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Daniel Willingham has long been interested in how learning and memory work.

But about 15 years ago, the University of Virginia professor of psychology decided to move beyond the study of cognition and do something few others in his field had done: focus on what the research means for classrooms.

His goal these days is to help K-12 teachers understand why students learn the way they do.

"My experience is teachers are kind of tired hearing 'If you do X, then Y will happen,'" Willingham, who is married to a Montessori teacher and credits her with guiding much of his research, said in a recent interview. "They're just supposed to believe it. It's pretty patronizing. ... It wouldn't satisfy me. It's much more persuasive if you understand how it works."

Willingham has written several successful books that bridge the gap between cognitive psychology and education, including Why Don't Students Like School? and Raising Kids Who Read.

His most recent book, The Reading Mind, published last month, is a deep dive into the many processes happening as people translate black marks on a page into meaning. It's an ambitious undertaking, covering everything from why sound-based (versus picture-based) coding systems were created to how reading on digital devices affects comprehension.

Rather than prescribing how to teach, the book "is meant to leave the teacher with a useful cartoon model of what's happening in the mind when a skilled reader reads ," Willingham explained.

Below are some highlights distilled from both the interview with Education Week and Willingham's new book.

Using Sound and Sight to Decode

The purpose of writing-and, by extension, reading-is to communicate thought across time and space, Willingham explains in his book. Writing with pictures or symbols requires too much memorization, so instead sound-based decoding systems were developed, in which the sounds that make up spoken language are written down.

Sounds-based decoding requires three things: 1) the ability to differentiate letters from each other (to see the difference between b and p); 2) the ability to differentiate sounds from one another (to hear the difference between b and p); and 3) knowledge about what sounds go with what letters (or letter pairs).

"It's the second of those that, if it's going to be a stumbling block, that's probably what's going to be hardest for kids," Willingham said. "None of it is super easy. I mean the easiest is letters probably." But when kids really have difficulty in learning decoding, it's likely because they struggle with phonemic awareness, or hearing the differences between sounds.

Experienced readers don't have to sound words out-instead they remember what words look like. With sight-based reading, "what really counts is reading experience," he said. "Eventually, most typically developing readers are going to develop this type of visual expertise where they become fluent" in recognizing words.
(See the Education Week Facebook Live interview with Willingham below as well.)
Understanding What You Read

A very simple way of looking at reading comprehension is that it's not that different from understanding speech.

"Once you've got a fluent decoder, everything else that's happening in reading is basically the same thing that's happening when you're listening to somebody talk," he said. "We know that's not fully right, but to a first degree of approximation, it's pretty close."

Looking deeper, reading comprehension requires an understanding of individual words, what those words mean when put together to form a sentence, and how sentences connect to each other. "Knitting sentences together is a very important part of comprehension, and it's the part that students usually have difficulty with or fail to do altogether," Willingham said.

Having background knowledge is key to understanding how sentences fit together, Willingham claims. He uses this example in the book: "The morning precipitation had left sidewalks icy. Kayla told her children to be careful." To make the connection there, the reader has to know, among other things, that people walk on sidewalks, that ice is slippery, that people can fall and get hurt when they walk on slippery things, and that parents don't want their children to get hurt.

(A University of Virginia professor emeritus, E.D. Hirsch Jr., spent his career arguing that background knowledge is critical for reading comprehension. Hirsch and Willingham are pals, it turns out, and agree on this point. Though Willingham notes he believes knowing grammar and other "content-free abstract rules" is important for comprehension as well.)

When Reading Goes Digital

Overall, the research shows that reading on a screen can hurt comprehension a bit, Willingham explained.

"If I had to guess, that will probably be gone in 10 years as we get better and better at figuring out why," he said.

The data differ slightly depending on the kind of digital reading being done.

When it comes to reading a novel on an e-reader versus on paper, there's "not a whole lot of difference between the two formats," he said. "There's probably a small hit to reading comprehension on the screen." But most often people use Kindles and other e-readers for pleasure reading, so that kind of small hit is OK.

For digital textbooks, there seems to be a slightly larger negative impact on comprehension, Willingham said. However, some studies have shown comprehension is about the same; it just takes longer to read a digital textbook than a paper one. That all makes sense, he said, because in a digital textbook "the content is hard-it's complicated stuff."

And while digital technology seemed to have a lot of promise for improving pre-reading interventions (say, by using an iPad app to practice letter sounds), the data there are "really all over the place," Willingham said. That is, some applications help improve reading skills, and some don't.

The software developers are, for the most part, "just using intuition for how to do this, and the design choices they're making end up having an impact," he said. Animations and graphics may be illuminating or distracting, depending on how they're used.

In all, using technology to improve reading "may be more complicated than we thought."

Reading Motivation

In his new book, Willingham also rehashes some of Raising Kids Who Read, which focuses on fostering a love of reading.

Rewards aren't the best option for getting students to read more, he writes. "A reward definitely makes it more likely you'll do something," he said. "My concern is what happens when the reward ends."

Studies show that rewards can backfire; people who are rewarded for doing a task may think the task was less enjoyable afterward than those who were not rewarded for doing the same task. That's because they attribute their participation to the reward alone.

Offering a logical appeal for why students should read-i.e., telling them that it will broaden their mind or help them in school-isn't that effective either. Attitudes about reading, instead, tend to be based on emotion. "The analogy to exercise is compelling," he said. "My problem is not that I don't understand the health benefits of exercise, it's that I just don't like it."

To engender positive reading attitudes, students need to have positive reading experiences, Willingham writes. They need to see themselves as readers. And they need to have books that they enjoy readily available.

For more news and information on reading, math, and STEM instruction: Follow @LianaLoewus
And sign up here to get alerts in your email inbox when stories are published on Curriculum Matters.

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Reading and the Mind: An Interview With Daniel Willingham

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Daniel Willingham has long been interested in how learning and memory work. But about 15 years ago, the University of Virginia professor of psychology decided to move beyond the study of cognition and do something few others in his field had done: focus on what the research means for classrooms. His goal these days is to help K-12 teachers understand why students learn the way they do.

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A federal lawsuit centering on the Detroit school district raises a fascinating argument about the relationship of literacy to citizenship: Is it possible to be a participating member of society without the ability to read and write?

The plaintiffs in the lawsuit, don't think so. And they argue that Michigan's failure to help Detroit's needy students, and students of color, to read falls afoul of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees liberty and equality under the law.

Think about it, they say: If you can't read and write, you will have trouble voting, reading the news, getting a job, or otherwise being a fully formed citizen.

The unusual lawsuit is among the first to argue that public education should lead to a specific educational outcome in a content area: if not literacy outright, the schools must give access to literacy instruction.

A Complex History

As you probably know, the U.S. Constitution doesn't say anything explicit about education, leaving it up to states to define in their own constitutions what educational rights are guaranteed. That's why most litigation over school adequacy has been fought at the state level, rather than at the federal level. (And in some states, including Michigan, courts have even held that the state constitution doesn't create a "cause of action" over education-or allow individuals to sue over educational rights.)

The U.S. Supreme Court has generally been suspicious of attempts to read educational rights into the constitution. Most notably, in the 1973 case San Antonio v. Texas, it ruled that even though Texas' school financing system yielded big disparities in per-pupil funding, it did not run afoul of the 14th Amendment's equal-protection clauses.

That seems pretty open-and-shut. But according to the plaintiffs in the Michigan case, brought by the pro bono law firm Public Interest, the San Antonio case left open the possibility that a school system could be so dysfuctional and fail so greviously to provide a "basic" education that it might run afoul of the constitution's equal-protection clause. And in effect, the Gary plaintiffs say that's exactly what's happened in Detroit, thanks to the falling spending, the crumbling schools, the outdated textbooks, and the lack of qualified teachers. What's more, the state is doing a disservice to a particular class of students who are disadvantaged and non-white.

Not surprisingly, the state of Michigan is fighting this argument. In its motion to dismiss the case, which was heard by U.S. District Judge Stephen Murphy last week, the state argued that "there is no fundamental right to literacy" in the constitution, and that it is not responsible for the Detroit school district's woes.

"Plaintiffs' claims go far beyond mere access to education and ask this Court to serve as a 'super' legislature tasked with determining and dictating educational policy in every school district and school building throughout the United States where an illiterate child may be found," the state's lawyers wrote. "This Court should soundly reject Plaintiffs' attempt to destroy the American tradition of democratic control of schools by creating a fundamental right out of whole cloth."

Mark Rosenbaum, the director for Public Counsel's Opportunity Under Law project, said that during the hearing, he argued that the right the plaintiffs are fighting for isn't as anywhere near as extensive as the defendants claim.

"It's not clear to me beyond basic education and access to literacy how much the 14th Amendment would admit," he said in an interview. "But if kids can't read and write, they are excluded from democracy and the ability to achieve based on merit."

Expanding Educational Rights

No matter which way this case ends up, it is emblematic of a subtle shift in lawsuits over educational rights. For years, access to school finance and funding were the name of the game in such lawsuits. And now, a handful of lawsuits are arguing that equity contains an instructional component.

The primary example is probably , the 2014 case that sought to overturn that state's teacher-tenure and dismissal rules, arguing that they were concentrating poorly performing teachers in schools serving large number of needy students, in violation of the state constitution. That lawsuit was successful at the trial-court level, but an appeals court overturned it.

Public Counsel wasn't involved in Vergara, but Rosenbaum was a key figure in another, similar equity lawsuit, Reed v. California. That case, in 2010, argued that seniority-based layoffs violated needy and minority students' civil rights by subjecting them to a revolving door of teachers.

It resulted in a settlement with the Los Angeles school district, but the settlement was also overturned, this time over procedural problems raised by United Teachers Los Angeles.

The Gary plaintiffs' legal team includes two law professors, Evan Caminker of the University of Michigan and Erwin Chemerinsky of the University of California, Irvine, alongside the Public Counsel and other pro bono lawyers.

Lori Higgins, the Detroit Free Press' excellent education reporter, has a great rundown on some of the complex legal arguments in this case and will be following it as it develops. Her most recent piece is here.

Photo credit: Kim Davies/ Flickr Creative Commons
For news on standards, curriculum, and testing, And sign up here to get alerts in your email inbox when stories are published on Curriculum Matters. Follow @Stephen_Sawchuk

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Should Literacy Instruction Be a Constitutional Right?

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A federal lawsuit centering on the Detroit school district raises a fascinating argument about the relationship of literacy to citizenship: Is it possible to be a participating member of society without the ability to read and write? The plaintiffs in the lawsuit, don't think so.

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Literacy professionals say that early literacy, teacher preparation, and equity are among the most important literacy topics to emphasize-but those aren't always what policymakers are focusing on, a new survey concludes.

The survey, released today from the International Literacy Association, explores the views of nearly 2,100 respondents from 91 countries. While the results reflect a wide range of opinions from educators and academics working in different contexts, it's not a nationally representative sample of people in any one country.

The survey asked the respondents to rate literacy topics on a scale of importance from whether they are "not at all important" to "extremely important," and on a scale of how "hot" they are, form "not at all hot" to "extremely hot."

A topic can be "hot," or the focus of a lot of buzz, but teachers may not find it very important, and vice versa. The ILA's report focuses on that gap since it shows that a crucial topic may not be getting nearly enough attention among those who set policy goals and priorities for literacy. Let's take a look at three of the most interesting gaps.

The highest gap, of 46 percentage points, was for teacher preparation. Eighty-five percent of respondents said it was an extremely or very important literacy topic, but just 39 percent felt that it was "hot."

In nearly all cases, respondents rated a topic as more important than it was hot, but there was one glaring exception: Only half of respondents said that "summative assessments"-the year-end tests used to promote students or for school accountability purposes-were important, the lowest of all 17 topics studied. But 57 percent felt they were "hot," an indication that teachers continue to think these tests are being overemphasized, despite changes made in federal law.

The smallest gap was for digital literacy, defined here as teaching children how to communicate using digital technologies and how to comprehend and evaluate digital information. But digital literacy was deemed a lot less important than things like early literacy, teacher preparation, and access to books and literacy content. Translation: Digital literacy has a lot more buzz than experts think is really warranted in the grand scheme of things that make up literacy instruction.

Wondering what topics were deemed "not hot"? 19 percent identified "mother tongue literacy,"-or recognizing the importance of and building on home language-as not hot, a finding that probably reflects the international nature of this survey. The other was standards for specialized literacy professionals, with 17 percent saying this was not a hot topic in their country.
Image credit: Getty

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What's 'Hot' In Literacy Policy Isn't Always What Experts Think Merits Attention

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Literacy professionals say that early literacy, teacher preparation, and equity are among the most important literacy topics to emphasize-but those aren't always what policymakers are focusing on, a new survey concludes. The survey, released today from the International Literacy Association, explores the views of nearly 2,100 respondents from 91 countries.

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Louisiana wants to overhaul tests to measure students' reading skills to better reflect the curriculum that students actually encounter in class, rather than to use the random and often dull reading passages that populate the current exams.

The state is one of just two, plus Puerto Rico, to apply for the U.S. Department of Education's innovative assessment pilot program. It would allow up to five districts in the winning states the opportunity to allow some districts to use innovative new tests to measure achievement, rather than the usual state standardized exam.

Louisiana's plan is to base its reading tests on a collection of texts that students have actually read, discussed, and analyzed over the course of the school year.

So why does Louisiana think this is an improvement? The answer to this depends on knowing a bit about what current reading tests look like. Mostly, they measure specific skills, like finding an author's point of view or the main idea of a paragraph. The main criticism of this approach has come from cognitive psychologists and scholars like E.D. Hirsch Jr., a longstanding proponent of content-rich curricula, who argue that to fully grasp these random reading passages, you actually need to have some background knowledge of the subject at hand.

If on the test you get a passage on blueberry cultivation, or how Nancy Drew was a role model for young women, or hiking in Ireland's Dingle Peninsula, for instance, but have never seen or tasted a blueberry, heard of a "roadster," or know where Ireland is located, then you're at a disadvantage, the thinking goes. (True confessions: All three topics showed up on my SAT exam once upon a time.)

And so in this way, they argue, the tests tend to be unfair to students from low-income backgrounds. Students who come from print-rich homes and have had more opportunities to build this knowledge are more likely to do well on the tests, they argue.

Louisiana officials are clearly drawing from this argument.

The current tests, officials in Louisiana say in their application, "do not always value the background knowledge students bring to them, including students' deep understanding of books and texts they have studied previously. Instead, state tests preference reading and writing skills over the content that renders them rich and meaningful." And that in turn tends to weaken instruction in the English classroom, they say.

Building Students' Background Knowledge

In some ways, the proposal flows from the state's curriculum work, for which it's received a lot of attention. Among other things, teachers helped develop new curricula in the form of "guidebooks" in reading that couple literary, nonfiction, and social science texts all on a particular theme. In its proposal, it imagines testing students on several different collections of texts; districts could choose which they'd like to use for their curriculum and for the test.

There was a lot of excitement in the early days of ESSA about the innovative assessment pilot, but as my colleague Alyson Klein writes in this story, it has not ended up being all that popular with states. In part, that's because of all the guardrails in the program: The tests have to be modified as appropriate for English-language learners and students with disabilities, and the results have to be comparable with those from the state tests. And that's without any extra cash.

Louisiana seems to think the extra trouble is worth it. Read all 300 pages of the state's proposal here.

Image: Sebastien Wiertz. Licensed under Flickr/ Creative Commons
For news on standards, curriculum, and testing, And sign up here to get alerts in your email inbox when stories are published on Curriculum Matters. Follow @Stephen_Sawchuk

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Louisiana's New Approach to Reading Tests

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Louisiana wants to overhaul tests to measure students' reading skills to better reflect the curriculum that students actually encounter in class, rather than to use the random and often dull reading passages that populate the current exams. The state is one of just two, plus Puerto Rico, to apply for the U.S.

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Eight years later, have the Common Core State Standards led to a revolution in how reading and writing are taught?

Not exactly. Teachers have shifted practices dramatically on vocabulary and assigning nonfiction, but they've struggled with some of the other shifts in those standards-most notably the tenet of having students of all reading abilities grapple with grade-level texts.

That's according to a new, nationally representative survey of some 1,200 teachers published today by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. The teachers fall into in three categories: those teaching grades 4- 6, 6-8, and 9-10. The survey's margin of error is plus or minus 5 percentage points.

The usual survey caveats apply, of course: These are self-reported practices, not observed practices, which means that we can't know for sure how teachers intepreted the questions. And it can be hard to capture detailed information about really nuanced aspects of teaching in a survey.

Let's dig in!

Vocabulary Is Now Largely Taught in Context

Most teachers now teach new words in the context of reading and conversation. This is encouraging, Fordham analysts write, since most ELA scholars agree that learning words in the context of rich texts is superior to memorizing a list each week and taking a quiz on it.

Of note, 53 percent of teachers reported teaching domain-specific vocabulary essential to each discipline (sometimes called by practitioners "Tier III" words); fewer taught general academic vocabulary (or "Tier II" words).

Literacy experts greeted this finding with open arms.

"The news on vocabulary is heartening, moving away from list-based and program-based approaches," said Carol Jago, a former president of the National Council of Teachers of English and now a consultant, who was not involved in the survey. "I think all of that was eating up too much classroom time."

Teachers Continue to Choose Reading-Level, Not Grade-Level Texts

Here's an instance in which there's evidence of some backsliding. Compared to Fordham's last big survey on common-core reading, in 2012, the proportion of teachers reporting using "grade level" texts rather than texts based on students' reading levels has fallen among secondary teachers.

This wades right into one of the common core's biggest controversies. The standards prioritized giving even struggling readers opportunities to learn grade-level texts. It challenged what had long been an orthodoxy in reading instruction, especially for lower-level readers: choosing "just right" texts for each student that won't cause frustration. The problem with that, the thinking goes, is that some kids are never challenged enough to reach the difficulty or complexity of grade-level reading materials, and thus fall further behind.

Fordham found that far fewer secondary teachers are assigning grade-level reading materials, and among teachers overall, fewer than half are assigning those texts.

Timothy Shanahan, an emeritus professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, pulled no punches in interpreting the results: "It means holding kids back and not learning texts that are hard enough," he said.

(Shanahan provided feedback on an early draft of the survey report, and also helped to write portions of the common core.)

One explanation for this finding may also be that teachers haven't been given enough training on how to "scaffold" more complex readings for students who are furthest behind.

"Asking teachers to teach kids who are well below grade level these texts is an extremely big ask, even for experienced and skilled teachers," said David Griffith, a senior research and policy associate at Fordham who co-wrote the report accompanying the survey findings. "When I look at this, as a former teacher who is now interested in policy, that's the one where I think, 'Wow, teachers really have to have their act together and be supported to do this well.' I see it as a basic capacity issue."

Evidence-Based Reading Is Common, But Writing Lags

Most readers know that the common core highlighted the importance of reading and writing based on texts, not just on personal experience or creative writing-by far the most dominant kind in U.S. schools through the 2000s.

On the reading front, teachers are overwhelmingly asking students to cite evidence from texts when they teach "close reading," which basically means assisting students as they grapple with a text's craft, structure, and meaning. More than 90 percent of respondents said they did that.

No other techniques used as part of close reading scored as high, which Jago said probably reflects that some other best practices weren't offered as drop-down choices on the survey.

"The idea of evidence-based questions, text-based questions is an easy idea to get your head around. Other techniques are harder to improve in instructional materials, and I do think there are a whole lot of things that high-quality close reading would have that aren't described here," she said. For example, teachers must make sure students feel safe offering up opposing points of view, that they are intrepid in their interpretations, and that all students have a chance to speak up, she noted.

On the other hand, writing still tends to be based on personal experience or creating a narrative, rather than based on texts. This was yet another flash point in the common-core wars, since personal experience was long a component of "workshop" -type writing classrooms.

What's potentially most problematic here, literacy experts said, is that teachers reported giving below grade-level kids tasks based on knowledge or experience, not asking them to grapple with a text, as they did for more skilled students. In other words, students who are presumably more academically advantaged are getting what appears to be more challenging work.

Fiction Is on the Decline

Arguably, the single most divisive issue in the English section of the common core was its emphasis on giving students access to challenging nonfiction text as part of the effort to build their background knowledge and their academic vocabularies.

(There was quite a lot of confusion about what the standards actually required on this front. In brief, the standards called for this to gradually shift in favor of nonfiction until, in high school, about 70 percent of what they read is nonfiction. But this was supposed to be their reading diet across all the content areas; in English, they were still expected to engaging in literature.)

The survey found that, indeed, nonfiction is on the rise among all grade levels, making up more than a third of the materials the teachers reported teaching.

Here again, interpreting what these findings mean is a little difficult. On the one hand, teachers are clearly responding to what the common core demands.

On the other hand, Fordham sounds like it's having some misgivings about this approach. The nonprofit notes that 40 percent of teachers reported assigning fewer "classical texts or teaching the literary canon," and if those are being replaced by a random, rather than a coherent, collection of texts, it won't benefit students, Griffith said.

Expect this finding to pique the interest of the Pioneer Institute, a Massachusetts-based group that has been one of the foremost opponents of the standards, and has repeatedly cited the loss of "classic literature" in its push against the standards.

Final Thoughts

Overall, the survey paints a mixed picture about the effect of the common core on instruction. The standards are still in use (sometimes under other names) in dozens of states, but whether they've really penetrated classrooms is a different question.

Shanahan, for one, is concerned.

"Overall, I think this is not good," he said. "I think maybe the political brouhaha around the common core scared people away from implementation."

States may have kept the standards in place, but the fear of raising opponents' hackles might have prevented them from sharing resources with each other or providing teachers with sustained help on some of the most challenging practices, he surmised.

The data, though, are somewhat challenging to interpret, because of the survey-based issues noted above. For more perspectives on the implementation of standards in the classroom, check out the work products from the Center on Standards, Alignment, Instruction, and Learning, a research collaborative with several continuing studies.

Fordham also offers recommendations for ELA teachers. The most interesting one is to organize lessons around "text sets," or groups of texts on a theme or topic that are scaffolded in difficulty for students and help build background knowledge. Text collections are part of the work that Louisiana has assembled in its homegrown efforts to design curriculum for the common core. It's also the approach taken by several new ELA content providers such as Newsela, which focuses on nonfiction.

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The State of Common-Core Reading and Writing in 5 Charts

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Eight years later, have the Common Core State Standards led to a revolution in how reading and writing are taught? Not exactly. Teachers have shifted practices dramatically on vocabulary and assigning nonfiction, but they've struggled with some of the other shifts in those standards-most notably the tenet of having students of all reading abilities grapple with grade-level texts.

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A California lawsuit asserting that literacy is a fundamental right within the state constitution has been cleared to proceed.

A state Superior Court judge overruled a motion by the state education department, board of education, and superintendent to dismiss the lawsuit. Her decision means that the lawsuit is presumably cleared to go to trial, although the plaintiffs appear to be hoping that the state will settle long before that. If so, it would probably mean putting new funding into literacy programs and instruction in the Golden State.

The public interest law firm Public Counsel and a global law firm, Morrison Foerster, are representing the plaintiffs: students in three low-performing California schools that mostly serve black and Latino students.

In her July 18 ruling, Superior Court Judge Yvette Palazuelos agreed that, as minorities, the students have a valid class claim. And, she wrote, since the state is ultimately responsible for the quality of education, the students' claim that their education fell far below "prevailing statewide standards" is valid.

In essence, the lawsuit faults the state for not intervening in the low-performing schools to ensure that the students could read at grade level, despite evidence from state tests of chronic low performance and the existence of a statewide literacy plan. Read more about the case in this story I wrote when the lawsuit was filed back in December 2017.

The California lawsuit echoes a federal one brought in Michigan by current and former Detroit students, who are also being represented by Public Counsel. That federal lawsuit was dismissed by the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, but the plaintiffs plan to appeal.

The core argument in both of them is that the inability to read and write precludes people from exercising other civic duties, like the right to vote.
Photo credit: Romanus_too. Licensed under Flickr/Creative Commons.
See also: Reading Is Fundamental. But It's Not a Fundamental Right, Court Rules
For news on standards, curriculum, and testing, And sign up here to get alerts in your email inbox when stories are published on Curriculum Matters. Follow @Stephen_Sawchuk

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Literacy Lawsuit in California Can Proceed, Court Rules

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A California lawsuit asserting that literacy is a fundamental right within the state constitution has been cleared to proceed. A state Superior Court judge overruled a motion by the state education department, board of education, and superintendent to dismiss the lawsuit.

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Visual: This poster tells us the importance of reading. It shows a man with words in his head, words that mostly come from books. At the bottom, you can see a quote that highlights the importance of reading books.

Textual: The text compares the mind and books to the sword and the whetstone. The whetstone is a slab of rock that is used to sharpen swords and tools, or weapons for war. The mind is like a sword; the books are the whetstones. The slogan is trying to tell us that reading more books will sharpen your mind.

Typography: The slogan is a whitish yellow color, and it is in contrast to the red background of the poster, drawing attention. The words are also quite big, which makes it eye-catching and more comfortable to read from a distance.

Layout: The person's head is displayed above to grab the reader's attention and arouse curiosity, then the reader will read the words at the bottom, and they will sort of have an answer, understanding the poster better.

Audience: The general public, especially students and young adults/teens.

Context: The purpose of the poster is to highlight the importance of reading and make people aware of the benefits of reading, thus encouraging the people to read more books.

Culture: As our world is transforming into a more electronic one, more people will turn to their mobile devices and search up an answer or an article on the web and read there. The people read less and lesser books. Thus, the importance of reading books and the knowledge you gain needs to be highlighted, and therefore this poster is created.

Message: Reading books is essential, as it sharpens your mind and expands your knowledge.

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Visual: This poster tells us the importance of reading. It shows a man with words in his head, words that mostly come from books. At the bottom, you can see a quote that highlights the importance of reading books. Textual: The text compares the mind and books to the sword and the whetstone.

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a practical guide to integrating technology in the classroom

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April 18, 2018
Yes, You Really Can Do Authentic Projects with Limited Resources

As many Project Based Learning practitioners can attest to, PBL is a rewarding instructional framework, but sometimes it can be expensive to implement: field trip costs, material costs, or even specialized software and technology costs that may not fit within a declining school budget. Moreover, authentic tasks or challenging problems that do the best job of motivating students to exhibit effort require adults beyond the classroom. Industry professionals and credible experts-who will usually be glad to help and don't require extra funding-inspire students and help raise their performance. But where can a school in a marginalized neighborhood with few industry professionals and experts find them? Two of the keys to success are relationships and time.

The need to leverage existing resources and relationships presented itself recently at Nueva Vista Continuation High School in Bassett Unified, located in an unincorporated part of Los Angeles County. Teachers collaboratively designed a week-long career readiness project that focused on:

Technical writing standards (resume and cover letter)

Presentation skills, which required attention to both speaking and listening skills

Self-mastery, that extra magic that comes out in all meaningful projects, as students understand their potential greatness due to reflection and revision of project components.

Project Launch: Guest Speakers
The project launch event consisted of a series of teacher-invited guest speakers who talked about their career and the challenges they overcame growing up in the same neighborhood as the students. Students heard from a model, an LAPD officer, an LAPD detective, and a county level employment resource manager. The LAPD officer spoke to how he overcame several obstacles while growing up with similar struggles to the students' own struggles. All the speakers demonstrated and spoke to hope with the students that need it the most.

The launch event was designed to connect students emotionally to the driving question: "How do I get prepared for a job interview?" It's a question that many young people struggle with, a question that drives hopelessness in the hearts of the young especially when they see so much unemployment in their community.

Cover Letters & Resumes
During the project, students worked on crafting cover letters that spoke to specific desires and characteristics that made them employable. Imagine young people, many of whom have given up on being asked to write about what makes them worthy to have a job when many older people around them are unemployed. Students interacted with teachers and support staff who shared examples of cover letters and developed an understanding of desirable employee qualities. Following the inquiry, students wrote their letters, which were short and truthful. The letters spoke to their desires for improving the lives of others and their families. Cover letter writing did not require lots of resources, but did require time spent on precision and revision, which provided the students hope for job searching.

Students also spent time working on resumes. The students were challenged due to a lack of role models with jobs and very little positive activities or work experience. The project touched upon the kinds of experiences that should be shared in a resume and how to describe them appropriately. Students exhibited frustration several times with having to revise and adjust format, but saw the purpose in the end as they produced resumes properly formatted with appropriate content.

Public Performance
The culminating performance in the project was an interview day where students had to dress for success and be interviewed by two adults who they did not know. The school enlisted the support of our district's technology department, who was more than willing to get out from behind the computers and servers to interview students for the first time in their lives. It was a no-cost transformative experience for many students. All it took was time to build the relationships with Bassett's technology department to have them spend three hours supporting students directly on a Friday morning.

Students were interviewed with a premade set of generic questions and were rated on three criteria: speech development, logic, and delivery. The interviewers provided written feedback to the students to improve their chances in a real job interview. After the interviews, students reflected on the experience of the career week project and came away with one big takeaway that can change a life: "I had to spend time paying attention to what I put in writing. I had to pay attention to what I said during the interview. I can do this. I'm happy that I could do this!"

Post Project Reflection
After the week of work was completed, faculty spent time doing the "What Do You See" protocol to examine the student work completed. It became readily apparent that more time in crafting detailed cover letters would have helped students. More time on speaking skills development would have helped as well. Students did mock interviews with each other in preparation for Friday's work, but maybe more time with adults doing interview preparation one-on-one could have increased student success.

Finally, a few words of wisdom to reiterate when implementing Project Based Learning in under-resourced neighborhoods:

Do not discount the power of relationships to find people who want to work with young people (teachers can reach out to old friends and classified staff in the district office, who frequently want to help).

Build hope into the project.

Celebrate success and reflect on the quality of work immediately so that powerful professional learning happens.

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Yes, You Really Can Do Authentic Projects with Limited Resources | Blog | Project Based Learning | BIE

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As many Project Based Learning practitioners can attest to, PBL is a rewarding instructional framework, but sometimes it can be expensive to implement: field trip costs, material costs, or even specialized software and technology costs that may not fit within a declining school budget.

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Tools for Sharpening Multimedia Skills - K-12 Technology - June 1, 2018

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Voices of Youth (VOY) offers resources to help educate students on filmmaking and blogging. Their workshops offer instructor manuals, educational videos, workbooks, and more to aid in teaching students self-expression and creativity through digital storytelling.

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Information for teachers and parents on teaching and assessing reading, writing, and literacy.

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Edutopia is an initiative of the George Lucas Educational Foundation.

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Great writing resource

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writing Archives | Language Arts Classroom

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Stuck or confused about commenting on students writing? Yep. So, you have to grade papers - specifically, writing. Your students wrote a paper, and you want to give them feedback....

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One of best sites for ELA teachers