Literacy Now

A few years ago, staff at Edward White Elementary learned we would begin a partnership in comprehensive literacy (PCL) with the University of Northern Iowa while beginning full implementation of the Common Core. Designed to enhance the learning of all students, the PCL program involved the use of language, reading, writing, and content workshops, which necessitated a restructuring of our traditional daily schedule.

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) also called for increased rigor, complexity, and variety in types of texts, requiring the devotion of additional instructional time to new and more challenging materials. Our staff was left pondering where to begin and how to create sufficient time in the day to address all learning goals. Once PCL implementation began, we realized the workshop model worked for the Common Core, too. As a result, our depth of instruction as well as student learning has increased.

Implementing the workshop framework

Regardless of content area, there are five components of the workshop framework. Based on the work of Linda Dorn and Carla Soffos in Teaching for Deep Comprehension: A Reading Workshop Approach (Stenhouse, 2005), workshop models allow student participation in a whole-group minilesson, followed by guided instruction, independent practice, individual conferences, and a whole-group sharing time. The minilesson allows for strategy instruction followed by an opportunity to practice these strategies with varying levels of support in a variety of contexts. Sharing at the end of the workshop is essential, as it facilitates social learning and metacognitive reflection about the day’s learning. Therefore, to be effective, all components of the workshop must be included.

Given the components involved, the implementation of workshops requires a significant amount of instructional time and clear instructional objectives. Because implementation of the CCSS further requires vast amounts of time and understanding of what is being required of students, it was necessary to determine the best means of integrating the standards into the various workshops. We found language workshop allowed for teaching the vocabulary and concepts students needed to understand the requirements of the standards, with particular emphasis being given to the language standards. The reading strands facilitated the alignment of reading and content workshops. Students practiced the reading standards during reading workshop and applied this learning in content area work to build an understanding of science and social studies concepts. Although written responses to share thinking occur in all workshops, writing workshop allowed for focused writing instruction to enhance students’ understanding of the craft. Through all workshops, collaboration and application of learned skills integrate the speaking/listening and foundational skills standards. Recognizing the connection between the various workshops and the CCSS supporting these areas created a framework to structure all educational experience throughout the day, maximizing our instructional time.

Learning and mastering the standards

The rigor of the CCSS places high expectations on student performance. Therefore, within each workshop, instruction needs to be carefully tailored to the needs of students, continually moving their learning forward to promote mastery. A Gradual Release of Responsibility model, as explained by Doug Fisher and Nancy Frey in Better Learning Through Structured Teaching: A Framework for the Gradual Release of Responsibility (Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 2014), fits the workshop framework and allows students to take additional responsibility for learning as they gain proficiency with the standards. Through the workshop, there are opportunities for focused instruction (minilessons), guided and collaborative practice (small group and partner work), and independent practice. As mentioned, standards align throughout the various workshops. Therefore, as Dorn and Soffos highlight, not only are students able to gradually accept more responsibility for learning, they also can apply this learning in a variety of contexts promoting the transfer of understanding.

The CCSS increase expectations for student progress. As teachers, we must ensure our students demonstrate proficiency with grade-level standards. In the PCL, to maintain growth and monitor progress, formative assessments become key in documenting student understanding. The Dorn and Soffos workshop model incorporates a variety of instructional settings, including whole group, small group, partner work, and individual practice allowing data to be gathered in various contexts. Formative checklists and anecdotal notes are easy to collect and allow instruction to be tailored to students’ needs. With daily workshops, these assessments become a systematic and common practice. Although our initial reaction to implementing both new standards and the workshop model was one of trepidation, once implemented it became clear we would be able to not only integrate standards throughout the day but have multiple opportunities to monitor students’ progress on a given standard.

Why the workshop model works

Although our staff experienced initial hesitation when being asked to restructure our instructional time and teach new standards, time has shown the workshop model is an effective way to deepen students’ learning across all grade levels. The workshop model allowed us to integrate standards-based instruction throughout the school day; such integration creates experiences in which students become immersed in concepts. As students are exposed to the standards in a variety of situations, with responsibility for learning gradually released to them, they have an increased depth of understanding. Our building data have shown an increase in students performing at grade level as a result of our instructional practices. Thus, the workshop has proven to be a powerful instructional technique to fully implement the Common Core and ensure the learning of all students in our school.

Jennifer Neff teaches first grade at Edward White Elementary School in Eldridge, IA, and is the ESL coordinator for the North Scott School District. She earned her bachelor's degree in elementary education and Spanish from Augustana College in Illinois, and a master’s degrees in bilingual/ESL education and reading from Western Illinois.

As reading and writing teachers who value providing authentic experiences for our high school students, we feel compelled to examine the disconnect between our students’ experiences with Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) and our approach to teaching reading and writing.

Our ninth-grade students took the PARCC performance assessment in March. The morning following testing, we prompted our freshman English classes to journal about their PARCC experience. We asked them to respond honestly about how the PARCC made them feel. The following examples sum up what the students had to say:

• “The test made me feel frustrated, dumb, stupid, and that doesn’t feel good.”
• “The test made me feel confused, dumb, and unknowing.”
• “The PARCC test made me feel like a 5-year-old learning for the first time.”
• “The test made me feel stupid and lowered my self-esteem.”
• “I felt really down because I couldn’t answer any of the questions.”
• “The test was extremely hard, and I never want to take it again.”

As teachers, we work tirelessly beside our students, guiding their decision making to facilitate their literacy identities. Our purpose has been to develop positive lifelong reading and writing attitudes and habits. We have taught them that reading and writing are processes that develop over time (e.g., days, weeks, or months) as they actively engage in decision making. We have taught them to choose their topics and purposes wisely because the reading and writing begins when they make these initial decisions. We have watched our students grow significantly as confident, competent readers and writers, which is why their responses bother us so deeply.   

Why did our students have such negative responses to their experience with PARCC? During reading classes, students choose books so they can use their background knowledge and experiences as all good readers do. In these classes, students have read deeply and critically and have been instructed to decide what is important from the text and prove it in their writing, discussions, and conferences. In their writing classes, students have been instructed to choose topics around their interests and their expertise so they craft purposeful writing. They have had to decide which form best meets their purpose and to use mentor texts as their guides. We have mandated that they draft, confer, revise, edit, and publish. Through modeling, we show them that writing does not simply pour out on the page. We have encouraged our students to think freely, embrace their individual learning styles, and find a workable learning pace. PARCC included none of these options for our students.

Instead, PARCC said read and interpret this passage this way. PARCC said organize the main ideas using this method. PARCC said take 90 minutes to read three complex passages, answer six analytical questions, and write an essay in this box. There was no free thinking, individuality, or pacing. There was frustration, confusion, low self-esteem, defeat.

These observations frustrate us because PARCC, we believe, could offer customization. After all, different students were given different passages to read. Why could they not choose which ones they read? This way, they could engage their schema and begin the reading process before reading the text. For the writing, why are they told to write a narrative or expository piece? Could they not decide which form best meets the function? And why write in a little box? Perhaps if the screen split in half, giving the test takers a full-line view, students could more easily write, revise, edit, and back-and-forth their way to a well-written response. To scroll up and down to write disrupts the writing process.

PARCC was pitched as revolutionary. Take away the servers, the flashing lights, the backlighting, the typing, and the clicking and dragging—we’re left with the same old test. Students sitting in rows being tested on what someone else thinks is important and being asked to prove their understanding as someone else decided they should prove it. They are reading what some other person picked out and being asked to write in a format that someone else chose.

At this point, the only thing revolutionary about PARCC is that it made our students feel less motivated, less confident, and less competent. Our students will take the PARCC again in May. With what attitudes will the students show up?

Michael P. Henry is a literacy coach and reading teacher at Reavis High School in Burbank, IL. As a dissertation candidate at Northern Illinois University, his research interests include adolescent reluctant readers, adolescent reader identity, and high school reading intervention. Henry has served as chairman for ILA’s Teacher Advisory Panel and as chairman for the Advisory Committee of Teachers. He currently serves as a member of the Adolescent and Adult Literacy Committee for ILA. Kelly Klein is also a teacher at Reavis High School. Teaching both ninth-grade English and 11th-grade American Studies, her pedagogical philosophy focuses on helping her students become independent readers, writers, and thinkers.

As a librarian, I do a little bit of everything to keep students engaged—magic and science tricks, booktalking titles, book giveaways, singing songs, and, of course, reading aloud.
Often, however, these things do not happen inside the library walls. To make a public library, like the one I work for, a true part of the community, we have to go out into the community.

Community outreach can be one of the most complicated parts of being a public librarian. How do you find time in your already stretched schedule to do outreach? Is outreach even that important on top of everything else your library provides? And yet community outreach, making connections with your community outside your library walls, can also be one of the most rewarding parts of public librarianship.

I know it’s not always easy, but even in small ways, you can reach out to your community and start making connections. When my staff participates in outreach, we not only build a connection to the library but also help create a culture of reading and literacy in our whole community. 

Looking for some ways to increase your community outreach and start building stronger partnerships within your community?  Here are a few ways to start:

• Find out when your local schools are having parent events or fairs. Organizers are almost always receptive to allowing community organizations to have booths or stations at events like this. If you don’t have staff to attend one of these events, ask if you can drop off brochures or bookmarks with information about your library and its programs. These are a great way to connect with community members who might not regularly make it through library doors, and it also positions you (and the library) as a source for literacy education.
• Let outreach come to you! Reach out into your community and invite people in. Every month, I e-mail local elementary teachers of a specific grade and ask them to come for tours. This is a great chance for teachers to visit, and it takes the pressure off you and staff being out of the building. Tours also help to establish the library as a welcoming place for the whole community to grow and learn.
• Find and network with a group of local community educators. Building community engagement with the library can start with something as simple as finding your community of like-minded educators. There are often groups of community educators who meet to network and share information. In my town, community educators meet once a month, giving us a chance to touch base without a big time investment. Informal educators groups can be well worth your time—consider organizing one. Doing so might take a lot of time to set up, but once you establish a group the payoff is more than worth it. Our community educators group has representatives from our museum, historical society, nature center, art center, and local National Park. Creating a group and leading a group as a librarian can be another way to develop new partnerships, bring outreach into the library, and position your library as a leader in education.    

I know outreach isn’t always possible for libraries with limited budgets and staff. But if you look for chances in your community to be present when you can and take all the chances you can to invite your community into your library, outreach can become more feasible. Outreach, though it often takes time and scheduling creativity, makes your library and staff an active part of the literary growth and continuing education of your community. And isn’t that worth it?

Angie Manfredi is the Head of Youth Services for the Los Alamos County Library System in Los Alamos, NM. She loves when children shout “LIBRARY LADY!” at her in the grocery store and is dedicated to literacy, education, and every kid’s right to read what he or she wants. You can read more of her writing on her blog, Fat Girl Reading, or find her on Twitter.

We stand firm in our belief that differentiated instruction can provide equitable and effective instruction and learning opportunities for all students—gifted students, preschoolers, English learners, and struggling readers. We also believe differentiated instruction provides opportunities for building teachers’ caring relationships with their students and promotes responsiveness to students’ interests and learning trajectories.

Differentiated instruction is particularly powerful when embedded in rich learning contexts that address persistent gaps in literacy achievement between racial groups, and more-and less-advantaged students. Such contexts offer differentiated pathways for achieving learning goals for all students.

Differentiated instruction is not a skill-and-drill approach that attempts to “fill in the gaps” that, on the surface, seem to be contributing to learning difficulties. Instead, differentiated instruction teaches explicitly a wide array of skills, concepts, and strategies, often simultaneously, while leveraging students’ prior knowledge, learning and cultural histories, and linguistic differences.

Leveraging students’ prior knowledge and histories provides a conceptual foundation for acquiring new knowledge and accessing academic knowledge.

Differentiation gives students access to the same curriculum and learning assignments as their peers. At the root of differentiated instruction, then, is the recognition of students’ strengths and differences and teaching to both. Such instruction counters attempts to close potential gaps between students’ abilities and school performance by reducing the curriculum to a basic set of skills (often taught in isolation or without sufficient application) that can delay access to rich sources of information as needed for concept development and academic learning.

To be effective, differentiated instruction is situated in and designed to be responsive to the curricular and instructional goals, students’ capabilities and needs, and community and parent input.

Guided by continuous and multiple student assessments, instruction engages learning in mixed-ability grouping assignments, guided reading and writing opportunities, use of multiple texts (including digital texts) to scaffold other texts to afford access to new knowledge, and explicit instruction focusing on concept development, strategic word learning and text comprehension, and generative writing, among other literacy skills and knowledge areas.

Teachers who have differentiated the content, process, or products for the diversity of students in their classroom have seen improvements in students’ spelling development, letter-word reading, vocabulary development, comprehension, fluency, and reading engagement through instruction planned in coordination with literacy specialists, supported by administrators, and aligned with literacy instruction provided within the classroom.

Excellent reading instruction includes creating classrooms that optimize learning opportunities for every child. Every day teachers strive to optimize learning opportunities and provide equitable instruction based upon the cultural backgrounds of their students.

Supporting their efforts and documenting their successes places students front and center—where they belong.

Doris Walker-Dalhouse is a past member of the ILA Boardof Directors and current member of the Specialized Literacy Professionals SIG. She is a literacy professor at Marquette University in Milwaukee, WI. Victoria J. Risko is a past president of ILA and current president of the Specialized Literacy Professionals SIG. She is a professor emerita of language, literacy, and culture at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN.

Thousands of people across the United States gathered last month in cities such as Chicago, San Francisco, and Seattle to celebrate the Lunar New Year. The zodiac animal symbolizing this year is yang in Mandarin, which can mean sheep, goat, or ram. There has been a lot of discussion about the English translation. The English translation varies, scholars say, depending on the context and the lifestyle in different areas of the world, illustrating the richness and complexity of this holiday and how it is celebrated differently by people of diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds.

National Center for Education Statistics projects that by 2023 the percentage of White students in public school enrollment will decrease to less than half, whereas Hispanics are projected to constitute 30% and Asian/Pacific Islanders 5% of the enrollment. That means more than half of our students in public schools will come from a family where two or more languages are spoken and holidays from two or more cultures are celebrated. In response to this trend of shifting student demographics, teachers need to adjust their teaching to be culturally relevant. Still, we seem to add just a few “multicultural” books to our libraries and overlook the richness in English learners’ diverse life experiences and continue to view these students from a deficit perspective.

A few years ago, I met “Johnny,” a new student in a public school. Johnny’s family came from Southeast China and had just moved to a Midwest town. Johnny’s parents worked in a local Chinese restaurant and did not speak much English. New to the class, Johnny was considered “behind” on the basis of a reading test and needed extra English language learning. On the basis of my observation of the class, Johnny appeared very shy and lacked confidence. A wonderful opportunity to engage him presented itself when the class was about to have a cultural lesson on the Lunar New Year; however, Johnny and his parents were not invited to be involved in the lesson preparation or implementation.

This experience brought to mind the concept of “funds of knowledge,” created by Luis C. Moll and other scholars: knowledge and skills that are developed historically, socially, and culturally in individuals and households. Johnny’s family possessed rich experiences and knowledge about Lunar New Year, which would have made the lesson on the festival more relevant and authentic for his classmates. However, their funds of knowledge went unnoticed and were obscured by the predominant, deficit view that Johnny was behind and his parents did not speak much English.

In that same class, there were two students of Korean background, for whom Lunar New Year is also a major festival. I cannot help wondering what it might have been like if Johnny, his Korean peers, and all of their parents were given the opportunity to share how the festival was celebrated at their homes. They could have shared their New Year traditions by showing artifacts, preparing traditional food, and telling stories of past celebrations. Perhaps Johnny would be willing to show his hong bao (lucky money in red envelope) and tell the class its meaning and significance. To celebrate linguistic diversity, they could have taught the class New Year greetings in Korean and Mandarin. The other students in Johnny’s class could have experienced a Lunar New Year cultural lesson far more memorable in addition to reading multicultural picture books, such as Sam and the Lucky Money by Karen Chinn or New Clothes for New Year's Day by Hyun-Joo Bae.

Moreover, these children could have come to appreciate the funds of knowledge inherent in their classmates from different backgrounds, thereby building a more inclusive, stronger classroom community. In this way, student diversity may become as strength for teaching and learning.

In addition to “meeting the needs” of English learners, it is also time to purposefully invite students of diversity and their families to the classroom stage. We may be surprised by the content and the spark they will bring to our teaching and learning environment.

Hsiao-Chin Kuo is an assistant professor in Literacy Studies at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, MI. She has a Master’s degree in TESOL and a PhD in Literacy, Culture, and Language Education. Her research interests include multimodality and multiple literacies, literacy and language education for linguistic and cultural diversities, and partnership between school, home and communities.