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PE and Literacy - An Odd Couple or a Match made in Heaven?

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PE and Literacy - An Odd Couple or a Match made in Heaven?

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In a world of constant notifications, tweets, and status updates, we have access to more content than ever before. With a 24/7 media cycle, there's more and more content being pumped out-some of it great, some of it...not so much. Our phones, tablets, and devices make this stream of content the focus of our attention with pings and "BREAKING NEWS" flashing across the top of our screens. But wait, all of this content means we're more informed, right?

Well...

Yes and no. Some of this content could be classified as "fake news". And while it's hard enough for adults to distinguish between reliable news and fake news, it's even more difficult for children to tell the difference.

Facebook's struggle with fake news made headlines in 2017, and the platform admitted it struggles with weeding out a lot of its fake news. (In fact, Facebook is having scientists look at its private servers to combat the issue.) The platform is even running ads on television to improve its damaged reputation. And while some might not consider this a big deal, more Americans are getting their news from social media than ever before. The number is even higher for children. According to a study by the Pew Research Center, two-thirds (67%) of Americans report that they get at least some of their news on social media.

How can we fight unreliable sources and ensure students can tell the difference?

1. Encourage students to ask questions

While it's absolutely fine to get updates from social media, it's important that we encourage students to not assume everything is factual, reliable, and trustworthy. How do we do this? Have students look over a few online articles. Who's the author? Is it a paid article or ad? Does it mention something about being sponsored content? Is it from another source? Asking these sort of questions will help students build critical-thinking skills.

2. Help students collect multiple sources

As media literacy expert Michelle Ciulla Lipkin notes in a recent post about media literacy, "Backing up a source by comparing the information on several different media networks is always a good idea." Depending on where a piece of content comes from, an article on a topic could be very different than one about the same thing from a different source. Encourage students to compare and contrast different sources. What's different? The same? Does one seem more negative? Encourage them to read several articles about the same topic. Reinforce the fact that personal bias exists, but as long as we're aware, that's okay.

3. Teach students to scan, scan, and scan

With trustworthy content, it should be easy to spot authors, publication dates, and brief information about the publisher itself. In addition, quotes and other sources referenced should be recognizable. Now, take a look at some questionable sources. Are things missing or hard to find? Does the author not quote sources or seem one-sided? If so, it might not be the best piece of content. Another giveaway? The headline. If it seems outrageous and uses multiple question marks or exclamation points, it might be best to look elsewhere. Often, unreliable sources will attempt to grab attention through outrageous headlines and claims. This leads to ad revenue, and sometimes, fake news is created just for that!

4. Promote working together with others

Unreliable sources are all over. Yet, when students help other students identify reliable sources of information, it helps them learn the differences and where to search next time. A possible exercise? Have students list the things to look for when determining if a source is reliable, then have them list some tip-offs that might make something unreliable. Eventually, these giveaways will stick with students as they absorb content outside of school.

There's no question that our world is saturated with content-some of it great, some of it not so much. The trick is navigating all of this content and getting to the good stuff. Renaissance myON News™, helps students do just that. Articles are written by professional journalists and reviewed by a child psychologist for age-appropriateness. Every article is written at three Lexile ® levels, with audio supports and engaging multimedia to further student understanding. Now, more than ever, it's important that we help students develop the skills needed to differentiate between reliable and unreliable sources.
To learn more about myON News, click the button below.
Sources

Chokshi, N. (2017). How to Fight 'Fake News' (Warning: It Isn't Easy). New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/18/business/media/fight-fake-news.html
Shearer, S. & Gottfried, J. (2017). News Use Across Social Media Platforms 2017. Pew Research Center. Retrieved from http://www.journalism.org/2017/09/07/news-use-across-social-media-platforms-2017/

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Tips for helping students find reliable news and online sources

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In a world of constant notifications, tweets, and status updates, we have access to more content than ever before. With a 24/7 media cycle, there's more and more content being pumped out-some of it great, some of it...not so much. But wait, all of this content means we're more informed, right?

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Focus on the portion on integrating literacy.

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Electives give students avenues for choice and can function as vehicles for core content standards.

©Shutterstock/Monkey Business Images

A vibrant elective program in middle and secondary schools should be considered just as precious as the core classes-after all, electives are the one or two periods a day that students have had a say in selecting. In a nationwide survey I conducted of sixth through 12th graders (for my most recent book), I asked what engaged them the most as learners. Across the nation, student choice ranked high in results. And according to education researcher Robert Marzano, choice "has also been linked to increases in student effort, task performance, and subsequent learning."

Yet this very quality-student choice-seems to be one of the factors that make electives vulnerable.

For many schools, budget cuts and an ebb and flow of educational funding are par for the course. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, "As of the current 2017-18 school year, at least 12 states have cut 'general' or 'formula' funding-the primary form of state support for elementary and secondary schools-by 7 percent or more per student over the last decade." In many cases, schools look to the classes they deem extras to be the first to fall.

For many, that means electives. However, I want to push back on this notion that electives are somehow expendable. In fact, some might argue they are just as vital as core content classes.

The Power of Connection

Students also reported in the nationwide survey I conducted that they need to be more connected to the adults on campus. We talk so much about differentiating students, but we need to differentiate teachers and schools too. It helps our students to connect with school if they learn that there are many diverse personalities on hand for them to learn from. Electives, many times, reflect the interests of the teachers that teach them as well as the students that choose them. This permits a student to automatically have a self-selected connection to the adult in the room.

The Journal of Educational Psychology recently reported that in a study of almost 400 students and their 25 teachers, researchers found that when teachers and students were given information about five similarities they shared, the knowledge helped improve student-teacher relationships and academic achievement.

Electives Support Core Classes

Electives can also do double duty as vehicles for core content standards. And teachers can help ensure that electives are not thought of as inferior to core classes by guaranteeing that they help carry the weight of teaching literacy along with core classes. Elective teachers can provide evidence of the learning happening by doing three key things:

1. Encourage annotation when students read texts related to the elective topic.

2. Utilize pre- and post-assessments to show growth in related informational reading comprehension.

3. Fold in writing and oral presentations to help students communicate the elective's content.

Yearbook, robotics, film society, photography, world languages, theater, speech and debate, music appreciation, and current events-all of these classes can tap into reading, writing, listening, and speaking. And all of them attract a variety of students while adding a self-selected layer of engagement to those students' learning of core standards.

I'd also like to make the push for electives to be more inclusive. I think it would help eradicate the myth of electives being nonessential if we dropped the grade-point average prerequisite and other requirements that grant students access. Student choice, after all, must be about the student, not the process of selection.

Elective programs can play a large role in our schools' goals in preparing our students for college and career. Being able to select classes reflects the same process that they will see again in college.

When Teachers Are Engaged

The fact is, while many consider electives the B story in a school, they can, in fact, set the tone for a campus and play a huge role in engagement. And because they are highly engaging, electives play a role in keeping our students on campus-especially those reluctant learners and ones who struggle academically.

The power of engagement, however, is not limited to students alone. Elective classes can serve a purpose to continue teachers' engagement as well. Feeling like you're burning out? Pitch a class that you want to teach, that you'd love to teach. Teach one that helps fuel your teaching flame. Teachers are helping to create master schedules that reflect a variety of interests-from gardening to digital storytelling. Create a class that helps lure students to learning in a way that engages you as well.

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Electives give students avenues for choice and can function as vehicles for core content standards. ©Shutterstock/Monkey Business Images A vibrant elective program in middle and secondary schools should be considered just as precious as the core classes-after all, electives are the one or two periods a day that students have had a say in selecting.

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Balancing Instruction in Social Studies 

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Balancing Instruction in Social Studies 

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Be sure to check out the links near the end of the blog.

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The difficult challenge of teaching reading, writing, and speaking in addition to social studies content and skills.

©iStock/monkeybusinessimages

Most teachers look for opportunities to reflect on their practice-what we hope will go well, what we plan to improve, which lessons we're excited for, and which we'll revise or scrap altogether.

Right now is a great time to do this in the social studies-whether elementary, middle, or high school, in history, geography, or government classes-because there are ongoing changes when it comes to teaching academic and discipline-specific skills alongside traditional content.

Incorporating Universal and Discipline-Specific Skills

Universal skills like reading, writing, and speaking should be applied by students across disciplines and departments. Students should be practicing at least one of the three in every class, every day. But assigning a reading and telling students to talk or write about it is not enough. We need to continue to teach kids how to read through the years-helping them advance in using literacy strategies, annotating, or taking notes.

The same goes for speaking, in small- and large-group discussions, delivering speeches, and debating. And the same also goes perhaps most importantly for writing: how to summarize, paraphrase, quote, explain, analyze, persuade, and so on. These academic skills take consistent practice to master and should be taught regularly in all subjects but particularly in the social studies because social studies provides such a rich opportunity for skill development-students can learn how to think and read critically, how to speak and write persuasively, how to corroborate sources and make and defend an argument.

It's also important to integrate discipline-specific skills like historical thinking. These skills continue to grow in importance, as the College, Career, and Civic Life Framework of the National Council for the Social Studies attests. The need for historical thinking skills and historical literacy has been promoted by Sam Wineburg and the Stanford History Education Group as well as Peter Seixas, University of British Columbia professor and director of the Historical Thinking Project. It's imperative, Wineburg and Seixas say, for students to learn how to examine primary and secondary documents and evaluate diverse sources for perspective, veracity, and meaning-the real-world work of history professionals.

All of which presents opportunities for reflection as we think about curricular changes to incorporate, like how we can most efficiently teach content and academic and discipline-specific skills, how much weight each deserves, and whether emphasizing one necessarily means excluding the others.

Teaching Skills Through Content

I don't think we can afford to exclude either, and the answer, I believe, lies in teaching skills through content. It's possible to learn content and skills simultaneously by using the former to practice the latter. Teachers can layer over and around their social studies units any number of discrete skills.

For example, we can teach students how to answer document-based questions (DBQs) in World History by using DBQs involving Asian colonialism. We can teach them how to write persuasive essays in American History over the course of several lessons on the Great Depression. And we can teach students how to deliver an effective public speech during a Geography unit about ethnocentrism and cultural pluralism. Students can practice key academic skills while learning academic content.

The same holds true for discipline-specific skills like Seixas's Big Six Historical Thinking Concepts: establish historical significance, use primary source evidence, identify continuity and change, analyze cause and consequence, take historical perspectives, and understand the ethical dimension of historical interpretations. Students can practice these mental tools of the historian every week, or at least multiple times per unit.

While learning about the 1920s in U.S. History, for example, students might focus on continuity and change to analyze what has stayed the same since the Harlem Renaissance and what now is different. In a World History unit about political revolutions, students might work with cause and consequence to determine why revolutions are successful in some countries at certain times and why they manifest as mere uprisings in others. Or when considering primary source evidence-say the Black Panther Party's Ten-Point Program-students might use the Stanford History Education Group's historical thinking chart (pdf), which includes sourcing, contextualization, corroboration, and close reading.

It may help to visualize the relationship between universal skills, social studies skills, and social studies content as a three-circle Venn diagram, each sphere at once overlapping and distinct. Ideally teachers will include all three circles or domains in every unit-if not every day then certainly every week.

If spending time focusing on skills makes you anxious about allocating less time to learning new content, know this is a difficult decision with few clear or prescriptive answers. It's not possible to teach everything about all that has ever happened, but hopefully by helping students acquire the skills needed to analyze and interpret new information as they navigate the world, we'll be setting them up to successfully live within it.

In my own practice, I often consider how best to achieve the appropriate balance. Reaching the high bar of ensuring that students learn both skills and content can sometimes feel like aiming for a moving target, but I shoot for teaching both at least every week if not each day, and including both skills and content in formative and summative assessments.

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The difficult challenge of teaching reading, writing, and speaking in addition to social studies content and skills.

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"Incorporate literacy strategies in science education without sacrificing content."

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There are a variety of ways to incorporate literacy strategies in science education without sacrificing content.

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Written and spoken language play a significant role in all classes. But if you're trained as a science teacher, how do you support literacy development without losing content time for science?

Rethink Literacy

Asking students to think critically while reading science reports, news and pop science, graphs, and documentaries;

Challenging students to connect multiple sources of media, analyze a source's potential bias, or identify an unreliable source; and

Asking students to write or speak about science findings from a review of research or their own experiments with an audience in mind.

Good news: You already teach literacy. Science teachers offer students many opportunities to improve their literacy skills, including:

Components of literacy are already present in the science classroom. The key is to mindfully support the levels of reading, writing, and speaking skills your students possess, while focusing on content.

Embed Supports

A key method to support skill development without taking away content time is to embed supports.

When you're in direct instruction, acknowledge your strategies. Model reading a science text by thinking aloud with your questions about the text, making connections, or summarizing as you read.

Include multiple types of sources: Students can be given a chance to discuss a chart or watch a short video to set some baseline understanding before tackling a text on the same topic. Be sure to ask students to connect the different mediums-you may be surprised at how many of them initially see the pieces of information as unrelated.

Embed writing supports: Provide opportunities for students to write parts of their notes in their own words, with structure. For example, ask students to summarize a main idea as part of their notes for the day. For students who need more support, create a sentence frame and word bank. Mentor texts are another great way to clarify expectations and demonstrate strong writing; choose a former student's work to share with the class and ask students to identify what is right about the response.

Original prompt: Describe the process of photosynthesis as it relates to glucose production. Explain how plants and other living organisms depend on one another.

Annotated version: Describe the process of 1) photosynthesis as it relates to 2) glucose production. Explain how plants and other living organisms 3) depend on one another.

Annotate the prompt: Science prompts are often multifaceted, and scoring depends on students' responding to each component of the question. Students who miss points often know the materials but have difficulty processing the entire question. Students can learn to identify each part of a prompt and use each identified requirement as a section in their writing. Here's an example:

Readers Below Grade Level

Some students can discuss the science topics but struggle to access any material they have to read. There are several ways to address these below-grade-level readers' needs.

Engineer a text: Take a grade level piece of text and center it on a page. Create a column to the left where you pull out and define key vocabulary, and one on the right where you ask questions of the reader. These questions can be tailored for many levels of readers, ranging from supportive, fact-based questions (helping students read to find out the key facts) to application and extension questions for your readers above grade level. The result is differentiated instruction for your students.

Use technology to expose students to texts: Even if a student is unable to independently read a text, they can develop grade-level literacy skills by interacting with vocabulary, sentence structures, and content of higher-level texts through technology. Several devices have the option to enable text-to-speech functions, which have the device read the text out loud. Speech-to-text functions allow students to speak what they want to have typed. This function requires some practice-don't ask the student to use it for the first time on an assessment.

The Immersive Reader program from Microsoft also reads texts to students. It includes other enhancements, like syllable recognition and the ability to highlight as you read. It even has parts-of-speech recognition to support writing.

Two more benefits for science teachers in promoting literacy: As my students improved their engagement with the literacy inherent to science class, I noticed an increase in engagement with the content and a decrease in disruptions.

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Supporting Literacy in the Science Classroom

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There are a variety of ways to incorporate literacy strategies in science education without sacrificing content.

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Be sure to check out the internal links.

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Creating a magazine gives students a chance to learn about real-world applications of math.

"When will I ever use this?" If you're a math teacher, this is a question you're very familiar with. As the math curriculum becomes ever more abstract in middle and high school, it's difficult for students to see when and where the material they're learning will be applicable.

Just telling them that the material will be useful for their following math courses or future academic career doesn't cut it-and it shouldn't. This is when the " unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics," as explored through reading and writing, is the ace up the sleeves of teachers.

Reading and writing are complex, fundamental, integrative learning skills that should be used to their potential in math class. Reading is a two-part process that is similar to mathematics in that it requires first the transfer of encoded information to the reader and then the comprehension of that information. And writing is one of the most powerful modes of learning because it engages both hemispheres of the brain -one side generates ideas, the other structures them.

Effective writing also clarifies and organizes a student's thoughts, and the slow pace of writing is conducive to student learning because it allows them to reason carefully to make sure they're correct before they state their thoughts. Studies have shown that writing is valuable specifically for the math classroom-for example, it seems that a student's ability to explain concepts in writing is related to the ability to comprehend and apply them.

And of course written explanations also allow the teacher to understand and assess the student's thinking in a way that computational steps alone may not provide.

Writing in Math Class

Although writing prompts for the elementary-and less frequently for the middle school-math classroom have been available for some time, they generally focus on attitudes and dispositions, likes and dislikes, and thoughts, concerns, and feelings about math or math class. They include journals, math autobiographies, letters to the teacher, and freewriting activities. They involve writing about a concept or a process the students are studying, or center on metacognitive skills such as effort, goals, expectations, study habits, and so on.

These prompts can be adapted for high school students, but I've found it more useful to use reading and writing to illustrate how mathematics is embedded in every aspect of life. Reading and writing are particularly effective in developing a quantitative understanding of the world around us because they can be used to lead students to reflect on everyday experiences. One assignment that I've found effective is having students create a magazine of excerpts of articles about various applications of mathematics in real life.

The magazine-I've included an issue here-is composed of summaries of published articles, so to get students started, I keep an updated list of articles that highlight the ways math is present in different facets of the real world-from the probability that a soccer team ends up in a particular World Cup group to gerrymandering, fractals in Jackson Pollock's paintings, black holes, the fairness of social media, invisibility cloaks, and more.

I select articles from a variety of newspapers, journals, and magazines, such as The Washington Post, The New York Times (especially the Upshot section), The Economist, New Scientist, Scientific American, and The Atlantic, as well as from blogs, websites, podcasts, videos, and other online resources. The app MathFeed ( downloadable for free in the Apple App Store), curated by mathematician Francis Su, is my most valued and trusted source-it allows me to find the most important news and views about math in the media in a single place.

After picking an article that has piqued their interest-from the list I provide or other sources of their choice-the students read it carefully, summarize it, and post it on the online magazine. (If they want to work with an article they have found, they have to ask me first so we don't end up with repetitions in the magazine.) They know they're required to understand the article content properly, edit their summary thoroughly, provide a visual to aid their readers' comprehension, and cite their source.

I give them access to the draft of the magazine, and they also have to upload their article and take care of any technical issues that may arise.

For assessment, I've created a simple rubric that looks at content understanding, clarity of communication, editing, critical thinking, initiative, and creativity.

This has been one of my most popular projects-students are amazed to discover some of the myriad applications of math. They also enjoy being able to choose articles according to their interests, and appreciate that the end product, the magazine, can be easily shared with family and friends and stored in their own e-portfolios.

This is a valuable activity that encourages students who enjoy reading and writing more than the computational side of math and gives all a deeper understanding and stronger appreciation of the usefulness and effectiveness of mathematics.

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Creating a magazine gives students a chance to learn about real-world applications of math.