, Alcott, and, of course, Shakespeare.

But now, as social attitudes and population demographics have shifted, teachers across the country are saying that the disconnect between the canon and its intended audience has become an epidemic, driven by rapid changes in the composition of American schools and the emergence of always-on digital platforms that vie for kids' attention. By middle and high school, teachers concede, many of today's students simply aren't reading at all.

"What I saw was that the 'traditional' approach to English class wasn't working for a lot of our kids," Amato says, referring to Maplewood's chronic low performance- fewer than 5 percent of students are on track for college and career readiness in English (and math as well). "We have a literacy crisis, and Shakespeare is not the answer."

To Amato and a growing number of teachers, the solution has been to move away from classics in English class and instead let students choose the books they read, while encouraging literature that is more reflective of the demographics and experiences of students in America's classrooms. In teacher training programs, in professional publications, and throughout social media, choice reading has become a refrain that can sometimes sound like dogma, and for some it has become a call for advocacy.

What's in the Center?

But while the student choice reading movement is growing, it is by no means universally accepted or supported in all classrooms. Other educators have warily pushed back on the approach, worrying that too much student choice is putting young adult (YA) and graphic novels -not highly regarded and vetted literature-at the center of the English literature curriculum. While not all books are enjoyable (or easy) to read, challenging books help boost students' comprehension and reading proficiency, they argue, and force them to grapple with difficult, timeless questions about love, life and death, and societal dynamics.

Choice reading and academic rigor are not mutually exclusive, though. To find balance, some teachers are trying methods like allowing students to choose from more diverse, preapproved lists of challenging literature; alternating between chosen books and assigned books; or using choice to pique students' interest in reading more stimulating texts.

Though polarizing-and at times highly contentious-the debate over reading lists in English class has illuminated the rapid pace of change in what kids are reading and the tension in trying to diversify literature without completely ditching the canon.

A Love of Reading

English teachers have long hoped that students would fall in love with the literature they taught. Mrs. Lindauer, my own English teacher from junior year in 1990, went to great lengths to demystify Shakespeare's greatness, impersonating characters' voices from A Midsummer Night's Dream to make us laugh and help us understand the difficult language.

But in the years since I attended high school, many teachers are increasingly finding that students do not always develop a love of reading in English class, and a disaffection for assigned books can foster something else-a general distaste for it.

A key belief-and a passionate one-I found among English teachers is that they feel their assignments require some enjoyment to complete, a sentiment that seems to have less standing with teachers of other subjects. Educators' concerns are also reflected in the research data, which indicates a steep decline in teens' reading for pleasure: 60 percent of high school seniors read from a book or magazine every day in the late 1970s, but by 2016, the number had plummeted to 16 percent.

On social media, teachers are adamant about the risks of an uncritical devotion to the classics. Some teachers have argued that these concerns are especially pertinent for children of color, who are less likely to be represented in traditionally selected texts. Though U.S. classrooms are rapidly diversifying-in just a few years, half of American students will be students of color-the English literature canon, many argue, has remained mostly unchanged and mostly white.

Amato's response to his students' reading apathy (and the canon) was to develop ProjectLit, a classroom approach that gives students the freedom to choose and discuss the books they want to read. In just two years, the model has not only improved his students' interest in reading, he says, but turned into a grassroots, national movement with its own hashtag (#ProjectLit) on social media with hundreds of participating schools. Other educators have also created movements of their own, like Colorado's Julia Torres's #DisruptTexts social media conversation.

The impact of his new approach in English class is already evident in the changes he's seen in his students, says Amato. The 13 students who helped Amato develop the new approach in his classroom got full scholarships to attend Belmont University in Nashville this fall. In addition, 46 students from his initial class who participated in #ProjectLit scored 5.7 points higher on the English ACT and 4.4 points higher on the reading ACT than the rest of their peers at Maplewood.

The Power of the Shared Text

But there isn't any substantial scientific evidence yet to suggest that choice reading improves reading proficiency-or even fosters a love of reading-according to some literary experts I talked to. Instead, critics warn that reading choice can be a limiting rather than expansive influence, permitting students to choose overly simplified texts or to focus singularly on familiar topics.

Doug Lemov, an educator and managing director of the Uncommon Schools charter network, tells me a story of visiting a special school for elite soccer athletes a few years ago. Looking around the room, he noticed that many students in their choice-based English classes had selected books about soccer. "They should not be reading books about soccer. All they know is soccer," says Lemov, who, along with coauthors Colleen Driggs and Erica Woolway, has written Reading Reconsidered, a book that pushes back on choice reading.

Lemov believes that student choice reading has been overhyped by schools and makes a couple of assumptions that don't add up: First, that adolescents know enough about books to know what they like to read; and second, that there's greater power in the freedom to "do your own thing" rather than in developing a deep understanding of what you're reading.

Whether it's Gabriel García Márquez, Toni Morrison, or Harper Lee, shared reading can also improve equity by giving all students access to high-quality literature, Lemov says. He also emphasizes that it teaches students to engage in a balanced and civil discourse, asserting that "you can only really listen to someone else's perspective on a story if you're discussing a text that you have also read."

And though it may not foster a love of reading, the data also shows that teacher-led explicit instruction in reading a particular text (especially in different genres), combined with lots of reading, can reap four to eight times the payoff compared with students' choosing books and reading on their own, according to Timothy Shanahan, founding director of the Center for Literacy at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Shanahan, a leader of the National Reading Panel, notes that classrooms where students have free rein over book selection can place a significant burden on teachers to know many different books well enough to guide deep analysis and interpretation of text for each student.

Finding a Middle Ground

For many teachers I spoke with, though, the polarizing debate over reading lists is making it difficult to find middle ground. In her seventh- and eighth-grade English classes at J.T. Moore Middle School in Nashville, Anna Bernstein tells me she puzzles through a thousand considerations when choosing what her students will read that year.

Bernstein tries to include a diverse array of characters and authors while getting the texts to align to both state standards and an end-of-year community service learning project. She chooses three to four texts the class will read together while leaving some room for student choice texts. Then, she considers text difficulty and genres that will stretch her students' capabilities or open their eyes to new ways of life.

But sometimes it can seem like this constant balancing act requires her to juggle too many factors. "What's hard right now in the English education world is there are two camps-one group that's never going to stop teaching Lord of the Flies, and another group that's never going to talk about that book," she says.

Yet while the data suggests that we are failing to interest many of today's students in reading, it seems that educators are starting to find some equilibrium between choice and a regimented list of must-reads: Shakespeare can exist in class alongside books kids want to read.

To find better balance, educators can gather recommendations of diverse books to include in their classroom libraries from organizations like We Need Diverse Books, which has partnered with Scholastic to ensure that all kids see themselves and their experiences represented in literature. Others suggest that teachers allow choice reading within tiered levels of challenge or a mix of easy, medium, and challenging texts. And Melanie Hundley, a former English teacher-and now professor at Vanderbilt University-emphasizes that teachers can "hook" students using choice books to get them excited about more challenging literature.

"If kids will read and you can build their reading stamina, they can get to a place where they're reading complex text," she says. "Choice helps develop a willingness to read... [and] I want kids to choose to read."

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The day I arrive for the school-wide "Read-In" this past spring, teenagers and books are covering every available surface in Jarred Amato's English classroom at Maplewood High School in Nashville, Tennessee-flung across lived-in couches, desks, and chairs. But there's not a book one might traditionally identify as a "classic" in sight, and that's by design.

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-Morgan Press

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We're thrilled to offer Project LIT Collections! Not familiar with Project LIT Community? Read on to learn, in their own words, a little more about the mission that drives this passionate group of students and educators.

About Project LIT Community

In August 2016, my students (recent graduates of Maplewood High School) and I founded Project LIT to eliminate book deserts and promote a love of reading in our Nashville community. Over the past four years, we have connected with all-star students, educators and authors to transform a class project into a national, grassroots literacy movement-one step, one book and one conversation at a time.

Currently, there are more than 1,700 Project LIT "chapters" across all 50 states. As you've probably seen on social media, every Project LIT chapter looks a little different and that's by design! However, all of us work together to:

EMPOWER our students as readers, writers and leaders

PROMOTE a love of reading in our schools and communities

NURTURE authentic reading identities by increasing access to high-quality books, building community and fostering a sense of belonging

CHAMPION young people and books that reflect their lived realities, communities and identities

ADVOCATE for literacy policies and practices that will build lifelong readers

SUPPORT AND INSPIRE one another as we improve our practice and pedagogy

READ, DISCUSS AND CELEBRATE books that make our students feel seen, heard, affirmed and valued

DEVELOP our cultural competence and EXPAND our thinking, regardless of individual starting point

AMPLIFY voices and stories of students and educators of color

REWRITE the narrative about which texts and authors are deemed worthy of academic study

PROVIDE students with as many positive literacy experiences as possible

How does it work?

First, educators apply to become a Project LIT chapter leader. Once accepted, educators access our Project LIT "Starter Kit" and connect with our community via social media and our monthly Zoom events to develop a game plan for their school. From there, educators work alongside students and staff to officially "launch" their chapter. We know this school year has been a challenge for all of us (to put it lightly), so please know that there is absolutely no rush to get started.

About Our Project LIT Chapters

As we mentioned, there are now more than 1,700 Project LIT chapters across all 50 states, and they all look a little different! Whether you're in an elementary or high school, small town or big city, we'd love for you and your students to join our movement! Check out the graphic below to review our chapter leader expectations.

Our Journey

After reading about book deserts in August 2016, we had a conversation in Room 220: "What can we do to eliminate book deserts in Nashville?" The rest, as they say, is history.

Our first step was to launch a book drive, and thanks to our students' successful social media campaign, we collected more than 15,000 books. From there, we placed many of these books in our LIT libraries, converted USA Today newsstands, which we set up in local community centers and YMCAs.

However, we soon realized that the solution wasn't simply to increase book access-it was to increase access to high-quality, culturally sustaining books. Books that allow all students to see themselves in the pages. Books that communicate to all students that their voices and their stories matter-that they matter. Books that encourage us to write stories of our own. Books that spark important, necessary conversations. Books that remind us that we're not alone, and books that inspire us to make a difference. Books that inspire students to fall in love with reading again or for the first time.

And with that in mind, we started Project LIT Book Club. At its simplest form, it is a monthly opportunity for students, educators and community members to come together in our library (or on Zoom) to read, discuss and celebrate great books.

However, Project LIT is not just about books; it's also about belonging. It's about building a community of readers and writers. It's about empowering our young people and providing our students with as many positive literacy experiences as possible. (See below for an original poem, written by our student founders!)

In June 2017, we encouraged other educators and students to join our movement and launch Project LIT chapters of their own. We haven't let up since.

Get Involved

Now, thanks to the power of social media, we've welcomed all-star students and educators from across the countryto our growing LIT community! And yes, we'd love for you to join our movement, too! If you're interested in joining Project LIT Community, complete our chapter leader application or contact us at projectlitcommunity@gmail.com!

To connect with Project LIT Community on social, follow them on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @projectlitcomm and use the hashtag #ProjectLITBookClub.

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We're thrilled to offer Project LIT Collections! Not familiar with Project LIT Community? Read on to learn, in their own words, a little more about the mission that drives this passionate group of students and educators. About Project LIT Community

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Globalizing the Reading of Middle and High School Students

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Globalizing the Reading of Middle and High School Students

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Although the classics serve as the foundation of most secondary literature classrooms, their domination is challenged by the call for cultural perspectives that reflect the diversity of our global society. The classics are critiqued for their basis in Western mainstream perspectives, biases against women and people of color, and inclusion of dated language and confusing writing styles, such as obscure expressions and unfamiliar sentence constructions. In addition, few classics have teens as main characters, having been written for adult audiences, and so teens struggle to connect. Given that these canonical texts are usually mandated reading, one way that teachers can increase relevancy and globalize reading is to pair the required classics with young adult global literature. These pairings can bring more diverse literature into the curriculum and, at the same time, create a context for understanding the classic work and its relevance for middle and high school students.

To explore the possibilities of pairing global young adult literature with classic books, a group of us at Worlds of Words took the complexity exemplar lists of fiction and nonfiction from the Common Core and searched for global literature with similar complexity and themes/plots. We selected the Common Core exemplar lists since these have been widely referenced as a core reading list and include many well-known classics. In addition to the pairings, we located other strong global young adult books and created additional recommended global lists. These extensive fiction and nonfiction lists along with complexity information and plot descriptions are available online at Worlds of Words. These lists reveal the dominance of historical fiction and fantasy and the lack of contemporary YA novels from global cultures.

We are exploring a range of ways to integrate these paired books into secondary classrooms. One possibility is to pair a classic text with a global book. Students can read the YA novel first as an entry to the classic so that students explore the theme in their own lives and then carry that connection into the classic. Or they can read the classic first, in which case the YA novel provides a connection into students' lives. Another option is for half the class to read the classic and half the global novel, with each group discussing their book and then meeting in pairs to make comparisons across the books.

* Pair The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald with Mirjam Pressler's Let Sleeping Dogs Lie, a contemporary novel about a German teen who learns that her family's successful business was stolen by the Nazis from a Jewish family. Or pair it with Alaya Johnson's The Summer Prince, set in a futuristic Brazil ruled by technology and tradition, where oppression lies beneath the city's glitter.

* Pair To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee with Elizabeth Wein's Rose Under Fire, in which a young American woman, dealing with the trauma of imprisonment and Nazi medical experiments on women, must decide whether to testify after the war.

Pairings can also provide a way to connect a more familiar culture with a less familiar one or to provide an informational context to understand an assigned novel.

* The Odyssey by Homer can be paired with Sithama Ami's Sita's Ramayana, a graphic novel retelling of an ancient legend from India in which Rama forces his wife Sita to undergo an ordeal by fire to prove herself. This pairing connects well-known Greek mythology with Hindu mythology for comparisons across cultures.

* Pair an informational book, such as Hitler Youth by Susan Bartoletti, about the youth organizations Hitler used to meet his sociopolitical goals, with a novel on the Holocaust, such as Marcus Zusak's The Book Thief. Or pair What the World Eats by Peter Menzel, which contains photos of 25 families in 21 countries to show what they eat in one day, with a novel on economic disparity, such as John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.

Another way to integrate global YA books is to have the class read a classic text and then invite students to select from thematically-related global books to form small group discussions.

* After reading Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemmingway, offer YA novels about the consequences of war, such as Ruta Sepetys' Salt to the Sea, set at the end of WWII as refugees flee the advancing Soviet army; Geert Spillebeen's Kipling's Choice, a fictionalized biography of Kipling's son who dies in agony during WWI; Keely Hutton's Soldier Boy set in early 1990s Uganda about an enslaved child soldier forced into the guerrilla army of a warlord; and Patricia McCormick's Never Fall Down about a child soldier forced to serve the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

* The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck could be read with YA novels about racism, poverty and desperation, such as The Queen of Water by Laura Resau and Virginia Farinango, set in Ecuador where a teen returns to her Indigenous village after years of being a servant for a wealthy family; Michael William's Now is the Time for Running, the story of a teen who escapes a massacre in Zimbabwe and faces racism in his journey to find safety; Fatima Sharafeddine's The Servant, set in Lebanon where a teen is sent from her poor village to the city to serve a wealthy couple; and J.L. Power's This Thing Called the Future about a Zulu teen in South Africa, growing up in poverty and the AIDs epidemic, who is caught in the clash between traditional and modern beliefs.

The reading of a classic can be followed by independent reading selected from global YA novels connected to the classic.

* After reading Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, students could read from science fiction, such as L.J. Adlington's The Diary of Pelly D, historical fiction about fascism, such as Ruta Sepetys's Between Shades of Gray, or about book banning, such as Marcus Zusak's The Book Thief, or novels on identity, such as Tara Sullivan's .

Of course, another possibility is to change the curriculum and replace several canonical texts with YA global literature. Bringing global literature into our classrooms opens students' minds to difference as a rich resource, not a problem, while inviting critical engagement. Literature provides a safe place to explore cultural diversity and to develop empathy, instead of judging those whose values or ways of living differ from our own. Through global literature, students come to understand their current lives and to imagine beyond themselves.

Take a look at all our pairings and suggestions for books and ideas in the Global book lists.
Journey through Worlds of Words during our open reading hours: Monday-Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Saturday, 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.

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Globalizing the Reading of Middle and High School Students * Worlds of Words

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Classics serve as the foundation of most secondary literature classrooms, but their domination is challenged by the call for perspectives that reflect our global society. Kathy Short offers pairings for middle and high school students that create a context for understanding classics and their relevance for teens.

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Today's YA fiction is brimming with real word content, raw issues, engaging plot lines, perfectly crafted fantasy worlds, differing perspectives, and characters of immense depth. Above all, it is honest and unapologetic, with titles seemingly for everyone (and if not, I believe we are consciously working towards this goal). So how do we get fiction of this magnitude into the hands of teenagers and into our classrooms? How do we use this rich content to bridge often-cited classic texts with relevancy and social issues?

We are at a pivotal moment in education. Last summer's renewed movement for Black Lives Matter, in response to the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, created a ripple effect and put social welfare and justice at the forefront of conversations. Now topics and issues that were historically shied away from in classrooms have been brought front and center, creating a perfect opportunity to reflect, adapt, and change our current practices to include culturally responsive teaching. There is power in representation and visibility. There is power in tackling tough conversations that lead to meaningful discussions. Let's challenge the status quo.

I understand disrupting a curriculum is a massive undertaking. We are going up against years of canonical tradition, systemic racism, and colonized education. Focus on what you can control in the four walls of your classroom. I believe that small shifts can create big change.

Before reimagining your classroom canon, make sure you have a solid foundation for the shift. Having worked with 9th-12th graders for the better part of 11 years, I can tell you that building strong relationships and providing engaging content (with student voice and choice) are the cornerstones of positive classroom culture and academic success.

First and foremost, you have to know your students. This means seeing and respecting them as individuals with different cultures, abilities, beliefs, identities, experiences, and feelings. You have to understand their strengths, interests and shortcomings, and how to support them accordingly. You have to know when to push and when to pull. Teenagers are complex and wildly interesting people. They are full of angst, passion, and questions, and if you can manage to engage and harness that power via your curriculum, you will be in for a truly magical experience.

I would like to help you create that magic. Let's take engaging YA lit and pair it with classic high school English texts to create a socially conscious, diverse approach to teaching and learning.

To do this, I have outlined the steps I take when creating modern pairings:

1. Recognize and address the possible roadblocks. A change to the curriculum is sometimes met with fear of deviating from tradition, lack of budget or funding, cultural and racial biases, or limited resources. These are all very real possibilities. Do not be deterred and start small in whatever way you can. The important part is that you recognize a need for change and try!

2. Start with what you have. What books are currently included in your curriculum? Are these flexible? Do you have to teach all of them? When you reflect on the authors, ask yourself whose voices and stories are celebrated and whose are left out? Do the texts provide windows (or opportunities for students to observe, learn, and empathize with others), and mirrors (or opportunities for students to see themselves reflected)? If you notice your curriculum is lacking diversity, or key voices are missing, ask yourself, how can I fix this?

3. Once you have surveyed your required reading, and identified the possible gaps in representation, review the titles. Ask yourself in what way are they all connected? What are the overarching themes or messages of the required texts? If you force yourself to move away from teaching in chronological order or fixating on content alone, the possibilities of connections become easier to make. When in doubt, you can always fall back on the connection lens: text to text, text to self, and text to world.

4. Then, research possible modern pairings. You can start with a simple Google search, ask colleagues for recommendations, read book blogs/reviews, or use the last YA book you have read as a starting point. Now combine this research with your content area expertise and brainstorm possible pairings. Think outside of the box, and focus on the universality of humanness and intersectionality to make unlikely connections. We are alike in more ways than we are different. Remember, these connections should encourage students to think critically about ideas that supersede the content on the page. I suggest beginning with 1-2 pairings per classic text.
Here are two examples:

1. Elie Wiesel's memoir , paired with Trevor Noah's YA edition of Born a Crime , and Between the World and Me by Ta Nehisi Coates. What are the overarching messages of these texts? This is where intersectionality is key. When I look at these texts I see the power of father and son relationships, the commodification of bodies, the systematic removal of humanity and dignity, and prejudice as a tool for power. You could also explore the author's craft and the importance of memoirs as historical texts.

2. J.D Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye paired with Angie Thomas's On the Come Up and I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter by Erika Sánchez. What do these texts have in common? To start, the characters/narrators are on a coming-of-age journey, all trying to find their voice and place in this world. With these novels, you can explore the teen experience and how time, place, relationships, and identity lead to reflection and personal discovery. Using this lens will show you that a wealthy white teen boy, a Mexican American teen girl, and a Black teen rapper can all have something in common.

5. Once you have solidified pairings for your required reading, consider the types of writing, creating, discussing, and listening that can take place with your new diverse cannon as a base. Will you focus on whole texts or key excerpts? Will you teach them in lit circles or entire class novels? What type of extension assignments can you create? What real-world happenings can you tie back to the texts? How can you encourage students to reflect and connect?

You have taken the first step. You have acknowledged the need for change in your classroom reading material and in turn, positively impacted the curriculum. Remember that we are always learning and growing. You will make mistakes, you will have questions, you will sometimes be uncomfortable and vulnerable. All of these are normal. The important thing is that you are consciously aware of the inequities in representation that exist and you are trying your best to create meaningful moments and opportunities for all students in your classroom. Our students deserve to go to school every day and be seen, heard, valued, and empowered to be the first best version of themselves. What pairings will you dream up?

Follow Gianna Macchia on Instagram to check out more modern YA pairings at @ required_reading_revisionist.

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Gianna Macchia is a Milwaukee-based educator and high school literacy coach. She believes reading cultivates empathy, and the more educators can encourage students to read, write, think, and discuss outside of their own perspective, the more they can contribute to building a more accepting, socially aware world. She thinks we should never doubt the power of representation and visibility, especially for adolescent youth. When Gianna isn't engrossed in YA books, she and her wife enjoy traveling, live music, hiking, cooking, and snuggling their pets Gatsby, Atticus, and Huckleberry, the literary brothers from different mothers.

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How to Pair Classic Texts With Modern YA Novels in the Classroom

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Today's YA fiction is brimming with real word content, raw issues, engaging plot lines, perfectly crafted fantasy worlds, differing perspectives, and characters of immense depth. Above all, it is honest and unapologetic, with titles seemingly for everyone (and if not, I believe we are consciously working towards this goal).

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Even though my quick trip to Houston for NCTE-CEL 2018 feels long ago, the lessons I walked away with have been playing on repeat in my mind since then:

1. How can English educators continue to provide windows and mirrors on the world through relevant instruction?

2. How can English educators evaluate their own biases in order to curate relevant materials and raise student achievement?

3. How can English educators authentically pique student curiosity to drive instruction?

It is those ubiquitous questions that have been guiding my planning of book clubs for next school year.

My district has been implementing the Reading Workshop model at the high school level over the past few years, so there has been a sharp increase in the amount of minutes students have been reading independently. During this time period, in order to live and breathe Reading Workshop in the classroom, I took a step back from book clubs.

Due to a master schedule change at my high school, we are in the midst of creating our 2019/2020 instructional calendars now. This moment feels like the right one to re-integrate literature book clubs back into the classroom, alongside Reading Workshop, and other forms of student-centered instruction.

Luckily, my English 9 colleagues here in the building have been thinking about making the same instructional adjustments next year. We have been collaborating to build a list of robust book titles from which students can choose during the corresponding unit.

To increase the number of titles we want to offer, I posted one simple question on Twitter: "What suggestions do you have for Lit Circle books that would pair "well" with Romeo+Juliet?"

Like any effective "tweacher," I inserted a slew of hashtags after that question: #DisruptTexts, #NCTE, #NCTEVillage #CEL18 #SchoologyAMB - though if you check out the original tweet, it says, "#SchoologgAMB" because even English teachers make typos!

Those three questions led to my simple request for a few book titles. I was hoping to get six or seven replies. I should have known better! I have received many titles in return from the Twitterverse! That is the thing about being a "tweacher": you're never alone and someone is always willing to help!

Below, you'll find lists for books that pair well with Romeo and Juliet. In sorting through all of the tweets, I had quite the English teacher moment. Alongside the suggestions was an entire backchannel conversation between authors and teachers about how much these books mean to teachers and students. I paused - real live authors, like Jennifer Niven, Barbara Dee, and Jacqueline Woodson, were involved in curating a book list!

Romeo+Juliet Book Pairings

1984 by George Orwell

All the Bright Places by Jennifer Niven

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz

Beastly by Alex Flinn

The Coffin Quilt: The Feud Between the Hatfields and the McCoys by Ann Rinaldi

Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell

Everything, Everything by Nicola Yoon

He Said, She Said by Kwame Alexander

If You Come Softly by Jacqueline Woodson

If You Could Be Mine by Sara Farizan

Love, Hate & Other Filters by Samira Ahmed

More Happy Than Not by Adam Silvera

Naughts and Crosses by Malorie Blackman

Once Upon a Marigold by Jean Ferris

Perfect Chemistry by Simone Elkeles

Pride by Ibi Zoboi

Red Glass by Laura Resau

Romeo and Juliet by Gareth Hinds

Romiette and Julio by Sharon Draper

Ronit & Jamil by Pamela L. Laskin

Saving Juliet by Suzanne Selfors

Scribbler of Dreams by Mary Pearson

Son of a Mob by Gordon Korman

Song of the Buffalo Boy by Sherry Garland

Star-Crossed by Barbara Dee

Street Love by Walter Dean Myers

The Fault in our Stars by John Green

The Lines We Cross by Randa Abdel-Fattah

The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton

The Sun is Also a Star by Nicola Yoon

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Huston

Tristan and Isolde

Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion

We Were Liars by E. Lockhart

West Side Story

When You Were Mine by Rebecca Serle
Independent Reading Support for a Core Text: Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
Compiled by Penny Kittle
Thank you to the many "someones" who helped to compile this robust list of book titles: Deanna M. Stephan is an English educator from Glen Mills, Pennsylvania. Follow her on Twitter:

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Book Pairing Ideas: Romeo and Juliet - NCTE

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Even though my quick trip to Houston for NCTE-CEL 2018 feels long ago, the lessons I walked away with have been playing on repeat in my mind since then: How can English educators continue to provide windows and mirrors on the world through relevant instruction?

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50 Beautiful Sentences from Young Adult Books

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Sometimes people think of young adult books as being easy, light, or dumbed down. Usually, these are people who don't read young adult books. These are likely the same people who say they hate The Hunger Games or Harry Potter without ever picking up the book series. YA is about teenagers.

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https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2019/12/19/learning/what-students-are-saying-about-how-to-improve-american-education.amp.html

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current events conversation

An international exam shows that American 15-year-olds are stagnant in reading and math. Teenagers told us what's working and what's not in the American education system.

In American schools, the achievement gap between high and low performers in reading has widened. We asked students how they think their education could improve. Related Article | Related Student Opinion Credit... Megan Jelinger/Agence France-Presse - Getty Images

Earlier this month, the Program for International Student Assessment announced that the performance of American teenagers in reading and math has been stagnant since 2000. Other recent studies revealed that two-thirds of American children were not proficient readers, and that the achievement gap in reading between high and low performers is widening.

We asked students to weigh in on these findings and to tell us their suggestions for how they would improve the American education system.

Our prompt received nearly 300 comments. This was clearly a subject that many teenagers were passionate about. They offered a variety of suggestions on how they felt schools could be improved to better teach and prepare students for life after graduation.

While we usually highlight three of our most popular writing prompts in our Current Events Conversation, this week we are only rounding up comments for this one prompt so we can honor the many students who wrote in.

Please note: Student comments have been lightly edited for length, but otherwise appear as they were originally submitted.
One of the biggest flaws in the American education system is the amount of pressure that students have on them to do well in school, so they can get into a good college. Because students have this kind of pressure on them they purely focus on doing well rather than actually learning and taking something valuable away from what they are being taught.

As a Freshman and someone who has a tough home life, I can agree that this is one of the main causes as to why I do poorly on some things in school. I have been frustrated about a lot that I am expected to learn in school because they expect us to learn so much information in such little time that we end up forgetting about half of it anyway. The expectations that I wish that my teachers and school have of me is that I am only human and that I make mistakes. Don't make me feel even worse than I already am with telling me my low test scores and how poorly I'm doing in classes.

I stay up well after midnight every night working on homework because it is insanely difficult to balance school life, social life, and extracurriculars while making time for family traditions. While I don't feel like making school easier is the one true solution to the stress students are placed under, I do feel like a transition to a year-round schedule would be a step in the right direction. That way, teachers won't be pressured into stuffing a large amount of content into a small amount of time, and students won't feel pressured to keep up with ungodly pacing.

In my school, we don't have the best things, there are holes in the walls, mice, and cockroaches everywhere. We also have a lot of stress so there is rarely time for us to study and prepare for our tests because we constantly have work to do and there isn't time for us to relax and do the things that we enjoy. We sleep late and can't ever focus, but yet that's our fault and that we are doing something wrong. School has become a place where we just do work, stress, and repeat but there has been nothing changed. We can't learn what we need to learn because we are constantly occupied with unnecessary work that just pulls us back.

As a student of an American educational center let me tell you, it is horrible. The books are out dated, the bathrooms are hideous, stress is ever prevalent, homework seems never ending, and worst of all, the seemingly impossible feat of balancing school life, social life, and family life is abominable. The only way you could fix it would be to lessen the load dumped on students and give us a break.

People my age have smaller vocabularies, and if they don't know a word, they just quickly look it up online instead of learning and internalizing it. The same goes for facts and figures in other subjects; don't know who someone was in history class? Just look 'em up and read their bio. Don't know how to balance a chemical equation? The internet knows. Can't solve a math problem by hand? Just sneak out the phone calculator.

My largest grievance with technology and learning has more to do with the social and psychological aspects, though. We've decreased ability to meaningfully communicate, and we want everything - things, experiences, gratification - delivered to us at Amazon Prime speed. Interactions and experiences have become cheap and 2D because we see life through a screen.

Kids now a days are always on technology because they are heavily dependent on it- for the purpose of entertainment and education. Instead of pondering or thinking for ourselves, our first instinct is to google and search for the answers without giving it any thought. This is a major factor in why I think American students tests scores haven't been improving because no one wants to take time and think about questions, instead they want to find answers as fast as they can just so they can get the assignment/ project over with.

There needs to be a healthier balance between pen and paper work and internet work and that balance may not even be 50:50. I personally find myself growing as a student more when I am writing down my assignments and planning out my day on paper instead of relying on my phone for it. Students now are being taught from preschool about technology and that is damaging their growth and reading ability. In my opinion as well as many of my peers, a computer can never beat a book in terms of comprehension.

Learning needs to be more interesting. Not many people like to study from their textbooks because there's not much to interact with. I think that instead of studying from textbooks, more interactive activities should be used instead. Videos, websites, games, whatever might interest students more. I'm not saying that we shouldn't use textbooks, I'm just saying that we should have a combination of both textbooks and technology to make learning more interesting in order for students to learn more.

At this point, it's not even the grades I'm worried about. It feels like once we've graduated high school, we'll be sent out into the world clueless and unprepared. I know many college students who have no idea what they're doing, as though they left home to become an adult but don't actually know how to be one.

The most I've gotten out of school so far was my Civics & Economics class, which hardly even touched what I'd actually need to know for the real world. I barely understand credit and they expect me to be perfectly fine living alone a year from now. We need to learn about real life, things that can actually benefit us. An art student isn't going to use Biology and Trigonometry in life. Exams just seem so pointless in the long run. Why do we have to dedicate our high school lives studying equations we'll never use? Why do exams focusing on pointless topics end up determining our entire future?
-Eliana D, Hoggard High School in Wilmington, NC
I think that the American education system can be improved my allowing students to choose the classes that they wish to take or classes that are beneficial for their future. Students aren't really learning things that can help them in the future such as basic reading and math.

I am frustrated about what I'm supposed to learn in school. Most of the time, I feel like what I'm learning will not help me in life. I am also frustrated about how my teachers teach me and what they expect from me. Often, teachers will give me information and expect me to memorize it for a test without teaching me any real application.

We divide school time as though the class itself is the appetizer and the homework is the main course. Students get into the habit of preparing exclusively for the homework, further separating the main ideas of school from the real world. At this point, homework is given out to prepare the students for ... more homework, rather than helping students apply their knowledge to the real world.

Standardized testing should honestly be another word for stress. I know that I stress over every standardized test I have taken and so have most of my peers. I mean they are scary, it's like when you take these tests you bring your No. 2 pencil and an impending fail.

Personally, for me I think standardized tests have a negative impact on my education, taking test does not actually test my knowledge - instead it forces me to memorize facts that I will soon forget.

Teachers will revolve their whole days on teaching a student how to do well on a standardized test, one that could potentially impact the final score a student receives. That is not learning. That is learning how to memorize and become a robot that regurgitates answers instead of explaining "Why?" or "How?" that answer was found. If we spent more time in school learning the answers to those types of questions, we would become a nation where students are humans instead of a number.
-Carter Osborn, Hoggard High School in Wilmington, NC
In private school, students have smaller class sizes and more resources for field trips, computers, books, and lab equipment. They also get more "hand holding" to guarantee success, because parents who pay tuition expect results. In public school, the learning is up to you. You have to figure stuff out yourself, solve problems, and advocate for yourself. If you fail, nobody cares. It takes grit to do well. None of this is reflected in a standardized test score.

I have always been told "Don't be a teacher, they don't get paid hardly anything." or "How do you expect to live off of a teachers salary, don't go into that profession." As a young teen I am being told these things, the future generation of potential teachers are being constantly discouraged because of the money they would be getting paid. Education in Americans problems are very complicated, and there is not one big solution that can fix all of them at once, but little by little we can create a change.

We cannot expect our grades to improve when we give teachers a handicap with poor wages and low supplies. It doesn't allow teachers to unleash their full potential for educating students. Alas, our government makes teachers work with their hands tied. No wonder so many teachers are quitting their jobs for better careers. Teachers will shape the rest of their students' lives. But as of now, they can only do the bare minimum.

The answer to solving the American education crisis is simple. We need to put education back in the hands of the teachers. The politicians and the government needs to step back and let the people who actually know what they are doing and have spent a lifetime doing it decide how to teach. We wouldn't let a lawyer perform heart surgery or construction workers do our taxes, so why let the people who win popularity contests run our education systems?

I'm someone who struggles when all the teacher does is say, "Go to page X" and asks you to read it. Simply reading something isn't as effective for me as a teacher making it interactive, maybe giving a project out or something similar. A textbook doesn't answer all my questions, but a qualified teacher that takes their time does. When I'm challenged by something, I can always ask a good teacher and I can expect an answer that makes sense to me. But having a teacher that just brushes off questions doesn't help me. I've heard of teachers where all they do is show the class movies. At first, that sounds amazing, but you don't learn anything that can benefit you on a test.

I've struggled in many classes, as of right now it's government. What is making this class difficult is that my teacher doesn't really teach us anything, all he does is shows us videos and give us papers that we have to look through a textbook to find. The problem with this is that not everyone has this sort of learning style. Then it doesn't help that the papers we do, we never go over so we don't even know if the answers are right.

The classes in which I succeed in most are the ones where the teachers are very funny. I find that I struggle more in classes where the teachers are very strict. I think this is because I love laughing. Two of my favorite teachers are very lenient and willing to follow the classes train of thought.

Whenever they are introduced to school at a young age, they are convinced by others that school is the last place they should want to be. Making school a more welcoming place for students could better help them be attentive and also be more open minded when walking down the halls of their own school, and eventually improve their test scores as well as their attitude while at school.

Students today feel voiceless because they are punished when they criticize the school system and this is a problem because this allows the school to block out criticism that can be positive leaving it no room to grow. I hope that in the near future students can voice their opinion and one day change the school system for the better.

The big thing that I have struggled with is the class sizes due to overcrowding. It has made it harder to be able to get individual help and be taught so I completely understand what was going on. Especially in math it builds on itself so if you don't understand the first thing you learn your going to be very lost down the road. I would go to my math teacher in the morning and there would be 12 other kids there.

The biggest issue facing our education system is our children's lack of motivation. People don't want to learn. Children hate school. We despise homework. We dislike studying. One of the largest indicators of a child's success academically is whether or not they meet a third grade reading level by the third grade, but children are never encouraged to want to learn. There are a lot of potential remedies for the education system. Paying teachers more, giving schools more funding, removing distractions from the classroom. All of those things are good, but, at the end of the day, the solution is to fundamentally change the way in which we operate.

I say one of the biggest problems is the support of families and teachers. I have heard many success stories, and a common element of this story is the unwavering support from their family, teachers, supervisors, etc. Many people need support to be pushed to their full potential, because some people do not have the will power to do it on their own. So, if students lived in an environment where education was supported and encouraged; than their children would be more interested in improving and gaining more success in school, than enacting in other time wasting hobbies that will not help their future education.

I wish that tests were graded based on how much effort you put it and not the grade itself. This would help students with stress and anxiety about tests and it would cause students to put more effort into their work. Anxiety around school has become such a dilemma that students are taking their own life from the stress around schoolwork. You are told that if you don't make straight A's your life is over and you won't have a successful future.

I personally think that there are many things wrong with the American education system. Everyone is so worried about grades and test scores. People believe that those are the only thing that represents a student. If you get a bad grade on something you start believing that you're a bad student. GPA doesn't measure a students' intelligence or ability to learn. At young ages students stop wanting to come to school and learn. Standardized testing starts and students start to lose their creativity.

Currently, I'm in a math class that changed my opinion of math. Math class just used to be a "meh" for me. But now, my teacher teachers in a way that is so educational and at the same time very amusing and phenomenal. I am proud to be in such a class and with such a teacher. She has changed the way I think about math it has definitely improve my math skills. Now, whenever I have math, I am so excited to learn new things!

At the moment, the one class that I really feel supported in is math. My math teachers Mrs. Siu and Ms. Kamiya are very encouraging of mistakes and always are willing to help me when I am struggling. We do lots of classwork and discussions and we have access to amazing online programs and technology. My teacher uses Software called OneNote and she does all the class notes on OneNote so that we can review the class material at home. Ms. Kamiya is very patient and is great at explaining things. Because they are so accepting of mistakes and confusion it makes me feel very comfortable and I am doing very well in math.

One of the classes that made learning easier for me was sixth-grade math. My teacher allowed us to talk to each other while we worked on math problems. Talking to the other students in my class helped me learn a lot quicker. We also didn't work out of a textbook. I feel like it is harder for me to understand something if I just read it out of a textbook. Seventh-grade math also makes learning a lot easier for me. Just like in sixth-grade math, we get to talk to others while solving a problem. I like that when we don't understand a question, our teacher walks us through it and helps us solve it.

My 2nd grade class made learning easy because of the way my teacher would teach us. My teacher would give us a song we had to remember to learn nouns, verbs, adjectives, pronouns, etc. which helped me remember their definitions until I could remember it without the song. She had little key things that helped us learn math because we all wanted to be on a harder key than each other. She also sang us our spelling words, and then the selling of that word from the song would help me remember it.

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What Students Are Saying About How to Improve American Education (Published 2019)

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current events conversation An international exam shows that American 15-year-olds are stagnant in reading and math. Teenagers told us what's working and what's not in the American education system. Earlier this month, the Program for International Student Assessment announced that the performance of American teenagers in reading and math has been stagnant since 2000.

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I wanted to explore this a little more after reading our required reading, "Miles Morales: Spider-Man and Reimagining the Canon for Social Justice". I had known what the school-to-prison pipeline was beforehand, but just wanted some more general information. This article does a decent job of explaining what it is, and so does the podcast I listened to, "Zero Tolerance Policies and the School to Prison Pipeline" by Jake Howard (which I found on Spoitfy for those of you who have it).

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In Meridian, Miss., police routinely arrest and transport youths to a juvenile detention center for minor classroom misbehaviors. In Jefferson Parish, La., according to a U.S. Department of Justice complaint, school officials have given armed police "unfettered authority to stop, frisk, detain, question, search and arrest schoolchildren on and off school grounds." In Birmingham, Ala., police officers are permanently stationed in nearly every high school.

In fact, hundreds of school districts across the country employ discipline policies that push students out of the classroom and into the criminal justice system at alarming rates-a phenomenon known as the school-to-prison pipeline.

Last month, Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., held the first federal hearing on the school-to-prison pipeline-an important step toward ending policies that favor incarceration over education and disproportionately push minority students and students with disabilities out of schools and into jails.

In opening the hearing, Durbin told the subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee, "For many young people, our schools are increasingly a gateway to the criminal justice system. This phenomenon is a consequence of a culture of zero tolerance that is widespread in our schools and is depriving many children of their fundamental right to an education."

A wide array of organizations-including the Southern Poverty Law Center, the NAACP and Dignity in Schools-offered testimony during the hearing. They joined representatives from the Departments of Education and Justice to shine a national spotlight on a situation viewed far too often as a local responsibility.

"We have a national problem that deserves federal action," Matthew Cregor, an attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, explained. "With suspension a top predictor of dropout, we must confront this practice if we are ever to end the 'dropout crisis' or the so-called achievement gap." In the words of Vermont's Sen. Patrick Leahy, "As a nation, we can do better."

What is the School-to-Prison Pipeline?

Policies that encourage police presence at schools, harsh tactics including physical restraint, and automatic punishments that result in suspensions and out-of-class time are huge contributors to the pipeline, but the problem is more complex than that.

The school-to-prison pipeline starts (or is best avoided) in the classroom. When combined with zero-tolerance policies, a teacher's decision to refer students for punishment can mean they are pushed out of the classroom-and much more likely to be introduced into the criminal justice system.

Who's in the Pipeline?

Students from two groups-racial minorities and children with disabilities-are disproportionately represented in the school-to-prison pipeline. African-American students, for instance, are 3.5 times more likely than their white classmates to be suspended or expelled, according to a nationwide study by the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights.

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Policies and practices that favor incarceration over education do us all a grave injustice.

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#Disrupt Texts is a crowdsourced, grass roots effort by teachers for teachers to challenge the traditional canon in order to create a more inclusive, representative, and equitable language arts curriculum that our students deserve. It is part of our mission to aid and develop teachers committed to anti-racist/anti-bias teaching pedagogy and practices.

We believe that literacy is liberation. By developing students' literacy skills, we support their ability to critically read and navigate a democratic society. To be literate in today's world, students must develop empathy and an understanding of a diversity of experiences.

We do not believe in censorship and have never supported banning books. This claim is outright false. It is a mischaracterization of our work made to more easily attack us, serve an agenda, and discredit the need for antiracist education. Teachers and schools determine curriculum for any number of reasons, and in fact, we know that censorship and banning efforts disproportionately hurts LGBTQIA+ authors and BIPoC authors are already underrepresented in the publishing industry.

We believe that literature provides access to a diversity of experiences by providing "mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors" (Bishop, 1990) to develop empathy and understanding. A curriculum that does not reflect the diversity of human experience does a disservice to all students.

We believe that no curricular or instructional decision is a neutral one. For too long, the traditional "canon" - at all grade levels - has excluded the voices and rich literary legacies of communities of color. This exclusion hurts all students, and especially students of color.

We believe that critical analysis of all texts helps students become stronger thinkers. Each of us has studied, taught, and continue to teach from canonical texts, just as we also make intentional choices about teaching, pairing, and centering BIPOC voices.

Thus, #DisruptTexts advocates for curriculum and instructional practices that are culturally responsive and antiracist.

You can read and learn more about #DisruptTexts and its founders by browsing the site, including the publications and media page.

In addition, please follow #DisruptTexts on Twitter as teachers from across the country and world come together to apply a critical lens on a central text (the 2021 #DisruptTexts Twitter chat topics and schedule TBD.) We'll discuss how to disrupt traditional pedagogies by suggesting alternative titles and approaches through thoughtful pairings, counter-narratives, and inclusive, diverse texts sets.

The #DisruptTexts chat and website are facilitated by Tricia Ebarvia, Lorena German, Dr. Kim Parker, and Julia Torres.

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Disrupt Texts is a crowdsourced, grass roots effort by teachers for teachers to challenge the traditional canon in order to create a more inclusive, representative, and equitable language arts curriculum that our students deserve. It is part of our mission to aid and develop teachers committed to anti-racist/anti-bias teaching pedagogy and practices.

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How you proceed from there-by removing the book from your library altogether or using it as a tool for learning-is up to you and your school or district leaders. In certain cases, you might want to label a book for your students as one that portrays negative stereotypes. Encourage your students (should they choose to read these stories) to talk about how these books stereotypically represent diverse communities and how they could be written in a more inclusive manner that reflects our culture today.

If you haven't read the story yourself or are unsure of how your own experiences may influence your perspective, do research online to find out what reputable sources are saying about the book. For example, the San Francisco Public Library put together a resource of several books containing negative stereotypes that the library continues to circulate for research purposes and because of public demand.

The bottom line: books that aren't telling the stories of marginalized people respectfully can be used to spur conversations about why these texts can be offensive. Note that there are many diverse books published in recent years that represent cultures in positive ways and are worth considering.

2. Include as Many Unique Perspectives as Possible

When you think about diversity for your library selection, be inclusive of many life experiences. While it's important to find stories that feature every race and culture, it can also help to include books featuring children with disabilities or nontraditional family structures, for instance. Students who deal with mental health issues would benefit greatly from reading about kids their age facing similar challenges.

Not sure where to get started? Here's a checklist that covers the many characters and perspectives that should be featured prominently in your library.

3. Consider the Stories That Feature Diverse Characters

While your students can benefit from knowing about the difficult moments behind the history of diverse communities, consider also having them read stories about diverse people in fun, casual settings. Ideally, your diverse classroom library will reflect both of these scenarios.

For example, you might add books to your library featuring Asian characters that focus on difficult and emotional subjects, such as immigration or Japanese internment camps, as well as about Asian children doing fun and exciting things, like battling magical creatures or playing in a band at school. This wide range of subject matters can help reinforce to your students that everyone is equal, and everyone deserves a wonderful life.

4. Ask for Help from Your Class

Another great way to build a diverse and inclusive library designed for your classroom is to include your students and their parents in the process. You might ask everyone in your class-whether through an online poll or by carving out time during the day-to share what kinds of stories they'd love to read. While not every family may be able to contribute, you can give them the option to donate any diverse books they have at home.

For instance, you can ask students to list specific titles or even just give a general description of stories they crave. Not only will your students get the chance to share what they're excited to read about, but they will also feel important and included. It's a win-win situation all around!

Including the parents in the conversation can also offer an inside perspective from someone who knows what would benefit their child. For example, their child may be struggling with anxiety and would benefit from reading stories centered around that topic. With this additional information and input, you'll be able to build an inclusive library filled with diverse stories covering a wide range of people and perspectives.

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6 Tips for Building a Diverse Classroom Library

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How you proceed from there-by removing the book from your library altogether or using it as a tool for learning-is up to you and your school or district leaders. In certain cases, you might want to label a book for your students as one that portrays negative stereotypes.

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Research clearly demonstrates that a robust, high-quality classroom library impacts student achievement. Students who have access to an extensive, exemplary classroom library read more, read more widely for a variety of purposes, demonstrate more positive attitudes toward reading, and score higher on standardized tests of reading achievement. In this way, students are more likely to achieve the goals of college and career readiness.

Successful skill-building classroom libraries do the following:

Support literacy instruction.

Help students learn about books.

Provide a central location for classroom resources.

Provide opportunities for independent reading and curricular extensions.

Serve as a place for students to talk about and interact with books.

Here are the 11 essentials every classroom library must have to be effective:
1. A minimum of 750 books in good condition.

2. Thirty books per student.

3. 30% of the books in your classroom library have been published in the last 3-5 years (at a minimum).

4. 5 new books per student are added to your classroom library each year.

5. 50-70% of your classroom library consists of nonfiction books.

6. 10% of your classroom library consists of reference books (at a minimum).

7. 25% of your classroom library consists of multicultural books (at a minimum).

8. The reading level of your classroom library expands to cover two to three years above and below grade level. ( Here's a handy link to book lists for every guided reading level.)

9. Multiple copies of popular titles and text sets appear in your classroom library so multiple students can read these at the same time.

10. A rich variety of genres is included in your classroom library so children are exposed to: realistic fiction, historical fiction, fantasy and science fiction, biography and autobiography, stories, classics, myths and legends, picture books, reference, poetry, comic books and graphic novels, and more.

11. Digital texts, ebooks, and multimedia such as interactive whiteboard technology.

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11 Essentials for a Highly Effective Classroom Library

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Research clearly demonstrates that a robust, high-quality classroom library impacts student achievement. Students who have access to an extensive, exemplary classroom library read more, read more widely for a variety of purposes, demonstrate more positive attitudes toward reading, and score higher on standardized tests of reading achievement.

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https://www.scholastic.com/teachers/teaching-tools/book-lists/resources/diverse-young-adult-book-list.html

https://www.buzzfeed.com/jemimaskelley/diverse-ya

https://www.edutopia.org/article/22-diverse-book-choices-all-grade-levels

https://resilienteducator.com/classroom-resources/diverse-childrens-books/

https://www.edutopia.org/article/7-diverse-texts-bolster-reading-lessons

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By the time readers are young adults, their worlds have broadened to include a wide range of people and life experiences that inform their developing identities. As teenage readers discover who they are, it's important that they have access to stories that reflect and celebrate the full range of human experiences and a diversity of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, physical and mental abilities, religion, and culture.

The following topics and themes are explored in this list:

Race and Ethnicity - diversity in race and ethnicity in the text

Social Justice - civil disobedience, advocacy, and attempts to seek justice for oppressed groups of people

Immigration - immigrant and emigrant experiences

LGBTQIA+ - featuring characters who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual, or any identification within the LGBTQIA+ spectrum

Neurodiversity and Neurodivergence - featuring characters who have neurological variances and differences, such as autism, dyslexia, and ADHD

Physical Disability - featuring characters with impairments that limit physical functioning

Mental Health - featuring characters with temporary, cyclical, or episodic mental illnesses and other mental health struggles

For even more Scholastic books that explore these themes, check out our catalog, The Power of Story: Diverse Books for All Readers.

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Diverse and Inclusive Books to Inspire Young Adults

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By the time readers are young adults, their worlds have broadened to include a wide range of people and life experiences that inform their developing identities. As teenage readers discover who they are, it's important that they have access to stories that reflect and celebrate the full range of human experiences and a diversity of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, physical and mental abilities, religion, and culture.

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The need to encourage empathy for others is being felt in classrooms across the country. Libraries can be key to facilitating these discussions and understandings. Jennifer Williams is a literacy specialist at Calliope Global, professor at Saint Leo University in the College of Education and Graduate Education, and member of the Board of Directors for the International Literacy Association. Be sure to join Jennifer for #Globaledchat on Twitter tomorrow, September 7 at 8pm ET to learn more tips and strategies. Just type #Globaledchat into the Twitter search box and join the conversation!
"Empathy is about finding echoes of another person in yourself."- Mohsin Hamid

Collectively as teachers in schools of today, we are given the gift of spending our days with classrooms of children and witnessing their young life experiences. This gift affords us moments where students share with us their greatest joys and reasons for happiness, but also their fears and concerns and uncertainties. Reflective of our increasingly global and diverse world, our students are unique in every sense of the word-in culture and religion and race and disposition. Each student comes to us in our classrooms with different sets of backgrounds and passions and with diverse and distinct learning styles and learning needs.

With intentional practice and careful construction of the learning experience, we as educators can work to inspire and nurture thoughtful exploration of sensitive topics related to differences in our class communities-moving conflict to a place of shared experience and shifting discord and disagreement to much-needed dialogue and repair. We see that through exercises of self-reflection, perspective taking, active listening, and conscious awareness of differences, we can support our students (and ourselves) to challenge understandings both in responsive practices, such as deconstructing biases, as well as with constructive practices to build empathy. And, paired with activities of culturally responsive teaching, our classroom libraries can become safe spaces for the sharing of stories-serving as entry points for discovery of the unknown and of the unspoken.

By filling our classroom libraries with books that offer compelling storylines and diversity in topics, we as teachers can demonstrate to students that there is not a universal experience. Support for this is evidenced by the work and research of organizations such as We Need Diverse Books and Teaching Tolerance and as powerfully expressed by author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in her 2009 TEDTalk. Through a description of her experience growing up as a Nigerian student reading stories of children that did not look like her or come from a world like hers, she poignantly asserted that there is true danger in the showing of a single story. Offered with transcripts/subtitles in more than 46 languages, her talk titled "The Danger of a Single Story" has now been viewed by over 13 million people.

We can clearly see in our classrooms that there is not a single story, but that there is power and beauty in sharing many stories. As our students begin to construct their own narratives of self, we can support them by filling our classroom libraries with books of diverse characters that they can look to and within see themselves or those whom which they care.

Here are five steps to help you and your students to create a diverse classroom library. Thirty book titles are also offered for exploration below. Through purpose and intention, we as teachers and guides of learning can work to ensure that all perspectives are included in the conversations of our classrooms and that literature and the sharing of stories bring us all closer to a place of understanding, compassion, and empathy.

5 Steps to Creating Your Diverse Classroom Library

Step 1. The process of building a diverse classroom library is an intentional one that involves dedicated time and thought. Consider the students in your class and the topics important to your community that you want represented. Openly discuss with students that you are dedicated to building a diverse classroom library and share reasons why you feel this is important.

Step 2. Survey your students to see what books they would like to see in the classroom library, and create a visible criteria checklist for the class to help frame the decision-making process. Criteria could include points such as: characters from diverse backgrounds or cultures; settings in different countries; themes or topics that build on current social justice and global issues; inclusion of words in different languages; or stories written from more than one perspective. Provide question prompts to students and invite them to submit anonymous responses. Question prompts for students could include:

1. What types of characters would you like to see represented in our books?

2. What challenges does our community face that should be reflected in our classroom library? ("community" can be considered from any level: self, class, school, family, town, country, or world)

3. What is one thing people do not know about you that you wish they did?

4. Complete this sentence: I want to read a story about someone who _____________.

Step 3. Together with your students, take an inventory of the books you currently have in your classroom. Evaluate books in terms of both text and illustrations. Consider donating or storing books that do not meet your classroom needs or find ways to showcase titles that perhaps have been hiding in the back of shelves and deserve to be revisited. Build in time to allow students to share reasons they would select to keep or remove books from the classroom library. Revisit the criteria checklist and continue to make edits or revisions based on reflections and new thinking.

Step 4. Invite students to research books through online searches or school library visits. With new focus on searching for diverse books, students may discover books in their own home libraries or from family member recommendations. Welcome students to share book titles during group lessons and invite students to read excerpts or favorite pages to give other students previews of stories. Favorite and treasured books can be placed on display for all to see and review.

Step 5. Following the cooperative process of creating a final book list of titles with your students, consider creative options for funding. DonorsChoose, GoFundMe, and other funding platforms help connect classrooms with donors that want to help students by giving to school projects. The FirstBook organization also provides a marketplace of free resources and reduced-priced books with multi-cultural titles, a library of global stories, and selections focused on social-emotional learning. Consider creating an Amazon.com Wishlist of titles. The wishlist can easily be shared via a weblink that can directly connect parents or community members to book titles. Books purchased will be delivered directly to your school.

As you review books lists and titles, below are 30 books spanning Pre-Kindergarten through Grade 12 that would be wonderful additions to any diverse classroom library. Also, please share your favorite titles or pictures of your diverse classroom library on social media with the hashtag #globaledchat.
You can connect with Jennifer and Heather on Twitter.

Author: Jacqueline Woodson
Explored Topics: African-American Culture, History, Family, Moving

Author: Andrea Davis Pinkney
Explored Topics: Global Studies (Sudan), Violence, Refugee Stories, Friendship, Family, Perseverance

Books for Upper Grades (9th-12th)

Authors: Jason Reynolds & Brendan Kiely
Explored Topics: Race Relations & Racism, Violence

Quote image created on Pablo.

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5 Steps to Build a Diverse Classroom Library and Encourage Empathy (Opinion)

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The need to encourage empathy for others is being felt in classrooms across the country. Libraries can be key to facilitating these discussions and understandings. Jennifer Williams is a literacy specialist at Calliope Global, professor at Saint Leo University in the College of Education and Graduate Education, and member of the Board of Directors for the International Literacy Association.

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Romeo and Juliet is on my syllabus this year, as it has been for the last six years, in two different schools. I'm not alone-William Shakespeare is one of the most widely taught authors in U.S. English classrooms, and the only author required by name in the Common Core State Standards for English/language arts. But in recent years, my Shakespeare assignments are tinged with guilt.

I'm not the only person who is starting to question Shakespeare's prominence in our classrooms. In 2016, students at Yale University petitioned the school to "decolonize" its reading lists, including by removing its Shakespeare requirement. Teachers are realizing that a lot of the curriculum in our classrooms privileges white, male, European voices, and are beginning to question Shakespeare's relevance for students.

Yet the idea of removing Shakespeare from schools is fraught. A teacher who wrote a piece in The Washington Post calling for Shakespeare to be removed from the classroom was lambasted in the comments section and called a "buffoon," among other names. Many view Shakespeare as classic literature, inherently good for everyone to read.

Five years ago, I would have agreed that teaching Shakespeare is inherently good. The English-and-theater major in me would have considered it sacrilegious to remove the Bard from our collective educational experiences.

Now, however, I feel guilty when I agree to another year of Romeo and Juliet. I still feel excited about diving into language I love with my students or helping them parse a difficult line. But at the very same time, I wonder if Shakespeare is actually good for my students to read.

Weighing the Role of a Classic

As I've grown as an educator, I've begun to question the merit and relevance of the canon, the historically white-and-male-authored list of "classic literature" works that includes Shakespeare, in my classroom.

My kids deserve to study stories that represent and validate their experiences and cultures, something I know is important for their development. Questioning how well Shakespeare serves that goal is crucial, especially considering that, as National Public Radio's "Code Switch" podcast recently explored, some of his stories perpetuate problematic and outdated ideas about gender roles and historically oppressed cultures. The Merchant of Venice's treatment of its Jewish character, Shylock, for instance, is widely criticized as anti-Semitic.

All of this leads me to ask: How important is it that my students read Shakespeare? Arguments about Shakespeare in schools often end in diametrically opposed solutions: Either continue to study his plays with zealous infatuation or strip them completely from classrooms.

I struggle with the idea of completely removing Shakespeare from our schools. It's not because I love his work (though I do). And it's not because I believe his plays are the only texts that allow students to grapple with complex or poetic language; Gabriel García Márquez or Toni Morrison, among others, provide those opportunities for students as well.

I struggle because Shakespeare's institutionalization in our education system reflects how pervasive he is in society. His work is referenced in novels, movies, Levi's commercials, and board games. If I remove Shakespeare from my students' experience, I remove access to cultural capital that could help them understand some aspects of American society. Yes, our classrooms can be the place that begins to shift cultural values and introduce other voices, but I can't ignore the fact that the world I send my students into is permeated with Shakespeare's language and stories.

I am turning my guilt into search for balance in my own use of Shakespeare's works. Studying Shakespeare doesn't have to be solely "exposure to great literature." It can be an opportunity for students to interact with a text in the American zeitgeist and form their own opinions. Our kids should interrogate the merit of Shakespeare's plays and the amount of attention his work gets. Students can better disrupt the narrative of Shakespeare as inherently good, classic literature if they have some knowledge of his work and the history of his influence.

A Question of Balance

One way to find balance is to consider how frequently Shakespeare is required during a student's time in school. Because of his place in the canon, Shakespeare may be over-represented in a school's curriculum (some schools, I discovered, have students reading one play a year from 6th grade to graduation). We should question the amount of time we require study of his work compared to other writers.

At my school, I plan to ask if it's possible to require that students read only one or two-instead of the current three-Shakespeare plays in their time with us.

We can also rethink how we use his texts. Can we involve students in the conversation, teaching them to interrogate why Shakespeare is more prevalent in our society than James Baldwin, Lois-Ann Yamanaka, or other writers from nonwhite backgrounds? Could we use excerpts of Shakespeare's works as supplemental reading in conversation with other texts for critical analysis? Could we provide students experiences with Shakespeare while still making space for authors whose voices should not be ignored?

I believe we can and should. Additionally, we can leverage Shakespeare's power in the literary world to discuss important issues like race and gender roles with our students. I use Romeo and Juliet to have conversations about toxic masculinity and how men are treated when they show emotion. Why does Romeo say love has made him more effeminate? What can we learn from this language about masculinity at that time? Why is Romeo berated when he cries after being banished?

One way this could work, at the high school level, is to share that NPR "Code Switch" episode, called "All That Glisters Is Not Gold," with students. In it, Shakespeare scholar Ayanna Thompson says there are "three toxic [Shakespeare] plays that resist rehabilitation and appropriation." Students could choose one play to research (read excerpts, scholarly works, see parts of the film, etc.). Afterward, students could share whether they agree or disagree with Thompson, and possibly recommend an alternative play.

The Folger Shakespeare Library provides a good resource on using The Merchant of Venice and an adaptation called District Merchants to help students grapple with identity and difference. The Tempest can be taught through a post-colonial lens, comparing Caliban's search for belonging and anger at Prospero to the feelings of historically colonized people. Othello is ripe for discussions about racism now, the history of racism, and how we treat "the Other."

We must "give up Shakespeare worship," as the Folger Shakespeare Library's education program says. Simply because Shakespeare is prevalent does not mean his writing is sacred. Believing and teaching our students that all his works are fundamentally "good" is a disservice to our kids.

Teachers must be upfront about the problematic aspects of Shakespeare's plays. We must call out the misogyny in The Taming of the Shrew, the racism in Othello, and the anti-Semitism in The Merchant of Venice. When I read Romeo and Juliet with my students, I pause, give a thumbs-down, and say "Boo" when the play says something misogynistic. Then, we discuss why it's problematic. Students deserve to interrogate, disagree with, and even dislike Shakespeare's plays.

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Why I'm Rethinking Teaching Shakespeare in My English Classroom (Opinion)

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It's high time to question the place of Shakespeare in our classrooms, writes middle school teacher Christina Torres. Our kids deserve to study stories that represent and validate their experiences and cultures. But throwing the Bard out entirely isn't the answer either.

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Broad ideas for you class opening "Hook"

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Broad ideas for you class opening "Hook"

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Trying to think of an opening hook to begin each class can be creatively draining, especially if we really care about getting the students' attention, excitement and focus for the day's lesson. This article gives very broad ideas for opening classroom "hooks" and how to utilize them within the day's lesson.

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Many lecturers launch immediately into their talks without much in the way of introduction. There is a better approach: Begin your lectures with The Hook. The Hook is an attention-getting device that you use to help students engage in the lecture from the outset.

The Hook should be compelling enough to encourage students to set aside thinking about other things to focus on the lecture. If you seed engagement at the beginning, students are likely to try to stay with you throughout the session.

The Hook also sends a signal to the students about your lecture style so that they are better able to follow you, and it also provides them with a glimpse of the central message of the talk, which in turn can help their comprehension. There are many different approaches to The Hook, including the following:

1. Use a Quotation

A quotation from someone famous in your field or perhaps from popular culture can set the scene of a given lecture, be thought-provoking because it borrows authority, and help students to see the importance of the topic. Using the same quote to start and end the session can bookend the lecture and reinforce the lecture's theme.

2. Pose an Intriguing Question

A good question can help focus students' attention on the most important issue you are there to discuss. Bringing the question back at the end of the session can help students understand the value of the lecture, particularly if you have, at least in part,

answered the question. Alternately, consider introducing a new intriguing question that relates to the initial question, and that may pique interest in the upcoming lecture.

3. Show a Statistic

Provide an interesting or impressive statistic to start and end a lecture. This can draw in student learners and help them to understand the importance of a topic. An alternate universe scenario. You can capture student attention by providing a provocative what-if scenario.

4. Employ an Open-Ended Rhetorical Question or Series of Rhetorical Questions

You can start a lecture by asking students to consider an answer to a rhetorical question. Avoid asking a question that can be answered with a simple yes or no. If the question is not thought-provoking, students may shut down and quit listening.

5. Make a Contrarian Statement

You can begin a lecture by taking the opposite viewpoint on something that may be conventional wisdom.

6. Provide Unusual Detail

Consider starting a lecture with an unusual detail or little-known fact.

7. Tell a Story

Stories can be one of the most effective ways to start a lecture. People make sense of the world through stories, and moreover, we simply enjoy them.

The key to The Hook is to know your audience so that you can gauge how best to capture their attention. When you plan The Hook, try to imagine how students will react to it. Only use a relevant hook; if you try to use one just to be clever, students will know.

A professor in a course on leadership wanted to seed engagement at the very beginning of each lecture. She, therefore, developed a repertoire of Hooks, including the following:

Quotations

"A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus."-Martin

Luther King, Jr.

"Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things."-Peter Drucker

"The first rule of leadership: everything is your fault."-Hopper, A Bug's Life

Statistic or fact

"According to the Grant Thornton International (2015), the percentage of women in senior business roles globally is 24; the percentage of firms with no women in senior management is 33."

An alternate universe scenario

"What if Steve Jobs had not been born?"

Open-Ended Rhetorical Question

"How do leaders become leaders?" or "What characteristics are essential to be a leader?"

Contrarian Statement

"Good leaders work smarter, not harder. That's what people say. I don't believe that. I believe that great leaders are exceptionally hard workers."

Unusual Detail

"Leaders have been around since humans began to live together in clans and tribes. Leadership research, however, is a relatively new field, with the first analyses of leadership starting only in the early twentieth century."

A Story

The following story is attributed to Gandhi and recounted by Erika Andersen in her book, Leading So People Will Follow(Jossey-Bass © 2012)to illustrate leading by example:
A young mother came to Gandhi leading her little boy by the hand and said, "Mahatma Ji, my son eats far too many sweets, and I'm concerned for his heath. If you tell him to stop, he will do it out of respect for you." Gandhi nodded, looked thoughtful, and then asked the mother to return in two weeks. Puzzled, the young woman did as he asked. Two weeks later, she returned and waited again to have the chance to speak to the master. When she came to the front of the line, she bowed respectfully to Gandhi and said, "Mahatma Ji, I came to you before and asked you to help my son understand he must not eat so many sweets. You asked me to return in two weeks, and so here we are." Gandhi smiled and said, "Ah yes, I remember." He turned to the little boy and said gravely, "Son, your health is very precious, and eating too much sugar could hurt your body and your teeth. You must stop eating so many sweets. Will you do that?" The little boy ducked his head, awed, and replied, "Yes, Gandhi Ji." The mother thanked Gandhi and then said, "Forgive me Mahatma Ji, but why did you make us wait? I don't understand why you couldn't have said that same thing two weeks ago." Gandhi replied, "Two weeks ago, I was eating too much sugar myself." Do you use any "hook" strategies in the classroom? Share your experiences with them in the comments below.
Excerpted and adapted from Interactive Lecturing: A Handbook for College Faculty by Elizabeth F. Barkley, Claire H. Major. Copyright ©, 2018, Wiley. All rights reserved.

About the Author

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More Content by Elizabeth F. Barkley

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7 Ways to Use "The Hook" to Grab Students' Attention

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Many lecturers launch immediately into their talks without much in the way of introduction. There is a better approach: Begin your lectures with The Hook. The Hook is an attention-getting device that you use to help students engage in the lecture from the outset.

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Five ideas on how to get students to really read books-and enjoy themselves while doing so.

All English teachers want their students to develop a love of reading, but this is anything but a simple endeavor. Although I used to give students time to read once a week in my English classes for several years, I always knew I wasn't making the impact I was aiming for.

After a few years, I was able to get the whole class to be silent during the reading period, but I realized that not all of the students were actually reading-and that my reading program was anything but a success.

A few summers ago, I read Donalyn Miller's The Book Whisperer, and it made me rethink everything I did when it came to choice reading. Now, not only do I have far fewer students "fake reading" but I've had several students tell me that they've read their first book ever by themselves in my class.

While I'm still constantly on the lookout for better ways to help my students find books they love and develop a habit of reading, I've put together a toolbox of concrete ways to make choice reading work in my class.

5 Tips to Get Students Really Reading

1. Make time for what's important: One crucial understanding I gleaned from Miller is that real readers read every day. Of course I knew this from my own reading life, but somehow I had failed to realize that I was ignoring this essential fact when it came to my students. I meet with my students for 54 minutes every day, and every last second of instructional time is precious. But making the decision to give my students 10 to 15 minutes a day to read choice books was easy once I thought about my priorities for learning.

Without a love of reading and the opportunity to practice reading skills, nothing else in my curriculum matters, and choice reading every day is one of the most effective ways I've found to support students in developing these skills.

2. Give students ready access to books: There's something powerful about having a good book immediately available to hand a student. I'm constantly on the lookout for books from yard sales, thrift stores, used bookstores, and student donations, but last year I discovered DonorsChoose.org, and it has vastly improved the health and appeal of my classroom collection of books.

I asked my students to list books they'd like to read on my classroom whiteboard and tapped into the young adult book recommendations of my teacher friends on social media. In less than half an hour, I set up a DonorsChoose project, and with a little bit of social media sharing and the help of some generous donors, I had boxes of crisp, new books for my students to open with great anticipation.

3. Make reading visible: Students don't always see the reading that's going on all around them, so I've made it my mission this year to make reading more immediately visible.

At the back of my room, there's a whiteboard labeled "Books We've Read" that's divided into four sections. There's one each for the three periods of sophomores I teach, and one for the teachers-me, my student teacher, and the resource teacher who assists in one of my classes. Everyone adds the titles of books as they finish them.

Recently, a student from one of my two sections of AP English asked me why their class wasn't up on the board. These more advanced classes don't have as many struggling readers as my sophomore classes, but it's just as important to celebrate reading with them, so I'll be adding two more sections to my board.

At the start of each month, I take a picture of the previous month's books and then clear the board to begin again. Students are getting a little competitive-even though I've told them we all win in this scenario-and they're very interested in what my co-teachers and I are reading.

They're also fascinated with a bulletin board in my room covered in pictures of educators on our campus holding some of their favorite books, from the shop teacher with his copy of Catcher in the Rye to the vice principal holding Stephen King's Christine.

4. Talk about books: Another way to make students aware of the reading all around them is to talk about it in the classroom. In addition to regular book talks, I make it a habit every day to ask the class, "How many people finished a book last night?" and "How many people read their choice books yesterday?" Although I know this isn't a scientific measure of growth in my classroom, it does give students a quick, daily opportunity to see the reading happening among their classmates, and it's a reminder of how much we value reading.

I've also started conferencing individually with students about their reading. Before we start our daily reading, I ask students to tell me what page they're on in their book. Since I write this down each day, I can quickly assess which students may want to discuss a book they've just finished and which students aren't making much progress in their reading-we'll discuss their thinking about their book, and if necessary I can suggest another that might better engage them.

I meet with approximately two to four students per day during our reading time. These discussions not only help students enjoy their reading more but also help me develop stronger relationships with them.

5. Be patient and relentless: The most valuable realization I've had in this decades-long endeavor to help my students learn to love reading is to just keep trying. There are so many brilliant teachers out there with so many good ideas for making things better in our classrooms, and if we stay connected and keep suggesting new books, talking about books, and trying different techniques-both new and old-our students will respond.

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Five ideas on how to get students to really read books-and enjoy themselves while doing so.

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Have you tried getting students to fall in love with a big white whale or a little girl named Scout? I have. And then I bumped up against checked-out, disinterested readers.

Many teens openly admit to disliking the assigned reading in English class. And those who don't confess are often expertly tucking cell phones in their copies of The Scarlet Letter, or skimming the SparkNotes of Great Expectations.

"Reading Snapchat but not Shakespeare deprives your soul!" we plead, but we must do more.

Fake reading is rampant.

It's damaging our students and future generations. Our teens face hundreds of pages of assigned reading each week in college. The intense reading workload for non-readers may greatly contribute to the nearly 50% drop out rate in college. Considering college loans average over 30k per student, and that almost any professional job requires a college degree, we must help our teens become real readers with robust stamina. ( Get tips on how to deal with fake reading from this Facebook Live event.)

One essential component to getting teens reading is choice.

Teens crave autonomy. They want characters, topics, themes, and settings they know and care about. They want books they understand so they feel good at reading and then want to read again and again. The road to real reading is built on choice.

But choice can't be the whole solution.

What about and Bradbury? Homer and Hemingway? Morrison and Milton? Wiesel and Wordsworth? Our students deserve these texts, too.

Nurturing teens' reading identity and stamina with choice is key. But so is exposing them to the complex texts English teachers know and love.

Every student, not just the AP student, is owed knowledge of the texts that have stood the test of time.

They all deserve an appreciation for authors who craft rich and compelling works that are relevant today, and for texts whose themes and narratives shape so many of today's stories in song, film, and media. How can we have both? Is having choice reading and classic class novels like having our cake and eating it too?

Rest assured, it can be done. Not only can we have both; we need both.

How does this work in a classroom?

Introduce students to skills using key excerpts of the class novel. Then ask them to apply those skills to books of their choice.

For example, an eighth grade teacher recently used an excerpt from The Outsiders to look at underlying conflicts within a novel. She spent a few minutes showing students her thinking and what she noticed as she read. Then, students went into their own novels and made sure to track not just the main, plot-driven conflict, but multiple conflicts. And everyone did so!

An eleventh grade teacher looked at the use of repeated imagery of the prison door and rosebush in The Scarlet Letter, showing students how he notices symbolism and what those repeated images stand for in the larger context of the novel. Readers turned to their own novels, paying attention to repeated images and symbolism. This transfer of a reading skill not only allowed students to take on the important work of readers, but it also let the teacher to see if students "got it."

In both classes, there is no fake reading. Pages turn, students have eyes on print, and the teacher is able to quietly help individuals and small groups with their work. No phones, no fake reading, no exhausted teacher.

Teachers around the country have proven it works.

Here is what they've found:

1. Engaged readers. Not just a select few, but all. No more fake reading or cell phones in books. Students identify as readers and boost reading stamina, all on their own.

2. Transfer. Now there's concrete proof that students "got it." Students watch the teacher trace the impact of minor characters on theme in Of Mice and Men. Then students do that same analysis in Insurgent or To Set a Watchman. Teachers clearly see who understands and can apply that skill, and who needs support.

3. Students read the classics by choice. Sure enough, when the classics aren't required reading, many teachers are finding students coming to those complex texts all on their own. And loving them.

4. Teachers rediscover the joy in teaching. They're getting to know their students through books, and students are forming communities of readers.

What can you try tomorrow to help end fake reading?

Try creating reading plans with your students, doing a book buzz (and here) on their phones, getting to theme by having them pull lines they love from books they love, or using these prompts so students apply high-level skills to texts of their choice, ie., books they want to and can read.

For a sample unit using a middle school level novel, click here. For high school units, nonfiction units, and planning templates, check out No More Fake Reading.

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How to Stop Fake Reading? Give Teens Choice, as Well as the Classics

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Have you tried getting students to fall in love with a big white whale or a little girl named Scout? I have. And then I bumped up against checked-out, disinterested readers. Many teens openly admit to disliking the assigned reading in English class.

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I'm here to share some tried and true tips and tricks to convert your fake readers into real readers.

To help our fake readers, we have to identify their coping behaviors that are helping them hide the fact that they aren't reading. Here is a list of 10 Ways to Spot a Fake Reader:

I always feel like I can spot a fake reader a mile away. That student who all of a sudden has to blow his nose the second independent reading starts. Or the student who thinks independent reading time is a great opportunity to catch up with friends. This is one of my biggest pet peeves. Reading time is a sacred time in our classroom, and my students know this from day one. No matter what, each year, I set out to convert those fake readers into real readers, and most of the time it works.

In the past, I have tried to eliminate those fake reading behaviors to try and stop the problem dead in its tracks. I've done things like restrict bathroom breaks and force my kids to stay in one spot throughout the duration of independent reading. The problem was, these fake readers were smart. As soon as I limited one behavior, they would come back with a different strategy. This became exhausting, and I wasn't doing what I set out to do...create REAL readers.

Read and make it fun.

The most important factor is having a classroom that is both centered around reading and celebrates reading. Let your kids sit and read self-selected books as much as possible. The only way to learn to love reading is to read. In our classroom, I read aloud to my students every single day. I carefully select some of the best books and use fun voices for the characters. I do my best to make the story come alive for my readers so much so that it makes them see how much fun reading can be.

I tell my students about what I'm reading at home and share new books with them every chance I get. I even make them do a drum roll on their desks each time I introduce a new book to our library. Usually, this leads to a waiting list for that book! I ask questions about their books, and I always let them choose what they want to read. Make sure you hype book orders by highlighting some phenomenal choices or by calling out students in front of the class and saying that you think they'd love a certain book. I promise that will get a big smile and a positive reaction. One time, I simply said out loud how I wish we could just have a whole read-in day where we get to read for seven hours straight, and my students went nuts over this idea. Even the non-readers were begging me to have a day like this!

By letting your kids just read and making it fun, they will want to read more. In my opinion, once those fake readers hear about and see all the fun the real readers are having, they will surely want to join in on what they are missing out on.

Observe your students.

I took the advice of Donalyn Miller in her book Wild Readers, and I started observing the fake readers over a few days and took notes. Miller recommends a few days of observation because the student could just be having a bad day.

After my observations, I discovered quite a bit about my fake readers. Some were just taking a bit longer to get settled into their books but were indeed reading (not a huge problem). Some were reading books in genres that they liked, but that were far too advanced for them (a student who reads far below grade level came back from the library with Eragon from the Inheritance Cycle-yikes!). Others were reading genres that I know do not appeal to them.

Confer with your fake readers and make a plan to help them.

Donalyn Miller says it's best: confronting students about their fake reading behaviors requires delicacy and care. Some students deny that they are fake reading. The last thing you want to do is undermine a student's confidence and feelings of self-worth. I completely agree. It's so important to have honest conversations with your fake readers and to be explicit with them. Most of these students have probably never had a positive experience finishing a book or connecting with a book. To be honest, I typically share the exact notes and observations I wrote about that student (fidgeting, disturbing others, etc.), and help that student make a plan.

Determine if their fake reading behaviors are habitual, book related, or a result of a distracting environment.

One important thing to remember is that for some students, fake reading may be habitual. This most likely went on year after year with teachers who were unable to help them. How frustrating for that student! Now they have come to you and all you hear is that they hate reading, or it's boring. Once you confront them, you do not want them to lose confidence in you. This is where you have to make a plan to let your students know that this year is going to be different. One of my favorite mini-lessons is my lesson on teaching students what comprehension means. In this mini-lesson, my students hear that this year is going to be different. Check it out HERE to implement this lesson in your own classroom.

Other students may not know what type of books they relate to, or which books are out of their zone of proximal development. I think it's so important to help students understand what they like and can connect to when looking for a book. If a student's current self-selected book is uninteresting or difficult, the student and I explore strategies for selecting a new book or working through challenging parts. See below for my success story.

A success story...

I have a student this year who is reading below grade level and is extremely self-conscious about it. Despite the fact that I have a number of books at her level, she still goes and grabs the thickest science fiction book she can find in our library. Even though she knows her reading level, she hasn't quite mastered how to identify a genre she likes and can connect to. After a few quick conferences with her, I found out about her love of horses and how she rides them on weekends. During our conference, I made a plan with her that if she would let me, I'd love to recommend some books that I think she would like. The next morning, when she walked in, she had an entire stack of Pony Pals waiting for her on her desk.

If you could see her smile...

We made a plan that she would start with one and try her best to finish the entire book. I told her to at least read to page 50 to see if the book interested her before continuing. We also made a plan that I would check in with her periodically to see how she was doing and if she liked the book. Well, as she started reading it, she loved it. She couldn't wait to come in every morning and tell me how much she loved the book and what she read each night. She went through that entire stack of Pony Pals and told me that this was the first time she ever finished a book. How great is that? After she had finished about three books from the series (in about a week!), we met again, and I reinforced some previous mini-lessons on how to identify genres and topics she not only enjoys, but can also connect with when looking for a book. I did this mini-lesson in our library, showing her the different baskets or books and how they are organized and labeled. While I originally did this as a whole class mini-lesson, reinforcing it one-on-one really helped. I made sure to watch her closely as she moved into selecting her own books, and I continued to conference with her on whether or not she was comprehending the material and able to complete them. I gradually released responsibility to her, and needless to say, she quickly turned into a real reader.

The biggest thing you should notice about your students who start finishing books for the first time is how much their comprehension and reading level goes up. How can these students who've never finished their own books make conclusions about text structures or characters or plots if they've never actually finished a book to figure these things out? Make sense!? :) The next time you give a reading strategy mini-lesson, remind that student to apply those strategies to the book they just finished and watch them have an AHA moment!

Model for your students what fake reading looks like.

For some, you may need to get back to the basics. Your students may not realize they are fake reading. If that is the case, pull them to the carpet and give them a mini-lesson on fake reading vs. real reading. Model for students what fake reading looks like. Except when you model this, act like a complete nut! Hold your book upside down, squirm like crazy, get up to obnoxiously blow your note, etc. When you do this, I promise your students will remember this lesson for weeks to come. In addition to modeling what fake reading looks like, you should also model what real reading looks like. Except when you model real reading, the emphasis shouldn't be placed on what the reader "looks like" but instead what's going through the reader's mind. I refer to my anchor chart on silent reading voices when I model real reading for my students.

Hopefully these tips and tricks that have worked to transform my classroom, work for you!

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How To Convert Your Fake Readers Into Real Readers - Young Teacher Love

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
I'm here to share some tried and true tips and tricks to convert your fake readers into real readers. To help our fake readers, we have to identify their coping behaviors that are helping them hide the fact that they aren't reading. Here is a list of 10 Ways to Spot a Fake Reader: I [...]

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
I'm here to share some tried and true tips and tricks to convert your fake readers into real readers.

To help our fake readers, we have to identify their coping behaviors that are helping them hide the fact that they aren't reading. Here is a list of 10 Ways to Spot a Fake Reader:

I always feel like I can spot a fake reader a mile away. That student who all of a sudden has to blow his nose the second independent reading starts. Or the student who thinks independent reading time is a great opportunity to catch up with friends. This is one of my biggest pet peeves. Reading time is a sacred time in our classroom, and my students know this from day one. No matter what, each year, I set out to convert those fake readers into real readers, and most of the time it works.

In the past, I have tried to eliminate those fake reading behaviors to try and stop the problem dead in its tracks. I've done things like restrict bathroom breaks and force my kids to stay in one spot throughout the duration of independent reading. The problem was, these fake readers were smart. As soon as I limited one behavior, they would come back with a different strategy. This became exhausting, and I wasn't doing what I set out to do...create REAL readers.

Read and make it fun.

The most important factor is having a classroom that is both centered around reading and celebrates reading. Let your kids sit and read self-selected books as much as possible. The only way to learn to love reading is to read. In our classroom, I read aloud to my students every single day. I carefully select some of the best books and use fun voices for the characters. I do my best to make the story come alive for my readers so much so that it makes them see how much fun reading can be.

I tell my students about what I'm reading at home and share new books with them every chance I get. I even make them do a drum roll on their desks each time I introduce a new book to our library. Usually, this leads to a waiting list for that book! I ask questions about their books, and I always let them choose what they want to read. Make sure you hype book orders by highlighting some phenomenal choices or by calling out students in front of the class and saying that you think they'd love a certain book. I promise that will get a big smile and a positive reaction. One time, I simply said out loud how I wish we could just have a whole read-in day where we get to read for seven hours straight, and my students went nuts over this idea. Even the non-readers were begging me to have a day like this!

By letting your kids just read and making it fun, they will want to read more. In my opinion, once those fake readers hear about and see all the fun the real readers are having, they will surely want to join in on what they are missing out on.

Observe your students.

I took the advice of Donalyn Miller in her book Wild Readers, and I started observing the fake readers over a few days and took notes. Miller recommends a few days of observation because the student could just be having a bad day.

After my observations, I discovered quite a bit about my fake readers. Some were just taking a bit longer to get settled into their books but were indeed reading (not a huge problem). Some were reading books in genres that they liked, but that were far too advanced for them (a student who reads far below grade level came back from the library with Eragon from the Inheritance Cycle-yikes!). Others were reading genres that I know do not appeal to them.

Confer with your fake readers and make a plan to help them.

Donalyn Miller says it's best: confronting students about their fake reading behaviors requires delicacy and care. Some students deny that they are fake reading. The last thing you want to do is undermine a student's confidence and feelings of self-worth. I completely agree. It's so important to have honest conversations with your fake readers and to be explicit with them. Most of these students have probably never had a positive experience finishing a book or connecting with a book. To be honest, I typically share the exact notes and observations I wrote about that student (fidgeting, disturbing others, etc.), and help that student make a plan.

Determine if their fake reading behaviors are habitual, book related, or a result of a distracting environment.

One important thing to remember is that for some students, fake reading may be habitual. This most likely went on year after year with teachers who were unable to help them. How frustrating for that student! Now they have come to you and all you hear is that they hate reading, or it's boring. Once you confront them, you do not want them to lose confidence in you. This is where you have to make a plan to let your students know that this year is going to be different. One of my favorite mini-lessons is my lesson on teaching students what comprehension means. In this mini-lesson, my students hear that this year is going to be different. Check it out HERE to implement this lesson in your own classroom.

Other students may not know what type of books they relate to, or which books are out of their zone of proximal development. I think it's so important to help students understand what they like and can connect to when looking for a book. If a student's current self-selected book is uninteresting or difficult, the student and I explore strategies for selecting a new book or working through challenging parts. See below for my success story.

A success story...

I have a student this year who is reading below grade level and is extremely self-conscious about it. Despite the fact that I have a number of books at her level, she still goes and grabs the thickest science fiction book she can find in our library. Even though she knows her reading level, she hasn't quite mastered how to identify a genre she likes and can connect to. After a few quick conferences with her, I found out about her love of horses and how she rides them on weekends. During our conference, I made a plan with her that if she would let me, I'd love to recommend some books that I think she would like. The next morning, when she walked in, she had an entire stack of Pony Pals waiting for her on her desk.

If you could see her smile...

We made a plan that she would start with one and try her best to finish the entire book. I told her to at least read to page 50 to see if the book interested her before continuing. We also made a plan that I would check in with her periodically to see how she was doing and if she liked the book. Well, as she started reading it, she loved it. She couldn't wait to come in every morning and tell me how much she loved the book and what she read each night. She went through that entire stack of Pony Pals and told me that this was the first time she ever finished a book. How great is that? After she had finished about three books from the series (in about a week!), we met again, and I reinforced some previous mini-lessons on how to identify genres and topics she not only enjoys, but can also connect with when looking for a book. I did this mini-lesson in our library, showing her the different baskets or books and how they are organized and labeled. While I originally did this as a whole class mini-lesson, reinforcing it one-on-one really helped. I made sure to watch her closely as she moved into selecting her own books, and I continued to conference with her on whether or not she was comprehending the material and able to complete them. I gradually released responsibility to her, and needless to say, she quickly turned into a real reader.

The biggest thing you should notice about your students who start finishing books for the first time is how much their comprehension and reading level goes up. How can these students who've never finished their own books make conclusions about text structures or characters or plots if they've never actually finished a book to figure these things out? Make sense!? :) The next time you give a reading strategy mini-lesson, remind that student to apply those strategies to the book they just finished and watch them have an AHA moment!

Model for your students what fake reading looks like.

For some, you may need to get back to the basics. Your students may not realize they are fake reading. If that is the case, pull them to the carpet and give them a mini-lesson on fake reading vs. real reading. Model for students what fake reading looks like. Except when you model this, act like a complete nut! Hold your book upside down, squirm like crazy, get up to obnoxiously blow your note, etc. When you do this, I promise your students will remember this lesson for weeks to come. In addition to modeling what fake reading looks like, you should also model what real reading looks like. Except when you model real reading, the emphasis shouldn't be placed on what the reader "looks like" but instead what's going through the reader's mind. I refer to my anchor chart on silent reading voices when I model real reading for my students.

Hopefully these tips and tricks that have worked to transform my classroom, work for you!

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How To Convert Your Fake Readers Into Real Readers - Young Teacher Love

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
I'm here to share some tried and true tips and tricks to convert your fake readers into real readers. To help our fake readers, we have to identify their coping behaviors that are helping them hide the fact that they aren't reading. Here is a list of 10 Ways to Spot a Fake Reader: I [...]

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Photo Credit: ©Shutterstock.com/Yulia Grigoryeva
When I think about my highest goal as a teacher, it is to help create responsible citizens who take care of each other and their world. And the best way that I can help form human beings who do good is to teach them empathy. I'd like to think that the ability to understand and share the feelings of others is something that everyone is born with, but I also think that it is important enough to be explicitly taught just in case.

By giving students an idea of what it is like to walk in someone else's shoes, all literature that deals with big ideas and emotions is good for teaching empathy. Still, I have found a few types of stories that I go to when I really want to get my students working to think about how other people live.

These are the kinds of texts that I gravitate towards when I want my students to strengthen their empathy skills.
Stories About People Who Are Not Immediately Likable
Understanding the motivations and perspectives of people who we don't like very much is a key element of empathy. So I often choose books with off-putting characters.

One of my favorite unlikeable characters is Malvolio from Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare. While students start off seeing him as an annoying know-it-all, as he is bullied more and more by the other characters, they start to see the story from Malvolio's perspective. Eventually, by examining the play with close reading questions, they come to an understanding of the way that class and birth can limit happiness and the ability to get what we want in life.

Some of my other favorites in this category include Okonkwo in Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe and Caliban in The Tempest by William Shakespeare. They both seem like monsters at some point in the story, but students come to understand that sometimes people aren't what they first seem.
Stories About People Who Are Similar But Also Very Different
Hooking students with an emotion or experience that they can relate to is a great way to get them thinking about people whose lives are also very different from theirs.

One of my all-time favorite short stories is "Barn Burning" by William Faulkner. The main character, Sarty, deals with universal feelings of being torn between family and society, and most teenagers can relate to that. But when students understand how the main characters' poverty factors into the plot of the story, they start to get a more complete idea of the themes of social justice and inequality.

I have also found success with "Elena" a poem by Pat Mora and Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. These stories are examples of universal emotions hooked into different lives, and they help students understand a little more about those differences.
Stories About People From Other Places
I have found that often students assume that people around the world live lives very similar to theirs. The more I can expose them to what life is like in other countries, the more empathetic they will be when they come across those differences in real life.

Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid is one of my favorite world literature choices. While the novel tells the universal story of a young girl growing up and finding her independence from her mother, it also deals with specific issues of race, colonialism, and post-colonialism in a former English colony. And I have found that when students learn a little more about the context of the novel, they really broaden their understanding of the world.

My other favorite choices for literature from around the world include What Is The What by Dave Eggers and A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah. The struggles that the characters in these books face is like nothing my students have ever experienced in their lives.
Anything That Gets Students Questioning Their Own Assumptions
One of the key elements to developing empathy is the ability to realize and admit when we have made a mistake. Everyone judges at times, and everyone makes assumptions at times. But when we can see our mistakes as something that we can easily move past, then we will be much more likely to feel empathy for others.

All quality literature questions and probes and gets us thinking about why we think what we do. But for me, there is nothing that effectively gets students questioning their own assumptions as well as poetry. My favorite poems for exploring beliefs are Adrienne Rich's poem "Prospective Immigrants, Please Note," Langston Hughes poem "Let America Be America Again," and "The Victims" by Sharon Olds. All three of these poems bring up important questions, but they don't always offer concrete answers, and they help students to understand that finding their way in the world is a process.

By helping my students to feel compassion, understanding, and patience for people whose lives are nothing like their own, I hope that I can push them to grow up to be responsible citizens who make a difference in their worlds. If I can teach them those skills by reading a great story together, even better!

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Photo Credit: ©Shutterstock.com/Yulia Grigoryeva When I think about my highest goal as a teacher, it is to help create responsible citizens who take care of each other and their world. And the best way that I can help form human beings who do good is to teach them empathy.

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How to Help High School Students Develop Empathy

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Writing exercises, opportunities for cultural exchange, and encouraging active listening can lead to more empathy among teens.

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An educational psychologist and parenting expert offers advice to school leaders.

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Readings - independent Australian retailers and online merchants of fine books, music and film.

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https://natlib.govt.nz/blog/posts/reading-on-screen-vs-reading-in-print-whats-the-difference-for-learning

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Implications from current research

Current research suggests that reading online results in lower understanding and less critical reflection. What might this mean for our students' learning and for society?

Image credit: All rights reserved. Used with permission.

I read differently online but what about our students?

I spend a lot of time in front of my laptop reading for research. But when I'm reading for pleasure, I usually grab a print book.

I've noticed that my reading is quite different when I'm online. I skim the text quickly, looking for keywords that might relate to what I'm researching rather than settling in for a long read. I often print online articles so that I can read them in hard copy because I find that easier to concentrate on.

For our students who are growing up in a digital world with all its advantages and distractions, I wondered what reading practices have developed to deal with the online world and what their consequences might be.

Online and connected

The online world is vast and there is no sign of data creation slowing down. Our digital experience is enhanced by media-rich content and quick links to other sites, offering convenience, flexibility of approach, and often cheaper costs than print materials. We have instant knowledge of world events and everyone's reaction to them and can, in turn, instantly react and contribute ourselves.

But not all of this information is unbiased or even relevant to our needs, and the speed at which events are reported gives us little time to evaluate sources, think critically or engage in considered reflection. As Susan Greenfield, a neuroscientist from Oxford University, comments in her 2014 interview with ABC's Gary Rivett:

The issue is that information isn't knowledge. Of course, you can be bombarded with endless information, endless facts but if you can't make sense of them, one fact is the same as any other fact. You can cruise on YouTube or on Google going 'yuck' and 'wow', but you're not actually making sense of things.

Digital content - finding, evaluating, using and creating it
Adapting to a fast-paced world

In 2018, journalist Sally Blundell interviewed neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf for The New Zealand Listener. As Blundell and Wolf note:

'By and large, reading on a screen encourages multitasking, a different form of attention, a different speed of processing'. And if people are skim, skim, skimming, she tells the Listener, 'and not going deeper to understand the complexity of issues, they will be far more attracted to false news or worse'. There is concern, she says, that digital media and the sheer volume of online information and communication invite the fast and shallow read. The result, she writes, is more and more young people not reading other than what is required, 'and often not even that: "tl; dr" (too long; didn't read)'. (2018, October)

Researcher Ziming Liu also notes that:

...screen‐based reading behavior is characterized by more time spent on browsing and scanning, keyword spotting, one‐time reading, non‐linear reading, and reading more selectively, while less time is spent on in‐depth reading, concentrated reading and decreasing sustained attention.

The issues are more compelling for even younger students as their adaptation to a fast-paced digital world may be changing their brains and influencing their ability to develop these skills. The very plasticity of our brain - the ability to respond and adapt to our environment and its challenges - that has kept our species alive for millennia also encourages it to take on the characteristics of whatever medium it is reading on.

If you have a young brain with the evolutionary mandate ... to adapt to the environment, and the brain is placed in an environment that is very fast-paced, requiring a little attention span where you move onto the next thing ... the brain will obligingly adapt to that. And then you put that same child in an environment where it has to concentrate for a long period of time it won't have rehearsed that skill. Therefore it won't be very good at it.
- Susan Greenfield, Technology and the Human Mind (YouTube video, 23:23), TEDxOxford

So, do our digital reading practices foster the reflection and deep reading necessary to evaluate and respond thoughtfully to so much data and information?

Comparing print and digital reading

In Naomi Baron's 2017 article, Reading in a digital age, her review of related research included a 2011 study by Ackerman and Goldsmith. This study noted that when students have a choice, they spent less time on digital reading, and had lower comprehension scores. Schugar et al (2011) found that participants reading on-screen used fewer study strategies such as note-taking. Baron's article also cited more recent research by Kaufman and Flanagan (2016) that found that students reading digitally did well on answering concrete questions. However, those reading in print did better on abstract questions needing inferential reasoning.

In Baron's own research between 2013 and 2015 of more than 400 university students from five countries, 86% preferred reading longer texts in print and 78% when reading for pleasure, with 92% saying it was easiest to concentrate when reading print. 85% of the US students were more likely to multitask in an online environment and only 26% when reading print.

New Zealand researchers Hooper and Herath (2014), in their study Is Google making us stupid? The impact of the internet on reading behaviour, determined that the impact of the online environment on university students' reading included:

increased amount of reading due to the growth of online material

improved speed of reading

improved skimming ability.

The impact also included:

Reich, Yau and Warschauer (2016), in their report on using tablet-based eBooks with very young children (0-2 years), commented that enhanced eBooks with sounds, animations, and games can distract children and reduce learning. When book-sharing with an adult, conversations during eBook reading are often about the platform while print book conversations are more often about the book content.

Careful design can make a difference

Interestingly, these same researchers have also found that with eBooks that are carefully designed to support reading rather than distract with features that are simply entertainment, the children's comprehension of a story was at a similar level.

Additionally, eBooks and digital technology can be very engaging for reluctant readers. The National Literacy Trust's 2015 study of children's access to eBooks found that:

...boys' reading levels increased by an average of 8.4 months, compared to 7.2 months' progress made by girls. Furthermore, the percentage of boys that felt reading was difficult almost halved from 28.0% to 15.9%, suggesting that confidence in their own reading ability increased as a result of the project. In addition, the percentage that felt reading was cool rose from 34.4% to 66.5%.

Reluctant readers
A recent literature review (2021) of 14 studies on the effect of ebooks on children's reading by López-Escribano, Montesino, and García-Ortega, notes that 'when e-books are properly selected and used, children develop literacy skills equally well and sometimes better than with print books'. The authors also noted that:

...children living in a deprived context, at risk of learning disabilities, and English Language Learners beneﬁted from all the reviewed e-book interventions, which highly improved their literacy skills, regarding concepts about print, phonological awareness, vocabulary, and reading comprehension. Digital learning and e-book reading represent a potential compensatory strategy for these children.

Best of both worlds

Both print and online reading are thoroughly established in our students' daily lives.

Online reading has evolved to allow the quick perusal of a lot of information very quickly - a great strategy for scanning through email for example.

In Baron's article about her 2013-2015 research, she reports that participants:

...praised digital reading on a number of counts, including the ability to read in the dark, ease of finding material ('plenty of quick information') saving paper and even the fact they could multitask while reading.

She also reports that the students in her study commented that print was aesthetically more enjoyable ('I like the smell of paper') and that print gave them a sense of where they were in the book - they could see and feel where they were in the text.

Students in Scholastics' 2012 Kids & Family Reading Report say that eBooks are better than print books when they do not want their friends to know what they are reading, and when they are out and about travelling. Print is better for sharing with friends and reading at bedtime.

Wolf, in her The New Zealand Listener 2018 interview, noted that print reading allows us to slow down and give time to sophisticated deep reading processes, letting us discern truth, apply critical analysis, gauge inference, develop empathy, appreciate beauty to reach the knowledge and wisdom necessary to sustain a good society.

So it's not an either/or choice

Instead, it's a matter of how we get the best out of both print and on-screen. Wolf, in her 2018 RadioNZ interview, suggests that we need to teach our students which medium best suits the purpose for which we are reading. Her best hope for our reading future is the 'bi-literate' brain - one that uses the optimal skills of each reading style so that students can read deeply as well online as in print.

Find out more

Engaging teens with reading - find inspiration and strategies to encourage teens to read for pleasure.

2019 Research: Reading in a Digital Age - by Read NZ Te Pou Muramura.

Reader Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World - 2018 book by Maryanne Wolf.

Reading on paper versus screens: What's the difference? - July 2020 article by Kerry Benson.

Skim reading is the new normal - Maryanne Wolf (2018) in the Guardian.

What works better for retention - printed or digital texts? May 2021 article by Naomi Baron.

Reference

Blundell, S. (2018, October). Dear Reader. The New Zealand Listener 85(4088) 13-19 October 2018.

This blog post

This blog post was first published in March 2019, and was last updated and republished in October 2021.

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Reading on-screen vs reading in print: What's the difference for learning?

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How well do your students learn when they read online? What are the outcomes of on-screen reading compared with reading in print? Current research suggests that reading online results in lower understanding and less critical reflection. What might th...

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https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/reading-on-screen-vs-print-new-analysis-thickens-the-plot-on-promoting-comprehension/2021/07

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The pandemic has increased the amount of reading young children do in digital formats, and a new research analysis suggests parent and teacher behavior can mean the difference in whether e-books help or hinder reading skills in the long run.

All else being equal, children 8 years old and younger comprehend storybooks better when they are in print rather than digital form, according to an analysis of 39 experimental studies published in the Review of Educational Research.

But print wasn't an end-all, be-all, they found. Researchers also found that most of the commercially published e-books explored in the studies didn't enhance the text in ways that focused children's attention as adults naturally would when reading a story to a child, such as pointing out main story elements, asking questions, and focusing children's attention on the chain of events in a story. The electronic books that did use these elements tended to outperform print books in children's comprehension.

"We need to have a more nuanced language about when reading digitally or print is beneficial and when not," said Natalia Kucirkova, the corresponding author and a professor of reading and early-childhood development at the University of Stavanger in Norwayand the Open University in the United Kingdom.

Co-author Adriana Bus, professor of language and literacy at Leiden University in Amsterdam, agreed. "Digital devices may always be distractive, thus predicting adverse effects of digital reading. However, our study also shows that books with digital enhancements can benefit and result in better comprehension than paper books if the enhancements support comprehension," she said.

More reading time during the pandemic

Children have been reading more during the pandemic, including in electronic formats, according to the latest census by Common Sense Media, a nonprofit that studies children and media. The group found that in 2020, children ages 8 and under spent on average, 32 minutes a day reading or being read to, up from 29 minutes a day in 2017.

Both print and e-reading increased overall, but e-reading rose particularly for some groups of students. Black students in that age group, for example, have gone from reading 28 minutes a day, including 8 minutes of e-reading and 20 minutes of print in 2017, to 48 minutes a day in 2020, including 33 minutes of print and 15 of e-reading. Similarly, students in families who earn less than $30,000 a year doubled their e-reading from 5 minutes a day to 10 minutes during that time.

Kucirkova said she expects wide variation in how children respond to e-reading during the pandemic, "attributable to the uneven quality of home schooling. I am particularly concerned about children who come from low-resource backgrounds with little history of reading and who do not have the supportive adult at home, who would be interpreting, and at times supplementing, teachers' instruction," she said. "The crucial influencing factor for these children is going to be the quality of the reading materials they accessed."

The research analysis suggested children's comprehension improved when adults read to them-but adults tended to read digital texts with children differently than print texts.

"Reading to children via Zoom has been happening in many families during the pandemic but anecdotal evidence shows that this was mostly for the most privileged children," such as those with highly educated parents or grandparents or family members who could afford to spend more time reading with them," Kucirkova said in an online message. She suggested teachers can help model for parents by holding videoconferenced reading sessions using both print and digital books.

The researchers analyzed the results of studies of more than 1,800 children from birth to age 8, comparing their comprehension and vocabulary learning when reading on paper versus on screens. The researchers also looked at the effects of common e-book enhancements, including spoken narration accompanying the text, design enhancements, and in-book dictionaries.

Some of the most commonly used enhancements didn't add much to students' comprehension. For example, Bus noted that audio narration of e-books did little, particularly for children who needed the most reading practice.

"They were the children who closed their eyes and just listened," she said. In one eye-tracking experiment, for example, "not surprisingly, we found that good readers focus on the text while listening, thus benefiting from this experience. The poor readers did not look at all at the text, just at the illustrations."

The researchers also found dictionaries did not improve children's comprehension, but did build students' vocabularies.

The analysis also found digital texts tended to be less effective than print ones in classroom settings. In part, Kucirkova said, this could be because the group-based reading used in schools may make less use of the interactive elements in digital books.

In videotaped lessons, Bus noted, "teachers [are] reading in small groups, and you can see that children are eager to interact with the book where possible in competition with their peers. However, looking for an opportunity to interact takes so much attention that they cannot concentrate on the story. So teachers have to organize sessions so that children can be sure of their share in the interaction with the story."

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Reading on Screen vs. Print: New Analysis Thickens the Plot on Promoting Comprehension

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Electronic books could boost young children's comprehension more than print, but few enhance, rather than distract, new study finds

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https://www.brainfacts.org/neuroscience-in-society/tech-and-the-brain/2020/reading-on-paper-versus-screens-whats-the-difference-072820

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During the coronavirus pandemic, students worldwide shifted from the classroom to remote, online learning. Many swapped hard copy textbooks and worksheets for websites and other digital resources. Digital books have been with us for a decade - but how well are we absorbing it all?

Turns out print is easier to comprehend than digital text.

"[Print reading] is kind of like meditation - focusing our attention on something still," says Anne Mangen, a literacy professor at the University of Stavanger in Norway. "And it's a whole different kind of immersion than responding to [digital] stimuli. I think it's healthy for us as human beings to sit down with something that doesn't move, ping, or call on our attention."

Print is visually less demanding than digital text. It provides spatial and tactile cues to help readers process words on a page. Mindset may also be a factor. If people associate screen time with casual web-surfing they may rush through without fully absorbing the text.

Do you think you're the exception? Most people do. Studies found digital reading breeds overconfidence.

"We read digital [text] more quickly, [so] we think we must understand it better," explains Lauren Singer Trakhman, who studies reading comprehension at the University of Maryland, College Park. "It's one of the best parts of our digital world - everything is at our fingertips and we can get the headlines in a second - but it may also be one of the pitfalls. Everything's so quick and accessible that we may not be truly digesting [what we read] anymore."

Both scientists agree digital is fine to scan news headings for main ideas, but longer, complicated texts are best read in print, especially to retain the details.

TL;DR: Digital Reading Equals Shallower Processing

In 2016, Singer Trakhman examined undergraduates' reading comprehension after they read digital and print versions of articles. Format didn't affect their grasp of the main idea, but students missed details when reading on screens.

Digital reading impairs comprehension, particularly for longer, more complex texts, says Mangen. This may be because of the shallowing hypothesis - constant exposure to fast-paced, digital media trains the brain to process information more rapidly and less thoroughly.

"There's not much [neuroscientific research] on the reading of actual texts," Mangen says. However, existing research does offer some clues. In a 2009 study, the marketing research company Millward Brown found the brain processes physical and digital materials differently. Participants viewed advertisements on a screen and on a printed card while undergoing an fMRI scan. Print materials were more likely to activate the medial prefrontal cortex and cingulate cortex, both involved in processing emotions. Reading print also generated more activity in the parietal cortex, which processes visual and spatial cues.

Keep Scrolling or Turn the Page?

Scrolling through digital text may impair comprehension by creating spatial challenges. A 2017 study found participants' reading comprehension suffered when they scrolled through a comic book's individual panels instead of seeing them all at once. When we read, our brains construct a cognitive map of the text, like recalling that a piece of information appeared near the top, left-hand page of a book. But imagine drawing a map of something with constantly moving landmarks, like a webpage. It's harder to map words that aren't in a fixed location, because we lose important "visual placeholders," says Singer Trakhman.

Scrolling demands more from our working memory, she adds. "In our working memory, we can hold about seven items at a time, so the goal when reading is to take away as many demands as possible. When we have to remember what we just read and we don't have spatial [cues] to help, that's taking some of our bandwidth."

In addition, the LED screens' constant flickering glow creates more work for our eyes, causing visual and mental fatigue.

However, e-readers, like Kindles, don't require scrolling and reduce eyestrain with e-ink technology. Those are likely superior to other digital-text formats, Mangen says. But they lack an important aspect of the reading experience: turning the page.

In one of Mangen's studies, participants read a story either on a Kindle or in print and then underwent comprehension tests. The texts were identical, but Kindle readers pressed a button to progress through the book, while print readers turned pages. Print readers were more likely to accurately recall the story's chronological order. Mangen says this may be because print provides sensorimotor cues that enhance cognitive processing. When holding a book, we receive reminders of how many pages we've read and how many remain. We can flip pages to reread text as needed. Some research suggests we process information more effectively when we recruit multiple senses, and multiple brain areas, during task learning - seeing the words, feeling the weight of the pages, and even smelling the paper.

What Happens Next?

Instead of getting better at digital reading, we may be getting worse. A study examining reading comprehension research between 2000 and 2017 indicates it's harder to comprehend digital text. The researchers found print's advantages are greater now than in 2000. In other words, this digital-reading problem isn't going away.

"This [finding may] have to do with the shallowing hypothesis," Mangen says. "The habits that we acquire when we read on screens are spilling over, and we're trying to cope by reading faster and more superficially."

Mangen and Singer Trakhman agree we shouldn't ditch digital reading; instead we should consider the situation when choosing our reading medium.

"I'll never say that everyone should be reading print all the time," says Singer Trakhman. "People are always shocked to hear that I have a Kindle, and I love my Kindle. But I only use it when I'm reading for pleasure."

To retain on-screen text information, Singer Trakham and Mangen suggest slowing down and handwriting main takeaways. (Typing works, but handwriting is likely a superior memory tool.)

When you need a break from the digital world, don't underestimate the power of paper and ink. Consider turning off your electronic devices, getting a book, and curling up to turn the page.

About the Author

Kerry Benson
1)What are the advantages of print reading over digital?

2)What areas of the brain respond when we read print text?

3)Why do researchers think it's getting harder to comprehend digital text?

Delgado, P., Vargas, C., Ackerman, R., & Salmerón, L. (2018). Don't throw away your printed books: A meta-analysis on the effects of reading media on reading comprehension. Educational Research Review, 25, 23-38. doi: 10.1016/j.edurev.2018.09.003

Garland, K. J., & Noyes, J. M. (2004). CRT monitors: Do they interfere with learning? Behaviour & Information Technology, 23(1), 43-52. doi: 10.1080/01449290310001638504

Hou, J., Rashid, J., & Lee, K. M. (2017). Cognitive map or medium materiality? Reading on paper and screen. Computers in Human Behavior, 67, 84-94. doi: 10.1016/j.chb.2016.10.014

Lauterman, T., & Ackerman, R. (2014). Overcoming screen inferiority in learning and calibration. Computers in Human Behavior, 35, 455-463. doi: 10.1016/j.chb.2014.02.046

Mangen, A., Olivier, G., & Velay, J.-L. (2019). Comparing Comprehension of a Long Text Read in Print Book and on Kindle: Where in the Text and When in the Story? Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 38. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00038

Mangen, A., Walgermo, B. R., & Brønnick, K. (2013). Reading linear texts on paper versus computer screen: Effects on reading comprehension. International Journal of Educational Research, 58, 61-68. doi: 10.1016/j.ijer.2012.12.002

Mayer, K. M., Yildiz, I. B., Macedonia, M., & von Kriegstein, K. (2015). Visual and Motor Cortices Differentially Support the Translation of Foreign Language Words. Current Biology, 25(4), 530-535. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2014.11.068

Millward Brown Case Study-Using Neuroscience to Understand. (2009). Retrieved from https://www.millwardbrown.com/docs/default-source/insight-documents/case-studies/MillwardBrown_CaseStudy_Neuroscience.pdf

Singer Trakhman, L., & Alexander, P. (2016). Reading Across Mediums: Effects of Reading Digital and Print Texts on Comprehension and Calibration. The Journal of Experimental Education. doi: 10.1080/00220973.2016.1143794

Smoker, T. J., Murphy, C. E., & Rockwell, A. K. (2009). Comparing Memory for Handwriting versus Typing. Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting, 53(22), 1744-1747. doi: 10.1177/154193120905302218

Yan, Z., Hu, L., Chen, H., & Lu, F. (2008). Computer Vision Syndrome: A widely spreading but largely unknown epidemic among computer users. Including the Special Issue: Internet Empowerment, 24(5), 2026-2042. doi: 10.1016/j.chb.2007.09.004

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Reading on Paper Versus Screens: What's the Difference?

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During the coronavirus pandemic, students worldwide shifted from the classroom to remote, online learning. Many swapped hard copy textbooks and worksheets for websites and other digital resources. Digital books have been with us for a decade - but how well are we absorbing it all? Turns out print is easier to comprehend than digital text.

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Schools are getting rid of homework from Essex, Mass., to Los Angeles, Calif. Although the no-homework trend may sound alarming, especially to parents dreaming of their child's acceptance to Harvard, Stanford or Yale, there is mounting evidence that eliminating homework in grade school may actually have great benefits, especially with regard to educational equity.

In fact, while the push to eliminate homework may come as a surprise to many adults, the debate is not new. Parents and educators have been talking about this subject for the last century, so that the educational pendulum continues to swing back and forth between the need for homework and the need to eliminate homework.

The Problem with Homework: It Highlights Inequalities

One of the most pressing talking points around homework is how it disproportionately affects students from less affluent families. The American Psychological Association (APA) explained:

"Kids from wealthier homes are more likely to have resources such as computers, internet connections, dedicated areas to do schoolwork and parents who tend to be more educated and more available to help them with tricky assignments. Kids from disadvantaged homes are more likely to work at afterschool jobs, or to be home without supervision in the evenings while their parents work multiple jobs."
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While students growing up in more affluent areas are likely playing sports, participating in other recreational activities after school, or receiving additional tutoring, children in disadvantaged areas are more likely headed to work after school, taking care of siblings while their parents work or dealing with an unstable home life. Adding homework into the mix is one more thing to deal with - and if the student is struggling, the task of completing homework can be too much to consider at the end of an already long school day.

While all students may groan at the mention of homework, it may be more than just a nuisance for poor and disadvantaged children, instead becoming another burden to carry and contend with.

Beyond the logistical issues, homework can negatively impact physical health and stress - and once again this may be a more significant problem among economically disadvantaged youth who typically already have a higher stress level than peers from more financially stable families.

Yet, today, it is not just the disadvantaged who suffer from the stressors that homework inflicts. A 2014 CNN article, "Is Homework Making Your Child Sick?", covered the issue of extreme pressure placed on children of the affluent. The article looked at the results of a study surveying more than 4,300 students from 10 high-performing public and private high schools in upper-middle-class California communities.

"Their findings were troubling: Research showed that excessive homework is associated with high stress levels, physical health problems and lack of balance in children's lives; 56% of the students in the study cited homework as a primary stressor in their lives," according to the CNN story. "That children growing up in poverty are at-risk for a number of ailments is both intuitive and well-supported by research. More difficult to believe is the growing consensus that children on the other end of the spectrum, children raised in affluence, may also be at risk."

When it comes to health and stress it is clear that excessive homework, for children at both ends of the spectrum, can be damaging. Which begs the question, how much homework is too much?

How Much Homework Is Too Much Homework?

The National Education Association and the National Parent Teacher Association recommend that students spend 10 minutes per grade level per night on homework. That means that first graders should spend 10 minutes on homework, second graders 20 minutes and so on. But a study published by The American Journal of Family Therapy found that students are getting much more than that.

While 10 minutes per day doesn't sound like much, that quickly adds up to an hour per night by sixth grade. The National Center for Education Statistics found that high school students get an average of 6.8 hours of homework per week, a figure that is much too high according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). It is also to be noted that this figure does not take into consideration the needs of underprivileged student populations.

In a study conducted by the OECD it was found that "after around four hours of homework per week, the additional time invested in homework has a negligible impact on performance." That means that by asking our children to put in an hour or more per day of dedicated homework time, we are not only not helping them, but - according to the aforementioned studies - we are hurting them, both physically and emotionally.

What's more is that homework is, as the name implies, to be completed at home, after a full day of learning that is typically six to seven hours long with breaks and lunch included. However, a study by the APA on how people develop expertise found that elite musicians, scientists and athletes do their most productive work for about only four hours per day. Similarly, companies like Tower Paddle Boards are experimenting with a five-hour workday, under the assumption that people are not able to be truly productive for much longer than that. CEO Stephan Aarstol told CNBC that he believes most Americans only get about two to three hours of work done in an eight-hour day.

When Does Homework Actually Help?

In the scope of world history, homework is a fairly new construct in the U.S. Students of all ages have been receiving work to complete at home for centuries, but it was educational reformer Horace Mann who first brought the concept to America from Prussia.

Since then, homework's popularity has ebbed and flowed in the court of public opinion. In the 1930s, it was considered child labor (as, ironically, it compromised children's ability to do chores at home). Then, in the 1950s, implementing mandatory homework was hailed as a way to ensure America's youth were always one step ahead of Soviet children during the Cold War. Homework was formally mandated as a tool for boosting educational quality in 1986 by the U.S. Department of Education, and has remained in common practice ever since.
Homework improves student achievement. Homework helps reinforce classroom learning. Homework helps students develop good study habits and life skills.
School work assigned and completed outside of school hours is not without its benefits. Numerous studies have shown that regular homework has a hand in improving student performance and connecting students to their learning. When reviewing these studies, take them with a grain of salt; there are strong arguments for both sides, and only you will know which solution is best for your students or school.
Homework allows parents to be involved with their children's learning.
Being responsible for completing at-home assignments helps students practice organization, time management, following directions, critical thinking and independent problem-solving.

Parents can see what their children are learning and working on in school every day.

Parents can participate in their children's learning by guiding them through homework assignments and reinforcing positive study and research habits.

Homework observation and participation can help parents understand their children's academic strengths and weaknesses, and even identify possible learning difficulties.

Negative Effects of Homework for Students
Students with too much homework have elevated stress levels. Students with too much homework may be tempted to cheat. Homework highlights digital inequity.
While some amount of homework may help students connect to their learning and enhance their in-class performance, too much homework can have damaging effects.

Today, homework often requires a computer and/or internet connection, which many students do not have access to outside of school.
Homework does not help younger students.
Students in low-income families are disproportionately affected by a lack of internet access, which further exacerbates the social and economic divide between them and their more affluent peers.

How Teachers Can Help

To help students find the right balance and succeed, teachers and educators must start the homework conversation, both internally at their school and with parents. But in order to successfully advocate on behalf of students, teachers must be well educated on the subject, fully understanding the research and the outcomes that can be achieved by eliminating or reducing the homework burden. There is a plethora of research and writing on the subject for those interested in self-study.
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For teachers looking for a more in-depth approach or for educators with a keen interest in educational equity, formal education may be the best route. If this latter option sounds appealing, there are now many reputable schools offering online master of education degree programs to help educators balance the demands of work and family life while furthering their education in the quest to help others.

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Is Homework Necessary? Education Inequity and Its Impact on Students

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Does homework help students? Discussing the pros and cons of homework, plus discerning how much homework is too much.

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University Park, Pa. -- Instead of improving educational achievement in countries around the world, increases in homework may actually undercut teaching effectiveness and worsen disparities in student learning, according to two Penn State researchers.

Most teachers worldwide are not making efficient use of homework, said David P. Baker, professor of education and sociology. They assign homework mostly as drill, to improve memorization of material either in math, science or the humanities. While drills and repetitive exercises have their place in schooling, homework may not be that place.

"Assigning textbook or worksheet questions as a drill assumes that the child has the kind of home environment conductive to supporting drill and memorization practice," noted Gerald K. LeTendre, associate professor of education.

Upper-income parents, who tend to have closer communication with the school and with teachers, are better able to assist their children with homework. But in poorer households -- often headed by single parents, parents with comparatively little education or, in some nations, parents held back by language barriers -- homework may not be cordially received, especially by parents of small children.

"An unintended consequence may be that those children who need extra work and drill the most are the ones least likely to get it. Increasing homework loads is likely to aggravate tensions within the family, thereby generating more inequality and eroding the quality of overall education," Baker said.

LeTendre and Baker are co-authors of the book, "National Differences, Global Similarities: World Culture and the Future of Schooling," recently published by Stanford University Press. Chapter Eight, "Schoolwork at Home? Low-Quality Schooling and Homework," was written in collaboration with Motoko Akiba, assistant professor of educational leadership and policy analysis at the University of Missouri-Columbia.

The researchers analyzed data from the Third International Study of Mathematics and Sciences (TIMSS), which in 1994 collected a large amount of data from schools in 41 nations across the fourth, eighth and 12th grades. For some analyses, they employed figures from the TIMSS 99, an identical study carried out in 1999 with 50 nations.

Their findings indicated a frequent lack of positive correlation between the average amount of homework assigned in a nation and corresponding level of academic achievement. For example, many countries with the highest scoring students, such as Japan, the Czech Republic and Denmark, have teachers who give little homework. "At the other end of the spectrum, countries with very low average scores -- Thailand, Greece, Iran -- have teachers who assign a great deal of homework," Baker noted.

"The United States is among the most homework-intensive countries in the world for seventh- and eighth-grade math classes. U.S. math teachers on average assigned more than two hours of mathematics homework per week in 1994-95," said LeTendre. "Contrary to our expectations, one of the lowest levels was recorded in Japan -- about one hour a week. These figures challenge previous stereotypes about the lackadaisical American teenager and his diligent peer in Japan."

During the early 1980s, many U.S. schools and teachers ramped up their homework assignments, at least to younger children, in reaction to intense media focus on studies comparing the mediocre performance of American students to the industriousness of their Japanese counterparts. At the same time, ironically, Japanese educators were attempting to reduce the amount of homework given to their students and allow them more leisure from the rigors of schooling. Neither the American nor the Japanese educational reform of the 1980s seems to have affected general achievement levels in either country, according to the book.

"American students appear to do as much homework as their peers overseas -- if not more -- but still only score around the international average," LeTendre said. "Undue focus on homework as a national quick-fix, rather than a focus on issues of instructional quality and equity of access to opportunity to learn, may lead a country into wasted expenditures of time and energy."

If schools expect every family to reinforce the child's learning process at home, they need to realize that, when families are unequal to the task, students will not receive the same quality of education. The addition of homework will only exacerbate existing inequities within a nation's student population and pull down overall scores, said Baker.

"Those families that are better able to marshal resources to support outside school learning will likely gain disproportionate advantage," he added.

"However, even in affluent nations, parents are extremely busy with work and household chores, not to mention chauffeuring young people to various extracurricular activities, athletic and otherwise," LeTendre said. "Parents might sometimes see exercises in drill and memorization as intrusions into family time."

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Too much homework can be counterproductive | Penn State University

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Instead of improving educational achievement in countries around the world, increases in homework may actually undercut teaching effectiveness and worsen disparities in student learning, according to two Penn State researchers. Most teachers worldwide are not making efficient use of homework, said David P. Baker, professor of education and sociology.

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The debate over how much schoolwork students should be doing at home has flared again, with one side saying it's too much, the other side saying in our competitive world, it's just not enough.

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It was a move that doesn't happen very often in American public schools: The principal got rid of homework.

This past September, Stephanie Brant, principal of Gaithersburg Elementary School in Gaithersburg, Md., decided that instead of teachers sending kids home with math worksheets and spelling flash cards, students would instead go home and read. Every day for 30 minutes, more if they had time or the inclination, with parents or on their own.

"I knew this would be a big shift for my community," she says. But she also strongly believed it was a necessary one. Twenty-first-century learners, especially those in elementary school, need to think critically and understand their own learning - not spend night after night doing rote homework drills.

Brant's move may not be common, but she isn't alone in her questioning. The value of doing schoolwork at home has gone in and out of fashion in the United States among educators, policymakers, the media, and, more recently, parents. As far back as the late 1800s, with the rise of the Progressive Era, doctors such as Joseph Mayer Rice began pushing for a limit on what he called "mechanical homework," saying it caused childhood nervous conditions and eyestrain. Around that time, the then-influential Ladies Home Journal began publishing a series of anti-homework articles, stating that five hours of brain work a day was "the most we should ask of our children," and that homework was an intrusion on family life. In response, states like California passed laws abolishing homework for students under a certain age.

But, as is often the case with education, the tide eventually turned. After the Russians launched the Sputnik satellite in 1957, a space race emerged, and, writes Brian Gill in the journal Theory Into Practice, "The homework problem was reconceived as part of a national crisis; the U.S. was losing the Cold War because Russian children were smarter." Many earlier laws limiting homework were abolished, and the longterm trend toward less homework came to an end.

The debate re-emerged a decade later when parents of the late '60s and '70s argued that children should be free to play and explore - similar anti-homework wellness arguments echoed nearly a century earlier. By the early-1980s, however, the pendulum swung again with the publication of A Nation at Risk, which blamed poor education for a "rising tide of mediocrity." Students needed to work harder, the report said, and one way to do this was more homework.

For the most part, this pro-homework sentiment is still going strong today, in part because of mandatory testing and continued economic concerns about the nation's competitiveness. Many believe that today's students are falling behind their peers in places like Korea and Finland and are paying more attention to Angry Birds than to ancient Babylonia.

But there are also a growing number of Stephanie Brants out there, educators and parents who believe that students are stressed and missing out on valuable family time. Students, they say, particularly younger students who have seen a rise in the amount of take-home work and already put in a six- to nine-hour "work" day, need less, not more homework.

Who is right? Are students not working hard enough or is homework not working for them? Here's where the story gets a little tricky: It depends on whom you ask and what research you're looking at. As Cathy Vatterott, the author of Rethinking Homework, points out, "Homework has generated enough research so that a study can be found to support almost any position, as long as conflicting studies are ignored." Alfie Kohn, author of The Homework Myth and a strong believer in eliminating all homework, writes that, "The fact that there isn't anything close to unanimity among experts belies the widespread assumption that homework helps." At best, he says, homework shows only an association, not a causal relationship, with academic achievement. In other words, it's hard to tease out how homework is really affecting test scores and grades. Did one teacher give better homework than another? Was one teacher more effective in the classroom? Do certain students test better or just try harder?

"It is difficult to separate where the effect of classroom teaching ends," Vatterott writes, "and the effect of homework begins."

Putting research aside, however, much of the current debate over homework is focused less on how homework affects academic achievement and more on time. Parents in particular have been saying that the amount of time children spend in school, especially with afterschool programs, combined with the amount of homework given - as early as kindergarten - is leaving students with little time to run around, eat dinner with their families, or even get enough sleep.

Certainly, for some parents, homework is a way to stay connected to their children's learning. But for others, homework creates a tug-of-war between parents and children, says Liz Goodenough, M.A.T.'71, creator of a documentary called Where Do the Children Play?

"Ideally homework should be about taking something home, spending a few curious and interesting moments in which children might engage with parents, and then getting that project back to school - an organizational triumph," she says. "A nag-free activity could engage family time: Ask a parent about his or her own childhood. Interview siblings."

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Instead, as the authors of The Case Against Homework write, "Homework overload is turning many of us into the types of parents we never wanted to be: nags, bribers, and taskmasters."

Leslie Butchko saw it happen a few years ago when her son started sixth grade in the Santa Monica-Malibu (Calif.) United School District. She remembers him getting two to four hours of homework a night, plus weekend and vacation projects. He was overwhelmed and struggled to finish assignments, especially on nights when he also had an extracurricular activity.

"Ultimately, we felt compelled to have Bobby quit karate - he's a black belt - to allow more time for homework," she says. And then, with all of their attention focused on Bobby's homework, she and her husband started sending their youngest to his room so that Bobby could focus. "One day, my younger son gave us 15-minute coupons as a present for us to use to send him to play in the back room. ... It was then that we realized there had to be something wrong with the amount of homework we were facing."

Butchko joined forces with another mother who was having similar struggles and ultimately helped get the homework policy in her district changed, limiting homework on weekends and holidays, setting time guidelines for daily homework, and broadening the definition of homework to include projects and studying for tests. As she told the school board at one meeting when the policy was first being discussed, "In closing, I just want to say that I had more free time at Harvard Law School than my son has in middle school, and that is not in the best interests of our children."

One barrier that Butchko had to overcome initially was convincing many teachers and parents that more homework doesn't necessarily equal rigor.

"Most of the parents that were against the homework policy felt that students need a large quantity of homework to prepare them for the rigorous AP classes in high school and to get them into Harvard," she says.

Stephanie Conklin, Ed.M.'06, sees this at Another Course to College, the Boston pilot school where she teaches math. "When a student is not completing [his or her] homework, parents usually are frustrated by this and agree with me that homework is an important part of their child's learning," she says.

As Timothy Jarman, Ed.M.'10, a ninth-grade English teacher at Eugene Ashley High School in Wilmington, N.C., says, "Parents think it is strange when their children are not assigned a substantial amount of homework."

That's because, writes Vatterott, in her chapter, "The Cult(ure) of Homework," the concept of homework "has become so engrained in U.S. culture that the word homework is part of the common vernacular."

These days, nightly homework is a given in American schools, writes Kohn.

"Homework isn't limited to those occasions when it seems appropriate and important. Most teachers and administrators aren't saying, 'It may be useful to do this particular project at home,'" he writes. "Rather, the point of departure seems to be, 'We've decided ahead of time that children will have to do something every night (or several times a week). ... This commitment to the idea of homework in the abstract is accepted by the overwhelming majority of schools - public and private, elementary and secondary."

Brant had to confront this when she cut homework at Gaithersburg Elementary.

"A lot of my parents have this idea that homework is part of life. This is what I had to do when I was young," she says, and so, too, will our kids. "So I had to shift their thinking." She did this slowly, first by asking her teachers last year to really think about what they were sending home. And this year, in addition to forming a parent advisory group around the issue, she also holds events to answer questions.

Still, not everyone is convinced that homework as a given is a bad thing. "Any pursuit of excellence, be it in sports, the arts, or academics, requires hard work. That our culture finds it okay for kids to spend hours a day in a sport but not equal time on academics is part of the problem," wrote one pro-homework parent on the blog for the documentary Race to Nowhere, which looks at the stress American students are under. "Homework has always been an issue for parents and children. It is now and it was 20 years ago. I think when people decide to have children that it is their responsibility to educate them," wrote another.

And part of educating them, some believe, is helping them develop skills they will eventually need in adulthood. "Homework can help students develop study skills that will be of value even after they leave school," reads a publication on the U.S. Department of Education website called Homework Tips for Parents. "It can teach them that learning takes place anywhere, not just in the classroom. ... It can foster positive character traits such as independence and responsibility. Homework can teach children how to manage time."

Annie Brown, Ed.M.'01, feels this is particularly critical at less affluent schools like the ones she has worked at in Boston, Cambridge, Mass., and Los Angeles as a literacy coach.

"It feels important that my students do homework because they will ultimately be competing for college placement and jobs with students who have done homework and have developed a work ethic," she says. "Also it will get them ready for independently taking responsibility for their learning, which will need to happen for them to go to college."

The problem with this thinking, writes Vatterott, is that homework becomes a way to practice being a worker.

"Which begs the question," she writes. "Is our job as educators to produce learners or workers?"

Slate magazine editor Emily Bazelon, in a piece about homework, says this makes no sense for younger kids.

"Why should we think that practicing homework in first grade will make you better at doing it in middle school?" she writes. "Doesn't the opposite seem equally plausible: that it's counterproductive to ask children to sit down and work at night before they're developmentally ready because you'll just make them tired and cross?"

Kohn writes in the American School Board Journal that this "premature exposure" to practices like homework (and sit-and-listen lessons and tests) "are clearly a bad match for younger children and of questionable value at any age." He calls it BGUTI: Better Get Used to It. "The logic here is that we have to prepare you for the bad things that are going to be done to you later ... by doing them to you now."

According to a recent University of Michigan study, daily homework for six- to eight-year-olds increased on average from about 8 minutes in 1981 to 22 minutes in 2003. A review of research by Duke University Professor Harris Cooper found that for elementary school students, "the average correlation between time spent on homework and achievement ... hovered around zero."

So should homework be eliminated? Of course not, say many Ed School graduates who are teaching. Not only would students not have time for essays and long projects, but also teachers would not be able to get all students to grade level or to cover critical material, says Brett Pangburn, Ed.M.'06, a sixth-grade English teacher at Excel Academy Charter School in Boston. Still, he says, homework has to be relevant.

"Kids need to practice the skills being taught in class, especially where, like the kids I teach at Excel, they are behind and need to catch up," he says. "Our results at Excel have demonstrated that kids can catch up and view themselves as in control of their academic futures, but this requires hard work, and homework is a part of it."

Ed School Professor Howard Gardner basically agrees.

"America and Americans lurch between too little homework in many of our schools to an excess of homework in our most competitive environments - Li'l Abner vs. Tiger Mother," he says. "Neither approach makes sense. Homework should build on what happens in class, consolidating skills and helping students to answer new questions."

So how can schools come to a happy medium, a way that allows teachers to cover everything they need while not overwhelming students? Conklin says she often gives online math assignments that act as labs and students have two or three days to complete them, including some in-class time. Students at Pangburn's school have a 50-minute silent period during regular school hours where homework can be started, and where teachers pull individual or small groups of students aside for tutoring, often on that night's homework. Afterschool homework clubs can help.

Some schools and districts have adapted time limits rather than nix homework completely, with the 10-minute per grade rule being the standard - 10 minutes a night for first-graders, 30 minutes for third-graders, and so on. (This remedy, however, is often met with mixed results since not all students work at the same pace.) Other schools offer an extended day that allows teachers to cover more material in school, in turn requiring fewer take-home assignments. And for others, like Stephanie Brant's elementary school in Maryland, more reading with a few targeted project assignments has been the answer.

"The routine of reading is so much more important than the routine of homework," she says. "Let's have kids reflect. You can still have the routine and you can still have your workspace, but now it's for reading. I often say to parents, if we can put a man on the moon, we can put a man or woman on Mars and that person is now a second-grader. We don't know what skills that person will need. At the end of the day, we have to feel confident that we're giving them something they can use on Mars."
Read a January 2014 update.

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Are You Down With or Done With Homework?

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caption id="attachment_5366" align="alignleft" width="319" caption="Illustration by Jessica Esch"] [/caption] It was a move that doesn't happen very often in American public schools: The principal got rid of homework. This past September, Stephanie Brant, principal of Gaithersburg Elementary School in Gaithersburg, Md., decided that instead of teachers sending kids home with math worksheets and spelling flash cards, students would instead go home and read.

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I realize I have not written much about homework the last few years. Not because it is not worth writing about, but because I do not really give it. Yet, the other day, as I presented a workshop on passionate literacy, someone asked me how much homework my students have, when I told her they are asked to read 20 minutes and that is pretty much it, she was surprised.

After all, how can we cover everything there is to do when we only have 45 minutes without giving homework? How can I provide enough practice for my students without telling them to work on something at home? How can I make sure they are ready for 8th grade, for high school, for college, for real life if I don't ask them to work on things outside of class?

Well, it turns out that there is a way to do this, where I am able to ask students to read outside of class but almost nothing else. I have written extensively about my decision to limit homework; some of the many reasons include the research that tells us how little benefit homework has for kids, how much it drives stress, the research on how much teachers versus students speak, but most importantly; my students telling me how they really feel about our homework practices. I realized that the kids who needed the extra practice, needed further teaching, not more work. That the kids who did the homework diligently didn't really need to do it. That some things that were not meant to take a long time did. So seven years ago or so, I decided that I would try to limit the amount of homework as much possible, here is how we have done it.
We make a commitment.
I start every year by telling students that in our classroom I will make them a promise; if they promise to work hard, then I promise to not assign homework beyond the 20 minutes of reading I expect every day outside of English. One of the big reasons often touted for assigning homework is that it builds time-management and resilience in children, but so does hard work in class. I make sure my students have enough work time in class to practice what they are learning. If they decide to not work hard, then the natural consequence is that they still have work to finish once the class is over. This approach has motivated many students to use their class time better, and it has definitely clued me into which kids are working super hard and still having a hard time understanding the work, then leading to further teaching.
We slow down.
Rather than doing many small projects, I have the luxury in English of focusing on several large projects, we call this being a part of the slow learning movement. It is, therefore, rare that we have an assignment that requires being turned in the very next day. We don't have quizzes or tests either, and so the bulk of what we do takes a week or longer, therefore allowing the students that need extra help or practice to get it in class.
We work hard.
I used to take a more leisurely pace when I had the luxury of more time, but now a sense of urgency often drives us forward. This doesn't mean we rush, it just means that time is precious in our classroom. At the beginning of the year, we discuss how to be more effective with our time and students quickly set up routines for this to happen. Instruction/exploration time starts the moment the bell rings and ends when the bell rings again. We don't have a lot of transitions or downtime as students manipulate the learning environment as needed, most of the time, not waiting for me to tell them to get ready for something, find supplies, or any other small things that can end up taking a lot of time. This means that most days, though not all, we get the most out of the precious instructional minutes give to us; 45 minutes to be exact.
We look at deadlines together.
The team I am on have a shared Google calendar that I try to keep updated with big project/tests deadlines. This allows us to see at a glance where big things may collide and then gives us a way to avoid that. While not all deadlines can be moved, many can, and I have no problem adding an extra day if it means students will not experience the unnecessary burden of multiple things do, thus being able to produce higher quality work.
We do bigger projects.
Another part of our slow learning movement is that most projects cover multiple standards. That way I don't have to constantly invent a project or an assessment and students are working on long-term goals, rather than short ones. It also means that many students can find success within a project even parts of it are still difficult for them.
We have venues for extra practice.
In the seven years since I have severely reduced homework, I have had one parent complain about it. Yet this is an assumption that runs rampant; how parents, other teachers, or even administration will react. I certainly do encourage you to partner with your administration, a great way to get permission is to ask to pilot limiting homework, and also discussing with your colleagues. Some may see it as a knock on their own practices, although it is not. In regard to the one parent complaint, I have had, this parent wanted more educational experiences for their child and I gladly provided them. I created a list of additional resources they could use with their child if they wanted to further practice their skills, in turn, I told them that I did not need further proof of their understanding and so all extra work could stay at home.
We spiral our curriculum.
Because I am dictated by a standards-based curriculum, I have the luxury of spiraling our standards. That means that all seven of our standards are taught in more than one quarter. Why does this matter? Because it means that even if a child does not achieve proficiency in a standard the first time it is explored, that standard will come back again, allowing me to assess them once more.
I limit my speaking.
I really try to monitor and actively limit how much time I spend giving direct instruction to students, instead of thinking of various ways I can scaffold the instruction I need to provide. Tools such as Google Classroom, anchor charts, and even extra handouts or other visuals (one of these years I will make videos as extra reference points) help students work through the progress rather than frontload all of the information. Because the students I teach are at so many different stages it simply does not make sense for me to deliver most of my instruction orally.
We continually commit to it.
Limiting homework has been such a natural part of our every day, and yet, it is also a commitment I make. It is not that all of my students "get" something the first time around, it is that I try to help them practice with the content in class, rather than outside of it. It is that I want to honor the commitment that kids bring to the work we do in class. It is that it is my job to figure out how to do the work we do within the time we are given. It doesn't always happen, but most of the time it does.

It, therefore, sounds incredibly simplistic, and I do not mean it as condescending, but limiting or completely getting rid of homework really does come to down to us; to how we spend our time in class, to how much we stop talking, to how we do not waste any time, to how we look at our curriculum as learning explorations and not stand-alone projects. To how we tell the kids that, in here, we will challenge them, but that means that they will get the reward of no work after if they rise to the occasion. That it is on them to use their time, to ask the questions they need answering, to reach out if somehow they are missed.

Seven years ago I told myself that all of the extra work I assigned was not really worth the time of my students, and I was right. It turns out they don't need the extra work to learn deeply.
If you like what you read here, consider reading any of my books; the newest called Reimagining Literacy Through Global Collaboration, a how-to guide for those who would like to infuse global collaboration into their curriculum, was just released. I am currently working on a new literacy book, called Passionate Readers and it will be published in the summer of 2017 by Routledge.If you are looking for solutions and ideas for how to re-engage all of your students consider reading my very first book Passionate Learners - How to Engage and Empower Your Students. Also, if you are wondering where I will be in the coming year or would like to have me speak, please see this page.

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https://pixteller.com/assets/storage/designs_images/2017-03-30/01/untitled-design-1-58dc302911c38.png I realize I have not written much about homework the last few years. Not because it is not worth writing about, but because I do not really give it. Yet, the other day, as I presented a workshop on passionate literacy, someone asked me how much homework my students have, when I told her...

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First Day of Teaching Tips | For Teachers

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With all the excitement and anticipation of being a first-year teacher, there's often a sense of anxiety mixed in leading up to that first day. But have no fear! With these five essential resources for first-year teachers, you'll have everything you need to put your mind at ease, build confidence, and be fully prepared for your teaching journey.
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These are just a few of the most essential teaching resources you can turn to as a new teacher. For more must-have books, tools, and classroom favorites to help you ease into your first year of teaching, check out these teacher resources from Scholastic.

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5 Essential Resources for First-Year Teachers

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With all the excitement and anticipation of being a first-year teacher, there's often a sense of anxiety mixed in leading up to that first day. But have no fear! With these five essential resources for first-year teachers, you'll have everything you need to put your mind at ease, build confidence, and be fully prepared for your teaching journey.

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As a new teacher, it's normal to feel both nervous and excited as the first day of school approaches. There's a lot to do to make sure your first day goes well, and a checklist can help you stay on track. When you take the time to prepare, you can transform first-day jitters into positive energy. Planning ahead is one of the best ways to ensure that your school year gets off on the right foot, with engaged students and an organized classroom. Here are some helpful steps you can take before the first day of school to make a strong start.

Decorate Your Classroom

You want to create a friendly, inviting space for your students, and colorful bulletin boards, signs, and name tags can help them feel comfortable and ready to learn. Some great ideas include adding potted plants to your space and putting up pictures to brighten up the room.

Choose a Creative Way to Introduce Yourself to the Class

To help your students get to know you, you may want to write a short biography and post it near your desk. Another idea is to write your name on the chalkboard or whiteboard and create a simple collage of things you like to do. You can also include yourself in any icebreakers you assign to the class on the first day.

Write and Practice Lesson Plans for the First Week

It's always better to be over prepared, so create detailed lesson plans for the first week of school. You may even want to create extra lesson plans to have on hand as you learn your classroom's pace and learning speed, according to TeachHUB.

Gather and Organize Your Teaching Supplies

Make sure you have everything you need for your classroom before the first day. It's a good idea to ask other teachers or administrators what materials are provided. Then you can create a list of the things you still need, like folders, staples, dry erase markers, and other items.

Decide on Classroom Rules and Consequences

It's important to have a solid set of rules from the start of the year so that students know what is acceptable behavior. A list of rules posted on your bulletin board or elsewhere in the classroom makes your expectations clear. Another good idea is to provide a take-home rule sheet for parents to sign.

Get Used to Classroom Technology

Find out what your new classroom has in terms of technology, whether it's a smartboard, tablets, or desktop computers. Then, you can learn best practices and simple hacks to help students learn how to use them. It's also a good idea to create a class webpage or social media account where students and parents can find important information such as homework assignments and your contact information.

Arrange Your Classroom

You can choose to arrange desks in rows, clusters, or other formations depending on your teaching style. You may want to stick with traditional desk arrangements until you know your students (and their behavior) better. The first seating plan you come up with will probably be temporary, so be open to changing it later.

Create Classroom Systems and Procedures

For a well-managed classroom, it's important to have clear systems in place for using the restroom, turning in homework, and more. You can also set up communication channels with parents so that they know how best to reach you, and vice versa.

Prepare an Icebreaker Activity

Icebreakers are a great way to help students feel comfortable in their new classroom. Any fun activity that requires students to get to know one another (and you!) is ideal. The best part is that icebreakers are easy to implement and can take up as much or as little time as you like.

When it comes to the first day of school, your best bet is to work through a checklist like this one to be sure that you've got everything covered, from bulletin boards to class rules and more. You can find even more tips here. And for other ideas to help you get ready for the school year, take a look at the following courses:

They'll give you customizable strategies and tips to help you manage your classroom and prepare for a successful year of learning for your students. You can also explore all of our professional development course options!

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New Teacher Checklist: Your Plan for the First Day of School

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As a new teacher, it's normal to feel both nervous and excited as the first day of school approaches. There's a lot to do to make sure your first day goes well, and a checklist can help you stay on track. When you take the time to prepare, you can transform first-day jitters into positive energy.

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You only get to teach your first lesson once! Make sure to make it count. Read below on how to ace your first class and make wonderful impression on your students. See all of the tips in the video below

A solid first lesson is easy to pull off if you have the right strategy

Hello teachers! I am one of the trainers at The Language House TEFL. What we do is pretty simple: The Language House in Prague teaches new teachers to be confident in the classroom. This includes 4 weeks of intense teacher training, followed by job support and networking assistance. In my career, I've probably helped about 3000 new teachers with their first lessons. These were trainees who had absolutely no teaching experience at all. Here are my tips for success. If you are a new English teacher, or wish to be one in the future, check us out. I've got a nice little video below that covers everything.

Know your students and your classroom

before you step foot into the classroom, try to learn as much as you can about your students. How many of them will there be? What are their approximate ages? Are they mostly male, female or an equal mix? Is the class one nationality or a mix of different nationalities? Finally, what are their expectations? What do they expect of you as a teacher?
Got that? Good! Now find out about your classroom.
Each classroom is going to have some unique qualities. The last thing you want to do is walk into a classroom blind without knowing what to expect. Get the details beforehand and give it a look. Once you see the classroom, think a bit about the arrangement and what you can do to personalize the space. Obviously, this might be impossible for some situations (you are sharing the room with another teacher), but whatever you can do to make the space more personalized/unique, do it!

Plan an engaging lesson

It's easy to botch your first lesson and make it dull. Don't fall into the trap of creating a boring hour of you lecturing your students to sleep while you all pray for it to end as fast as possible. Instead, plan out what you want to do in advance and incorporate a variety of activities that include group/pair work.
Give yourself enough time to get all of your materials prepared. Also, use materials that serve no other purpose but to make the lesson fun. If you have media, props and pictures that you can bring in, great. The idea is to make your first lesson memorable.
In terms of content, stick to material/language points that you are comfortable with. It is usually better to underestimate your class than to overestimate them. This being said, don't go into your class without some solid materials that you can teach and they can learn from.

Now practice... and then practice again

New teachers will spend hours just looking at their lesson plan. This. Doesn't. Help. It will only stress you out and make you second guess everything you have prepared. Instead, get up (preferably in a classroom) and practice your lesson. Practice all of the different parts and skills you'll need to be successful. In the video above, I cover all of these things along with some strategies on how to make it possible.

OMG you're teaching! Watch out for these things

Now you are in the thick of it all and you've got a whole bunch of eyes on you. This is a surreal experience for all new teachers, and that's really easy to understand. Most of our lives, we spend our time as students. Now, you're the one up in front of the class.
A few points to look out for are the following.

Greet students when the come in

Pass out name tags (they are easy to make)

Have all of your materials organized

Keep your TTT low

Work on your volume

Use big gestures

Monitor and error correct

Avoid long stretches of lecturing (use a lot of group/pair work)

Have a glass of water or something to drink

Elicit and concept check as much as possible

Keep track of time

Exit gracefully (end your lesson at a specific point that is planned with a 'have a nice day' or something like that)

As mentioned earlier, it's a great idea to run through your lesson a few times with a friend or colleague. There is so much you can learn by actually practicing your content (from start to finish) in advance.
Lastly... HAVE FUN! Teaching your first lesson is exciting. You'll do great. If for whatever reason things don't go exactly as planned, you always have the next lesson to learn and improve.

Extra resources

If you're new to teaching and feeling a little bit lost, head on over to my YouTube channel for some other methodology videos.

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Teaching Your First Lesson: Tips for New Teachers

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Hello teachers! I am one of the trainers at The Language House TEFL. What we do is pretty simple: The Language House in Prague teaches new teachers to be confident in the classroom. This includes 4 weeks of intense teacher training, followed by job support and networking assistance.

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Teaching your FIRST lesson | Tips for NEW teachers | FIRST day of teaching | PGCE | SCITT | TRAINEE

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The first day of student teaching is a big event for teachers in training. For most student teachers, it'll be the first time they're in charge of a classroom, acting as a "full" teacher. This initial day also marks the beginning of an important relationship. This is the teacher trainee's relationship with his or her school, students, and students' parents.

This teacher-school relationship is a very important one. Most student teaching experiences last anywhere from four to 6 months. And in many cases, student teachers wind up getting hired on at the schools where they student taught. (Sometimes in the very same classroom!)

So making a good impression on your new school is very important on the first day. Coming in strong can set the tone for your entire student teaching experience. A good first impression is a major factor in your long-term success. So let's look at some things you can do to prepare for your milestone first day in charge of the classroom.

Start Preparing Early for Your Student Teaching

You can prepare for your first day of student teaching months or even years before it happens. This is because all of your teacher training leads up to your student teaching experience. Your textbooks and classes give you the principles you need for classroom success during student teaching and beyond. Really think about how these principles will look in your classroom.

And apply that knowledge-get into the classroom before you actually start student teaching. Your school will help you get some early in-classroom experiences. In fact, classroom observations and volunteer work as a classroom aide are usually required as part of a teaching degree.

But don't stop there. See if you can get in some extra volunteer opportunities. And see if you can get some actual paid classroom experience. Summer camps and organizations like the YMCA love to hire education majors to teach classes and work with children. Some states also don't require a bachelor's degree for classroom assistants or substitute teachers. These kinds of jobs-if you can find them-are an excellent way to practice for student teaching.

Early on in your major, you should also start talking to advisers and professors about what student teaching is like. Learn some lessons about student teaching from those who have gone before you. You can also find out which area schools might be potential student teaching locations for you later in your studies.

Contact Schools About Possible Student Teaching Work

In most cases, you can let your teacher prep program choose your school for you. Often, they arrange a student teaching experience with a school on your behalf. But you usually also have the option to pick a school. As you do fieldwork and school visitation, treat the schools you encounter as prospects. In most cases, a school you visit is a school at which you could student teach. When the time comes to secure an actual student teaching position, start talking to schools that you're familiar with. And consider reaching out to schools that you aren't familiar with yet. Often, seeing how receptive a school is to letting you student teach can help you decide whether the school is actually a good fit for you.

Get to Know Your Student Teaching Site Before Your First Day of Student Teaching

Once you've chosen a school and secured a student teaching position, start talking to school staff. Let them know you'll be joining them as a student teacher. Ask them about their school, their students and their community. Ask for advice on how you should approach your teaching work. Find out about any dress codes you should follow. Finally, you could ask about how you could be a "good fit" for the school once you arrive. Schools are very receptive to this kind of advance intelligence gathering! They love working with a teacher trainee who is genuinely interested in them and wants to be a good team player.

Make Great First-Day Lesson Plans... and Be Prepared for Those Plans to Fail

You need to make lesson plans for your classes on your first day of student teaching-and every day thereafter. That much is obvious. But in your rush to start off on the right foot, don't forget the importance of contingency plans! These are backup courses of action you can take if the lesson you intend to teach starts to fall flat.

You are teaching a group of students for the first time. So there's always a risk that your lesson will be too easy for them, too difficult, too long, or too short. Be sure you have a few extra plans up your sleeve! Prepare alternate activities if you suddenly find that the things you'd planned just won't work out.

With advance preparation and these kinds of contingency plans, your first day is likely to go pretty well, come what may. But on rare occasions, every contingency plan fails. When that happens, a whole day of teaching can go off the rails. In case this kind of teaching disaster hits on your first day, be sure to also bring the ultimate contingency plan: failing with dignity and humor. If you've already made the effort to build rapport with your school, a bad day of teaching doesn't have to make a bad first impression. And it might not even amount to a truly bad first day of your student teaching adventure.

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Preparing for Your First Day of Student Teaching

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The first day of student teaching is a big event for teachers in training. For most student teachers, it'll be the first time they're in charge of a classroom, acting as a "full" teacher. This initial day also marks the beginning of an important relationship.

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Is "critical race theory" a way of understanding how American racism has shaped public policy, or a divisive discourse that pits people of color against white people? Liberals and conservatives are in sharp disagreement.

In truth, the divides are not nearly as neat as they may seem. The events of the last decade have increased public awareness about things like housing segregation, the impacts of criminal justice policy in the 1990s, and the legacy of enslavement on Black Americans. But there is much less consensus on what the government's role should be in righting these past wrongs. Add children and schooling into the mix and the debate becomes especially volatile.

School boards, superintendents, even principals and teachers are already facing questions about critical race theory, and there are significant disagreements even among experts about its precise definition as well as how its tenets should inform K-12 policy and practice. This explainer is meant only as a starting point to help educators grasp core aspects of the current debate.

Just what is critical race theory anyway?

Critical race theory is an academic concept that is more than 40 years old. The core idea is that race is a social construct, and that racism is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something embedded in legal systems and policies.

The basic tenets of critical race theory, or CRT, emerged out of a framework for legal analysis in the late 1970s and early 1980s created by legal scholars Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Richard Delgado, among others.

A good example is when, in the 1930s, government officials literally drew lines around areas deemed poor financial risks, often explicitly due to the racial composition of inhabitants. Banks subsequently refused to offer mortgages to Black people in those areas.

Today, those same patterns of discrimination live on through facially race-blind policies, like single-family zoning that prevents the building of affordable housing in advantaged, majority-white neighborhoods and, thus, stymies racial desegregation efforts.

CRT also has ties to other intellectual currents, including the work of sociologists and literary theorists who studied links between political power, social organization, and language. And its ideas have since informed other fields, like the humanities, the social sciences, and teacher education.

This academic understanding of critical race theory differs from representation in recent popular books and, especially, from its portrayal by critics-often, though not exclusively, conservative Republicans. Critics charge that the theory leads to negative dynamics, such as a focus on group identity over universal, shared traits; divides people into "oppressed" and "oppressor" groups; and urges intolerance.

Thus, there is a good deal of confusion over what CRT means, as well as its relationship to other terms, like "anti-racism" and "social justice," with which it is often conflated.

To an extent, the term "critical race theory" is now cited as the basis of all diversity and inclusion efforts regardless of how much it's actually informed those programs.

One conservative organization, the Heritage Foundation, recently attributed a whole host of issues to CRT, including the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, LGBTQ clubs in schools, diversity training in federal agencies and organizations, California's recent ethnic studies model curriculum, the free-speech debate on college campuses, and alternatives to exclusionary discipline-such as the Promise program in Broward County, Fla., that some parents blame for the Parkland school shootings. "When followed to its logical conclusion, CRT is destructive and rejects the fundamental ideas on which our constitutional republic is based," the organization claimed.

(A good parallel here is how popular ideas of the common core learning standards grew to encompass far more than what those standards said on paper.)

Does critical race theory say all white people are racist? Isn't that racist, too?

The theory says that racism is part of everyday life, so people-white or nonwhite-who don't intend to be racist can nevertheless make choices that fuel racism.

Some critics claim that the theory advocates discriminating against white people in order to achieve equity. They mainly aim those accusations at theorists who advocate for policies that explicitly take race into account. (The writer Ibram X. Kendi, whose recent popular book How to Be An Antiracist suggests that discrimination that creates equity can be considered anti-racist, is often cited in this context.)

Fundamentally, though, the disagreement springs from different conceptions of racism. CRT puts an emphasis on outcomes, not merely on individuals' own beliefs, and it calls on these outcomes to be examined and rectified. Among lawyers, teachers, policymakers, and the general public, there are many disagreements about how precisely to do those things, and to what extent race should be explicitly appealed to or referred to in the process.

All these different ideas grow out of longstanding, tenacious intellectual debates. Critical race theory emerged out of postmodernist thought, which tends to be skeptical of the idea of universal values, objective knowledge, individual merit, Enlightenment rationalism, and liberalism-tenets that conservatives tend to hold dear.

What does any of this have to do with K-12 education?

Scholars who study critical race theory in education look at how policies and practices in K-12 education contribute to persistent racial inequalities in education, and advocate for ways to change them. Among the topics they've studied: racially segregated schools, the underfunding of majority-Black and Latino school districts, disproportionate disciplining of Black students, barriers to gifted programs and selective-admission high schools, and curricula that reinforce racist ideas.

Critical race theory is not a synonym for culturally relevant teaching, which emerged in the 1990s. This teaching approach seeks to affirm students' ethnic and racial backgrounds and is intellectually rigorous. But it's related in that one of its aims is to help students identify and critique the causes of social inequality in their own lives.

Many educators support, to one degree or another, culturally relevant teaching and other strategies to make schools feel safe and supportive for Black students and other underserved populations. (Students of color make up the majority of school-aged children.) But they don't necessarily identify these activities as CRT-related.

As one teacher-educator put it: "The way we usually see any of this in a classroom is: 'Have I thought about how my Black kids feel? And made a space for them, so that they can be successful?' That is the level I think it stays at, for most teachers." Like others interviewed for this explainer, the teacher-educator did not want to be named out of fear of online harassment.

An emerging subtext among some critics is that curricular excellence can't coexist alongside culturally responsive teaching or anti-racist work. Their argument goes that efforts to change grading practices or make the curriculum less Eurocentric will ultimately harm Black students, or hold them to a less high standard.

As with CRT in general, its popular representation in schools has been far less nuanced. A recent poll by the advocacy group Parents Defending Education claimed some schools were teaching that "white people are inherently privileged, while Black and other people of color are inherently oppressed and victimized"; that "achieving racial justice and equality between racial groups requires discriminating against people based on their whiteness"; and that "the United States was founded on racism."

Thus much of the current debate appears to spring not from the academic texts, but from fear among critics that students-especially white students-will be exposed to supposedly damaging or self-demoralizing ideas.

While some district officials have issued mission statements, resolutions, or spoken about changes in their policies using some of the discourse of CRT, it's not clear to what degree educators are explicitly teaching the concepts, or even using curriculum materials or other methods that implicitly draw on them. For one thing, scholars say, much scholarship on CRT is written in academic language or published in journals not easily accessible to K-12 teachers.

What is going on with these proposals to ban critical race theory in schools?

The bills are so vaguely written that it's unclear what they will affirmatively cover.

Could a teacher who wants to talk about a factual instance of state-sponsored racism-like the establishment of Jim Crow, the series of laws that prevented Black Americans from voting or holding office and separated them from white people in public spaces-be considered in violation of these laws?

It's also unclear whether these new bills are constitutional, or whether they impermissibly restrict free speech.

It would be extremely difficult, in any case, to police what goes on inside hundreds of thousands of classrooms. But social studies educators fear that such laws could have a chilling effect on teachers who might self-censor their own lessons out of concern for parent or administrator complaints.

The laws could also become a tool to attack other pieces of the curriculum, including ethnic studies and "action civics"-an approach to civics education that asks students to research local civic problems and propose solutions.

How is this related to other debates over what's taught in the classroom amid K-12 culture wars?

The charge that schools are indoctrinating students in a harmful theory or political mindset is a longstanding one, historians note. CRT appears to be the latest salvo in this ongoing debate.

In history, the debates have focused on the balance among patriotism and American exceptionalism, on one hand, and the country's history of exclusion and violence towards Indigenous people and the enslavement of African Americans on the other-between its ideals and its practices. Those tensions led to the implosion of a 1994 attempt to set national history standards.

The culture wars are always, at some level, battled out within schools, historians say.

"It's because they're nervous about broad social things, but they're talking in the language of school and school curriculum," said one historian of education. "That's the vocabulary, but the actual grammar is anxiety about shifting social power relations."

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What Is Critical Race Theory, and Why Is It Under Attack?

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Here's what you need to understand about the academic concept-and how it's portrayed in political circles.

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Book clubs bring challenges in class management and assessment, but they can lead to improvements in students' reading ability.

Over the summer break, I've been thinking about what improvements I can make for next year, poring over student feedback from June and remembering aspects of the school year that caused me the most anxiety-and my chest begins to tighten as I think about choice reading book clubs.

I try to figure out how to monitor whether students are really reading their books, how to effectively manage a classroom with five groups discussing different books, and how to properly assess students' learning when their readings are different.

These issues alone seem reason enough to abandon book clubs, but then I think about the research demonstrating that independent reading and student choice in reading are significant factors in helping students improve as readers. So as I resolve to keep book clubs, I attempt to identify a few keys to making sure they're successful.

Share With Students Why Reading Matters

At the beginning of the year, I tell students that I believe reading is essential to a well-lived life and share research indicating that reading is linked to overall academic and economic success.

But we don't just talk about why reading matters, we live it. During choice book clubs-an exercise we do twice a year-I ask students to look for quotations that transcend context and exemplify how fiction can reveal truth. We share these passages along with the wisdom they reveal by creating posters with Sharpies and designing Padlets, and we discuss these ideas in pairs and small groups. Recently, one of my students quoted Akhil Sharma's Family Life: "Vanishing into books, I felt held." The truth he drew from this was: "When we read books, we feel less alone." The lessons we learn and the ideas that resonate ignite our desire to read, and remind us of the value of reading.

Provide Meaningful Selections

During book clubs, I offer five or six books that are related either to a whole class text or to each other by topic, theme, genre, or author. In 2016-17, my ninth graders read popular young adult titles by authors such as John Green, Rainbow Rowell, and Ernest Cline. Last year, in an effort to bring in diverse perspectives, we selected coming-of-age stories by male and female authors from Nigeria, India, Korea, and Sri Lanka.

When I introduce book clubs, I explain why I selected the books and seek to generate interest by sharing a brief summary of each one along with an excerpt I particularly love. I also provide students with links to reviews on Goodreads and Amazon, and class time to choose a book.

Provide High Interest Activities

In a classroom with five or six groups discussing different books, the challenges are many. Teachers have to ensure that students are prepared to engage in meaningful discussions, provide questions and conversational moves that work for multiple texts, and monitor discussions.

In my class, book club days are predictable and organized, yet they still provide variety. Each book club has a specific focus, such as character, theme, writing style, or how fiction reveals truth. Students arrive having read the agreed-upon number of pages (as decided by their book club) as well as having prepared a task for the day's focus (as decided by me).

Students begin by writing and responding to targeted prompts designed to generate ideas for the day's focus. The targeted prompts vary. For a book club focused on character, for example, I tasked students with tracking one character and marking in their book where they learned about the character through what he says, how he acts, and what others say about him. Some of the writing prompts included: What are your initial impressions of the character? What predictions can you make about how the story will progress based on your understanding of the character?

During book club discussions, students refer to their notes on these questions and their prepared task, along with conversational moves I've provided to ensure a thoughtful, civil discussion. Toward the end of class, students have time to reflect on the discussion, set future goals, and decide how many pages to read before their next discussion.

What About Assessment?

I've had to accept the fact that choice reading is messy and that assessing it must be as expansive and imperfect as books themselves. So I check journal entries and the completion of book club activities, and as a culminating assignment students write a formal reflection on how their book changed their view of themselves or the world, using specific textual evidence to support their assertion.

I know that these assessments don't prove that all students have read their books. Generally most kids will read, and a few will not. But in my classes, these book clubs have generated more excitement about reading and higher levels of insight than any other reading we do.

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Book clubs bring challenges in class management and assessment, but they can lead to improvements in students' reading ability. Over the summer break, I've been thinking about what improvements I can make for next year, poring over student feedback from June and remembering aspects of the school year that caused me the most anxiety-and my chest begins to tighten as I think about choice reading book clubs.

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This is the original OG (Harvey Daniels) on book clubs

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Literature Circles: Voice and Choice in Book Clubs and Reading Groups

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Buy Literature Circles: Voice and Choice in Book Clubs and Reading Groups: Read Kindle Store Reviews - Amazon.com

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Amazon.com: Mini-Lessons for Literature Circles: 9780325007021: Daniels, Harvey "Smokey", Steineke, Nancy: Books

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This is an example of a book tasting we did to help students choose. It was based on a unit question on perspectives.

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 Perspectives: Book Clubs "Chapter Clubs" Tasting

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This is an overview to students and parents on book clubs and making their top three choices

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This is one of many methods I've tried with students while reading for book clubs. It's what the do before-during-after a book club meeting.

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Rebakah O'Dells Literary Salons

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Rebekah O'Dell's Literary Salon Mini Unit/Mini-Lessons

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Four teachers across the U.S. challenged their students to choose two Times pieces - one on a topic within their comfort zone, another on a topic outside it - and read both. It was a success everywhere.

A student in Wisconsin chose this article on a topic she wouldn't ordinarily pick, and was interested to learn "that animals are likely much more active and intelligent than we give them credit for." Credit... Illustration by Shyama Golden

Before you read any further, try a quick experiment:

Go to the NYTimes.com home page, or to any of the individual sections.

Find an article, video, image, podcast or graphic that is immediately interesting to you because it is on a topic you know or care about, or are somehow connected to already.

Now take a second look. Find an article, video, image, podcast or graphic that is outside your usual comfort zone, yet still seems potentially interesting.

Read - or watch or listen to - them both. What happened?

This is exactly the challenge Kim Butterfield, an English teacher at Central High School in La Crosse, Wis., and a member of this year's New York Times Teaching Project, gave her students.

What they discovered is that no matter how foreign a topic feels initially, you can nearly always find a way to connect to it and learn something valuable. And, as Ms. Butterfield explains below, when her students shared what they chose, "all of our worlds widened."

We liked the idea so much we asked other Teaching Project members to try it. We ended up with students in schools from four U.S. regions - the South, the Midwest, the East Coast and the West Coast - all attempting the same exercise, and all discovering the same things Ms. Butterfield's students did. Below, you can read excerpts from the reflections of a few students in each of these classrooms.

We have labeled the students' choices "windows" and "mirrors," because all of these teachers explained the assignment in terms of Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop's often-cited metaphor of "windows and mirrors," which she described this way in a 1990 essay:

Books are sometimes windows, offering views of worlds that may be real or imagined, familiar or strange. These windows are also sliding glass doors, and readers have only to walk through in imagination to become part of whatever world has been created and recreated by the author.

When lighting conditions are just right, however, a window can also be a mirror. Literature transforms human experience and reflects it back to us, and in that reflection we can see our own lives and experiences as part of the larger human experience. Reading, then, becomes a means of self-affirmation, and readers often seek their mirrors in books.

What mirrors and windows can your students find in The New York Times? If you'd like them to try the exercise described above, we have a related Student Opinion question, " How Often Do You Read, Watch or Listen to Things Outside of Your Comfort Zone? " that challenges them to take the same steps, then post their answers to our comments section.

If they enjoy that, they might also be interested in our annual Summer Reading Contest, which invites teenagers to tell us what got their attention in The Times each week and why. This year it begins on June 11 and runs through Aug. 19.

Video

Credit Credit... Photographs by Art Streiber

One of the articles that inspired Kim Butterfield to invent this assignment was "The Weirdly Enduring Appeal of Weird Al Yankovic."
As a teacher, I'm always reading with the question, "How can I use this in class?" at the forefront of my mind. However, I also read The New York Times to unwind, and amidst a year filled with apocalyptic news stories, I encountered many bright spots that widened my understanding of the world and gave me hope.

When the school year started, I focused on the important issues - racial justice, the pandemic, the election - yet I couldn't stop thinking about how I could share with students the Weird Al profile that made me laugh and cry, the article about sheep shearing off the coast of Maine, the photo tour of the chalk factory that built a cult following among mathematicians, the bizarre story of the prank-commissioned Soviet-style mural of Cookie Monster, and the multimedia article that brought me 12,000 feet up the Grand Traverse in the Teton Mountain Range.

Finally, I realized that these articles weren't extraneous. They were a model of the lifelong reading habits that I wanted my students to develop. I shared all those articles as a text set and used one to demonstrate the summary and reflection I would have them compose for the articles they would find. My students were familiar with the concept of texts as mirrors and windows, so I asked them to look for one of each. I showed them how to use the search bar to find a topic they were already interested in, as well as how to browse the many, many sections of the New York Times website in order to discover something unexpected.

They found a trove of articles, Opinion pieces, videos and photojournalism that I had not encountered on my own. When they shared with one another in class, all of our worlds widened with new understanding. Many students revealed personal connections in their written reflections that taught me more about them, revelations that were profound, touching, fun and surprising. Ultimately, everyone gained something from the experience, including me, and I feel hopeful that they will take this with them on their journey as lifelong readers.
Nora W.
Mirror: " Olivia Rodrigo's 'Drivers License' Hit No. 1 in a Week. Here's How "

The day "Drivers License" was released it completely blew up on TikTok, and my For You page was filled with videos of people listening and reacting to it. While I was reading the article, I knew this song was breaking records left and right, but I had no idea it had gone worldwide.

Window: " Ancient Remains in Peru Reveal Young, Female Big-Game Hunter "

Ever since I've been a kid, whenever I watched a movie or documentary about past civilizations the hunters were always depicted as male and the gatherers, female. I just really appreciate the fact there is more information to be uncovered that could prove women and men had somewhat equal roles.
Jakyra A.
Mirror: "​ The Talk of the Super Bowl Is Quarterbacks, Except One ​"

I appreciate this article a great deal as someone who is not only Black but cares deeply about making people aware of the racism that still occurs today. The main question was why did it take the N.F.L. so long to say that Black lives matter, when according to the article, "N.F.L. rosters are 70 percent African-American"?

Window: "​ An Unleashed Dog, Sentenced to Death After an Attack ​"

I have never had a pet before, not even something as small as a hamster, so to me this was very informative in that I don't necessarily have to worry about my nonexistent pet being attacked by my neighbor's unleashed dog. Now, though, from looking through this "window," I can understand the importance of leashing your animals for their safety as well as others'.

Sydney H.
Mirror: " A Long, Lonesome Look At America "

I recently took a similar trip across the country with my family after my grandpa passed away. After a lot of deliberation, we made the choice to drive out to Idaho for his funeral, a round trip of about 3,200 miles. I've made this drive with my family several times before, but I spent much more time worrying this time - that we had made the wrong decision, that we were being irresponsible, that we would get sick or get someone else sick. Even with all these factors that made it difficult to enjoy, I found so much beauty. The mountains and the desert and the sky took my breath away, and I was reminded that some things don't change even when a million other things do.

Window: " How Far Does Wildlife Roam? Ask the 'Internet of Animals '"

I loved reading about how animal migration patterns, something that people previously thought to be so inconsequential and uncomplicated, could actually hold a lot of important information. It was also fascinating to think about the idea that animals are likely much more active and intelligent than we give them credit for, and there are complex systems throughout the entire natural world that we barely know anything about.
Shannon F.
Mirror: " Bernie Sanders Is Once Again the Star of a Meme "

The picture of Sanders that had immediately become a meme caught my attention, bringing to light the way in which I recognize and connect with the internet culture my peers have created. I love making fun of politics and joking around about important topics like the election and inauguration, much to the chagrin of my parents (it's all in good fun, of course; I avoid making jokes in bad taste), and the mere existence of this meme proved that I wasn't alone.

Window: " He Was Going to Close the Family Diner. Then He Got a Sign. "

I sympathized greatly with Chris Panayiotou; having to step into a leadership role in the middle of such tumult must have been a herculean task, but the fact that he took a step back and noticed what the community did for him and his father really proved significant. I can definitely take that advice. Sometimes, rather than being in my head and second-guessing myself, I should take a step back and look at the bigger picture.

A Mexican-American student in Los Angeles chose to read this article because of this image, which he says shows "the charm of Mexican culture." Credit... Christopher Lee for The New York Times

Unexpectedly, one of the most interesting parts of this assignment was the students' interpretation of what reflected their own lives. There were some that were predictable themes, like articles about cultural affiliation, teenagers and Los Angeles, but there were others that were much less obvious. For example, there were students reflecting on homelessness because they walk past tent camps on a daily basis, and students thinking about horrors around the world and seeing them as parallels to their own country of origin.

Distance learning has limited my view of who my students are, but this assignment broadened my understanding of them, and their experience. These students who participated took little prompting to dive in, and their work is reflective of who they are: thoughtful young people ready to engage, and make a difference, in the world.
Naydelin H.:
Mirror: " Mariachis Play On, Their Music Unsilenced by the Virus or the Deaths,"

I was first captivated by an image of Mariachis and their "trajes de charro," which roughly translates to someone who is well dressed. It really ties together the charm of Mexican culture. I was reminded of how I never had a strong sense of self-identity. Despite growing up in a traditional Mexican household, I also grew up in the United States where a lot of our culture and practices were not as prominent. It is difficult not knowing what to identify with because I fall right in the middle where I speak some broken Spanish and do not feel American enough to claim this as my own identity. I think it is beautiful that these Mariachis were able to keep their individual traditions and talents alive in spite of the loss and mourning of family members, friends and motivation and inspiration.

Rut J.

Window: " For Rohingya Survivors, Art Bears Witness"

I noticed pictures of murals but also how they were placed throughout the camp. I love that making art has become a passion as well as a way to make their homes a better place. It brings me back to living humbly. So many people forget, including myself, how fortunate we are to be living under a house, not many have the opportunity to live lives like the rest of us. It opens up my eyes as a reader to others' lives and how they make the best of it.
Cristian R.
Window: " Homelessness in U.S. Rose for 4th Straight Year, Report Says "

One thing that I noticed from the article is that a disproportionate amount of homeless people are in Black and Latino communities. In addition, a lot of them are minors - 1 out of every 6. It really shows me how dire homelessness really is in Los Angeles. Sure, I was able to notice the many tents and the homeless in Los Angeles, but I wasn't aware that the numbers were THIS bad statistically. Not only in terms of the number itself, but in terms of percentage compared to the rest of the United States.

I asked my students to read two articles: one from their comfort zone and one from outside of it. My students are used to completing an Article of the Week assignment where they can choose any article from The New York Times, so having them complete this assignment was a natural extension of the work we've done all year.

Out of 77 responses, only one student shared that she did not like having to read outside of her comfort zone. Most students reported being surprised by how much they enjoyed learning something new or how it built their confidence to read about an unfamiliar topic.

The assignment produced several unique pairings - K-pop and Biden's infrastructure plan; mental health and grasshopper invasion in Las Vegas; superhero TV shows and Hunter Biden's memoir. Many students picked seemingly disparate topics only to discover shared themes. Others found the connection between the topics and their lives through universal truths like suffering, perseverance, change and acceptance.
Maddy B.
Mirror: " Deals Designed to Lure Travelers Off Their Couches "

I travel a lot with my family, and I learned that cities and resorts are trying desperately to get people back in their doors. I can understand that they need the money for their business to stay open, but it's not quite safe yet. Many people still haven't been vaccinated and are likely to get Covid. I think the deals are great and you could plan an entire vacation for less than half of the usual price, but I don't think it's worth the risk.

Window: " Can We Really Picture Auschwitz? "

I got shivers reading about Buba and her time at Auschwitz. Her paintings are haunting and cold. I will never be able to understand the pain and suffering Jews had to go through, but Buba's paintings helped me see a small part of it. Also, I learned that there are only 2,000 or so survivors from Auschwitz left today.
Hattie D.
Mirror: " Asian-Americans Are Scared for a Reason "

Window: " UConn-Baylor: Was It a Foul? "

If someone were to ask me how I felt about Anti Asian-American violence, I would have a lot to say, whereas if someone asked me how I felt about the play with UConn-Baylor, I would have no idea what they were talking about and have no interest in finding out.

Which is probably why I was so shocked when the basketball article was fairly interesting to read. Sure, I didn't quite understand all of the complex sports terminology that was strewn throughout the article, but I understood that the players were rightfully outraged by the lack of a call for what seemed like an obvious foul. I don't think I'll ever understand how people can get so worked up over just a game, or how people can make millions of dollars for playing said game, but I know that others are passionate about it. I understand passion. It drives people to stand up for what they think is worthy of fighting for, and some may think that a foul play in basketball is what they have to stand up for.
Nick B.
Mirror: " What Republicans Could Learn From My Grandmother "

Window: " The Unsettling Power of Easter "

Going from an unfamiliar topic to one I know the ins and outs of was definitely giving me whiplash. Though, at the same time, I found myself connecting the two. Both groups that the articles were about happened to be oppressed or hated in some way. Both found safe spaces, be it church, or just a warm community of people; however, they were different in a lot of ways as well. The obvious difference being the topics at hand: Easter, and the other, transgender rights. Despite these jarring differences, I found myself, once again, connecting the two articles and what I took away from them was basically the same thing: there is power in community despite the hatred we may face. I would recommend both pieces, because I feel that these offer valuable information that other students could take something away from.

A student from Massachusetts chose this article because, she writes, "I never imagined a box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch making headlines!" Credit... Jensen Karp

I loved seeing what articles my sophomore English students chose to read! While it was fun to see what topics they naturally gravitated toward, it was even more fun to see what they read "out of their comfort zone."
I encouraged them to choose something that challenged them, and I explained that I do this regularly. For example, I shared that I might read an article about science or the stock market, areas definitely not within my expertise. Several of my students were surprised at the breadth of NY Times features. Certainly the Cinnamon Toast Crunch shrimp story was widely shared!
Callie B.
Mirror: " Why Your Brain Feels Broken "

I found "parental burnout" and "work burnout" to be very interesting. Parental burnout is a psychological phenomenon and a diagnosis for parents who feel so much exhaustion that they can't function. I didn't know this existed and it was interesting to learn the serious impacts the pandemic is having on parents.
Fabian
Mirror: " Too Much High-Intensity Exercise May Be Bad for Your Health "

As a longtime distance runner and an athlete of cross-country and track, I have encountered and participated in multiple high-intensity experience workouts. However, I have never stopped to consider how exactly these draining exercises affected my health.

Window: " The Curious Case of the Cinnamon Toast Crunch Box "

I never imagined a box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch making headlines! Then again, I never seemed to care much for that specific cereal in the first place. However, the cinnamon-coated shrimp tails' picture needed lots of more explaining and was way too good to ignore.

The experience of reading these two articles was unique and drastically different. While one article taught me about exercise and something I already had an interest in, the other article helped me learn something that I have never considered.
If you'd like to try this exercise with your students, just direct them to our related Student Opinion question, How Often Do You Read, Watch or Listen to Things Outside of Your Comfort Zone? It invites them to go through the exercise above and post their responses to our comments.

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A Simple Exercise For Encouraging Independent Reading

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Four teachers across the U.S. challenged their students to choose two Times pieces - one on a topic within their comfort zone, another on a topic outside it - and read both. It was a success everywhere. Before you read any further, try a quick experiment: Go to the NYTimes.com home page, or to any of the individual sections.