Literacy Now

It was a beautiful spring afternoon, downright hot, and the sprinklers were on the lawn at the school, all quiet at this late hour. It was a nice school in a quiet suburb—fairly advantaged in the scheme of things.

It was the mid-1990s. A colleague and I were there to check out their new equipment. The admin had gotten help from IBM to set up a couple computers with a new program. Clunky by today’s standards, this software let you walk down a path in the forest, notice a sparkly bit on a tree, and lo and behold, click it and there’s a bear cub peering out at you. Sure we make fun of it today—but at the time, it was part of appreciating nature. Specifically, it related to our district environmental centre on a lake outside town. 

Don’t get me wrong: everyone has their passion and computers were the cutting edge at the time. But I was appalled to think folks were so excited about this—couldn’t we just spend money to take the kids out there? 

This centre in the forest was a jewel for our district. All grade fives got a week’s stay, but teachers wangled it for other classes if they could. Of course, some kids have outdoorsy adventures with their own families—but most do not. For many children, some spiders in the shrubs, or watching the crows pull crusts from the trash can on the playground are what counts as a ‘nature experience.’ 

p: woodleywonderworks via photopin

I experienced a powerful disconnect—it was rude to scoff at what the principal was clearly so proud of. But how could it compare? Why sit at a machine when we can give kids real experiences, dipping up tadpoles, laughing and getting soggy and muddy themselves. Or listening for the strange sounds in the forest when we would sit so quietly, and being really cold at night in their sleeping bags on the rustic beds in the cabins. In the morning they can fry eggs and pancakes like real campers.

Of course, this software was just the beginning. Amazing to think how far we’ve come—the next year we were all internetted and thinking Netscape was so cool. Now it’s 2014. YouTube, Facebook and Twitter were all created in the mid-2000s, just a few years ago—but we barely recall “the time before”. 

“...[T]echnology changes so rapidly that it clouds our memory of things as they existed but a few years before... We lose a part of our humanity, a historical sense of our recent selves.” (Bauerlein)

So we rush forward feeling ‘the future is now’, having heard our whole lives that we were teaching kids whose later lives we could not imagine. 

The lure of it all is inescapable—and I’m right there with you. Browsing dozens of URLs, falling down any number of rabbit holes. The world is fascinating, and every reference, every image—it’s all right there at your fingertips.

Teens text hundreds of times a day and keep their phones nearby day and night. Parents don’t dare suggest cutting off Facebook and texting—it’s a new “place”, an entirely new layer of socialness. You might as well say they can’t go to the mall with a friend. And parents don’t want their kids left behind—they clamour for more SmartBoards, raising money with bake sales, even while the playground equipment needs sprucing up. But it creates a frenzy, this siren call of gizmos.

We know the curriculum is fragmented as it is. It takes longer than you thought to set up the activity—writing or maybe a craft. Finally everyone is pretty much into it. There is a happy buzz —but you are watching the clock: it’s snack time prior to recess, or someone’s delivering the lunch and milk orders. Or you must get the spelling pre-test done. “Stop, everyone—put that away, we’ll work on it tomorrow...” 

As teachers we get caught up in that rush of many demands, but children and parents will thank us if we can ourselves present a calm demeanor. We should reassure people, “It’s okay. Really.” As educators our job is to step back and find this balance—to give adequate time to each lesson. In some ways “less is more.” 

A favorite teacher of teachers used to say, “Stop interrupting the children!” The forty-five minute period seems far too short to do the intro and get into quality work—the work that requires thought and depth. 

In the past few decades we have really learned how to use great interactive approaches. When hyped in advance with rich sensory details—“imagine the smells, the sounds”—even small children can form an ‘Oprah’ style panel that responds to deeper questioning from their peers. 

“So how did you feel, Cinderella, when you saw your sisters in their fancy clothes, going out the door to the party?” Or, “Were you afraid, when the fairy godmother said the coach would turn back into a pumpkin if you were late?” 

Not only do these take time in the set-up, we know that kids, when put on the spot, need time to think—‘wait time’. Your children can be trained to be very courteous in this regard. “Just wait, give him a moment,” while you all listen briefly to the furnace fan and the classroom noise next door. It’s a thoughtful pause.

Another approach uniquely offers a structure for study in depth. It generates excitement through the very natural power of “the hunt” and the satisfaction we feel when we find new treasures. Learning in Depth (LiD) is the brain child of Kieran Egan, whose earlier work helped teachers vividly tap into kids’ imaginations with the power of story.

The structure of LiD is audacious to consider: in a child’s first year of school, he or she is assigned a topic they’ll work on individually for their entire school career, spending one hour each week to learn everything imaginable about the topic. Looking at the suggested topics chart, we see they are all nouns—bones, mountains, stone—though some are more abstract or broad such as humour or counting systems. Others are already a lifetime study for adults—musical instruments, sacred buildings. The sheer diversity offers rich performance and display opportunities over the years—weaving and spinning, Olympic games, dance. 

The notion that the topic is assigned brings an instant response from many—why not let kids choose? In fact, the point is made that all these topics are worthy of great depth of inquiry and pursuit. It proves the point, in not being your choice—not dinosaurs, not Lego. You can easily imagine how ‘apples’ leads to a visit to an orchard, an interview with an orchardist, cooking, and categorizing. The apple in myth and history—odd to think both Eve and Snow White fell to its juicy temptation.

Whether apples, bridges, or castles, the school community creates a ‘buzz’ around this event—the day you learn what your topic is to be. To take one topic year after year gives children a lot of scope with technology, a variety of presentation forms, collaboration opportunities, and not least, real world connections. It can be argued this is a holistic approach at its best.

Schools and families involved often praise LiD. A wealth of resources and examples of student work can be found on the LiD website. 

Step back and remember our sunny day with the sprinklers and a little bear in the tree on the screen. We will learn the technology along with our kids, but we must make wise choices to show how the sensory richness of the world can be brought to every hour. 

As adults we know what feels good, what wholeness and balance feel like. So too we must nourish some calm in our own classrooms. Children need time for play and exploration in the material world. It will sound odd to say, but now we must actually build it in, since many do not get much time for it otherwise. 

Don’t forget—less is more.

Linda Rightmire offers workshops and mentoring sessions on a structured partner reading approach that emphasizes Allington’s Six Elements of Reading Instruction. She also tutors students in individual and group reading sessions, and works as a teacher on call in the Kamloops-Thompson School District in British Columbia. Her articles have appeared in the regional daily newspaper and elsewhere.

At every author event I do—whether it’s a signing or a school visit or a panel—there’s always one story that I make a point to tell regarding my path to publication. I began writing THRONE OF GLASS at age sixteen, but my journey began years before that. In fact, I never would have had the courage or confidence to attempt writing a novel if it wasn’t for my 7th grade teacher.

Growing up, I loved Disney Princesses and cute boys and nail polish—I loved clothes and parties and just being a girl. I also played sports, loved “boy”/“nerdy” things like Star Wars and video games, read endlessly, and was far more interested in being the one kicking butt than the damsel in distress. But as I got older, I felt more and more pressured by the world around me to choose between the “girly” side of me and the “tomboy” side. By the time I got to 7th grade, I made a conscious effort to drop the nerdy/boy stuff.

Worse, I stopped reading.

Honestly, I hated most of what I read in school—so the majority of my reading was done outside of it, always for fun and as often as I could. But I stopped reading all together, and (this is so horrifying to admit) decided to focus more on those cute boys and nail polish (the mixed signals I received regarding femininity and strength is a story for another day).

But I had this amazing teacher in 7th grade: Stan (I went to one of those schools where you call your teachers by their first names). And Stan noticed that I’d stopped reading. Granted, I wasn’t the best student in my class by any means—I didn’t stand out much in any subject, actually. Yet he somehow noticed this shift in my behavior.

p: rogintakesphotos via photopin

Upon meeting with my parents for a parent-teacher conference, he mentioned my sudden lack of reading to them. He told them that it was okay if I wasn’t enjoying what we read in class, but I needed to be reading something. Stan asked them to take me to the bookstore to pick out some books that I wanted to read—to let me select a few titles for myself. Immediately following that conference, my parents did just that.

I walked out of the store that day with Robin McKinley’s THE HERO AND THE CROWN and Garth Nix’s SABRIEL, two novels that were seemingly sprung straight from my daydreams: fierce heroines in compelling fantasy worlds who get to save the day and kick butt. Those books were all I’d ever wanted, a combination of those two parts of me, and reading them changed my life—in so many ways.

They rekindled my love of reading—and introduced me to the fantasy genre; they made me slowly begin to realize I didn’t have to choose between the girly-girl and tomboy sides of me at all (a realization later solidified by watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer). And more than that, reading those two novels made me want to write.

I’d never written anything before—at least, not outside of class. But I began writing after that. Complete and total rip-offs of those novels, but they sparked a desire to keep writing.

I didn’t share a word of my writing with anyone until we had a creative writing unit in school, and I submitted one of my SABRIEL rip-off stories for an assignment. I had no idea if it was good, no idea if I could write—no idea if writing was even worth my time.

And then Stan read my assignment and told me my writing was good—that I was a good writer, and should keep at it.

Again, I’d never been that great at anything before—at least anything that had sparked my interest in such a big, big way, so hearing from a teacher I respected and adored that my writing was good…well, that changed my life. I stopped thinking of myself as someone who wrote for fun, and instead thought of myself as a writer.

I kept writing for several years after that—mostly fantasy rip-offs and embarrassingly awful fan-fiction. I wrote whenever I could. I kept reading, too—any and all fantasy novels I could get my hands on. Yet by the time I was sixteen, when that first spark of inspiration hit for the Throne of Glass series, I still credited Stan with giving me the encouragement and motivation to start writing. And when THRONE OF GLASS was published in 2012 (ten years after I began writing it; fourteen years after being in Stan’s 7th grade glass), Stan was right there in the acknowledgements, for all that he’d done for me.

There were other teachers over the years—some encouraging, some quite the opposite—but I will be forever grateful for Stan taking the time to notice that I had stopped reading, and to give me that initial bit of praise about my writing. I usually tell the story of Stan at my various events, but I always make a point to share it at my school visits. Not just for the students, but also for the teachers watching, too—so they know just how far a bit of praise and a nudge can go, and how much of a positive impact they leave on their students’ lives. I wouldn’t be here today without it.

Sarah J. Maas is the New York Times bestselling author of Throne of Glass and its sequel Crown of Midnight, published with Bloomsbury. She was born and raised in New York City, but after graduating from Hamilton College in 2008, she moved to Southern California. She's always been just a tad obsessed with fairy-tales and folklore, though she'd MUCH rather be the one slaying the dragon (instead of the damsel in distress). When she's not busy writing, she can be found geeking out over things like Han Solo, gaudy nail polish, and ballet.

I think that the very first test I remember taking in elementary school (beyond the Friday spelling tests) was one on the Spanish explorers and the conquest of America. We had to draw a line matching the explorer with the territory—Cortes with Mexico, Ponce de Leon with Florida, De Soto with the Mississippi and Louisiana. In my memory the Spanish Conquest was a cornerstone of the elementary curriculum.

There are other eras and episodes in history that are taught and re-taught, written about in grave historical texts, threaded through social studies units, and the subject of novels. To even think about writing a novel on some of these subjects is daunting just because they have been written about so much. From an author’s perspective the stories seem almost threadbare or worn out from so much exposure. She thinks to herself, What else might I offer?

And then in this nearly threadbare, worked-over historical tapestry, you find one little maverick thread sticking out at an edge and you just can’t help giving it a tug. What will happen? Will the entire tapestry unravel? Or will the thread itself lead like a trail into new, undiscovered territory?

A little of both happened to me when I tugged on one such thread in the story of the Spanish Conquest. It was that of horses. We have been told and taught in elementary school that the Spanish brought the first horses to our continent; that in February of 1519 Hernando Cortes sailed from Cuba to Mexico. He sailed with eleven ships, five hundred men and sixteen horses. All this is written down in the seminal book by the conquistador/historian Bernal Castillo Diaz who was on that voyage. Interestingly enough Hernando Alonso, the blacksmith for the horses, was a Jew escaping the Inquisition. He was a secret Jew actually or what was called a converso. There were several conversos on board.

I found all this intriguing. Yet what really caught my fancy was a revelation that it is completely erroneous to think of these sixteen horses as the first ones ever to set hoof onto the soil of the New World. There had been horses in the New World but they had disappeared millions of years before the Spaniards had arrived.

So for the horses of Cortes it was not so much an arrival as a return, a homecoming of sorts. In fact it was in the New World that the first horse Eohippus equus, known as the Dawn Horse, had evolved. Of course the Dawn Horse did not look much like the modern horses we know today. It was tiny, no more than ten to twenty inches in height. Over the vastness of time that tiny creature changed and became the progenitor of three other species of horses much closer to what we now consider a modern horse. However, two million years before the arrival of Cortes those horses mysteriously vanished .

This seemed like a story waiting to be told. But then again, how to tell it?

I considered telling it from Hernando Alonso’s point of view—a secret Jew with a deep empathy for horses, fleeing his own native land. Or perhaps I might tell it from the perspective of a young groom for the horses, an African boy who was on the ship as a slave. Finally, I thought, Why not tell the story of the Spanish coming to the New World from the horses’ point of view.

At first I was rather intimidated. I have written so many books about animals now—owls in The Guardians of Ga’Hoole series, wolves in The Wolves of The Beyond series. But all these animals were completely wild. Indeed I set those series in post-human times. There was no contact or involvement with humans.

p: Randy C. Bunney via Wikimedia

But the history of horses is inextricably involved with humans. Horses were domesticated for centuries. Oh yes, I know there are ‘wild’ ones, mustangs, but in North America they are nonetheless the descendants of the horses that came to America with the Spaniards. To say they were “wild” is not entirely accurate. They were “feral.” That means they were not born in a wild state but only became wild after they escaped from captivity or domestication. Therefore they had to actually learn how to live wild, to forage, to shed the gaits they were trained to trot in and to gallop without shoes.

It is an odd angle perhaps from which to tell this uniquely American story, but as I said it is an alternate history. I truly felt there were themes and subtexts concerning questions of wildness and freedom that I could only explore from this peculiar perspective of the horses who had been brought to serve in the Spanish Conquest of the Americas.

Winston Churchill once said that history is written by the victors. THE ESCAPE, the first book of my new Horses of the Dawn series, is in one sense a novel of alternate history in that it is not being told from the perspective of the victors or the vanquished, but of the horses. I think of it as an equine retelling of the coming of horses to the New World that for them was ultimately a homecoming after millions upon millions of years.

Kathryn Lasky is the author of more than 100 books for children, adults, and young adults, including the New York Times bestseller series "Guardians of Ga'Hoole", basis for Warner Brothers recent film "Legend of the Guardians". She has won awards including a Newbery Honor, New York Times Best Books, Boston Globe Hornbook Award, and the Washington Post Children's Book Guild Award for the body of her non-fiction work and the Anne V. Zarrow Award for Young Readers Literature. She has twice won the National Jewish Book Award.

Kathryn lives in Cambridge, Ma. With her husband Christopher G Knight who has photographed many of the nonfiction books.

Much in the wide world has changed since I began teaching in 1991—landlines have given way to iPhones, the Soviet Union has dissolved, and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have been rebooted several times over. Yet much has remained the same. In 2009, when I returned to classroom teaching after spending ten years away as an educational consultant, I came back to a school where I was required to use a core-reading (or basal) program, a program very similar to the one I was required to use almost 20 years earlier.

In 2010, after one year of using this basal program, my frustrations were many. Few phonic patterns were taught to mastery. Spelling was not strongly integrated with writing. There was a dearth of authentic reading and writing activities and too many worksheets. Students had no choice in what they read, and there was little time for them to practice reading on their independent levels. The list goes on and I haven’t even mentioned my struggling readers’ slow rate of achievement or the creativity and professional control the teacher’s manual stripped from me.

After listening to me gripe for months about the basal, my mother, a retired literacy professional, sent me THE DAILY FIVE and encouraged me to pitch it to my building’s administration as a replacement model. However, our district, just like many others, had made a commitment to their very expensive program. I knew they wouldn’t allow me to simply cast it aside.

Simultaneously, while guest lecturing to pre-service teachers at a local university, speaking on the joys of guided reading, browsing bins, and independent writing routines, two students said to me, “Yes, that’s all well and good, but in our school we use a basal program. We’re not allowed to implement any of the cool stuff you’re showing us.”

All of this led me to wonder, “Is there a way to meld the progressive practices I believe in with the traditional core-reading program I am required to use?” Personally, I couldn’t stomach the basal, yet I couldn’t get rid of it. And so I approached my district’s curriculum director and asked for permission to modify and supplement the reading program in one 3rd grade classroom. My goal was twofold: 1) maintain my sanity during upcoming years of teaching, and 2) increase the reading achievement of my struggling readers. Thankfully the reply was “go ahead.”

I based the new program on what I considered to be the four essential elements of any effective reading program:

1. Time for extended reading
2. Time for extended writing
3. Attention to the big ideas in reading and writing
4. Use of effective teaching practices

As my cooperating 3rd grade teacher and I taught with this modified and supplemented basal reading program, and as I watched it unfold over the year, I saw struggling readers experience success more often and reach higher levels of achievement than they had in the previous year. I became excited by the idea that I could write a book about this “bridge” program, bringing a message to other basal using teachers (which, I found out, were the majority of reading teachers in the United State) that said, “If you must use a basal, you can make it better.” What exactly does better mean? It means more interesting and engaging to all readers, more effective for the lowest and highest achieving readers and writers, and more satisfying to masterful teachers.

That 3rd grade program planted the seeds for SUPER CORE! TURBOCHARGING YOUR BASAL READING PROGRAM WITH MORE READING, WRITING, AND WORD WORK. Its most important messages are: 1) a core-reading program should never be and can never be a complete reading program because it simply isn’t flexible enough, powerful enough, or motivating enough to enable all children to reach important reading benchmarks, and 2) by subtracting a few components, adding a few research-based reading strategies and routines, and becoming mindful of a few instructional techniques, teachers and administrators can create a much more effective reading program.

During my years as a consultant, I met reading teachers who knew these messages to be true. But because most were not permitted to make changes to their district’s publisher-created core-reading program, they had to “fly below the radar,” making instructional changes clandestinely, tucking in progressive reading routines whenever possible.

Today, approximately 75% of U.S. elementary schools still use a basal program (a.k.a. core-reading program) to provide reading instruction. Are these programs effective? If no, is it possible for districts to continue to use them, but make them more effective? If so, what are the ways in which these programs can be made more effective? And finally, what instruction and leadership roles for teachers can be created within a basal system that honor their professionalism and expertise and increase their students’ chances of reaching critical reading benchmarks?

My desire to try and answer some of these questions prompted me to write SUPER CORE. Now, with the book written and three years of 3rd grade data in my spreadsheets, I realize there are ways to build bridges between the progressive reading models used by roughly 25% of the country’s teachers and the less-than-effective traditional basal programs used by everybody else. Perhaps discussions on how to meld the old with the new will be of use to districts as they begin to implement the Common Core State Standards. And perhaps SUPER CORE will bring hope to teachers who are required to use their school's core (or basal) reading program...but don't love it.

My personal belief is that school systems that exhibit a willingness to modify and supplement can create primary reading programs (K-3) capable of boosting 85% to 95% of third grade children to independent third grade reading and writing levels. Additionally, I believe that intermediate grade basal programs (4-6) can be made more effective even as these primary programs are built. If districts and administrators avoid pendulum swings, build programs in systematic ways, stick to the common consensus on what works (as identified in the research literature of the last 40 to 50 years), and empower their most expert teachers to organize, create, and lead, then more effective and more satisfying-to-use reading programs can be built on the bones of a basal in three to five years.

Mark Weakland is a mild-mannered Title I reading specialist in Western Pennsylvania; his alter ego, however, is faster than a fluent reader, stronger than a metacognitive strategy, and able to leap outdated vocabulary instruction in a single bound. 

As with most folks, when the New Year strikes I reach down deep, look into my heart and make commitments to the twelve months ahead that I hope won’t implode by Martin Luther King Day.

p: thomasstache via photopin cc

This year is no different. And being that we are now in Annum Comminus Summa (that’s Latin for Year of Common Core, btw…or so says Google Translate), here’s a list of a few things I hope to gain mastery over before the clock strikes twelve ending the twelve months which will comprise the year 2014.

1. I resolve to deepen and expand my ability to deliver non-fiction content to learners of all stripes. Of course this will mean I am going to need to check my sources, do a ton of research, carefully select grade appropriate texts and try to harmonize them with both cross-disciplinary aims as well as within intertextual, multi-media, appropriately scaffolded and differentiated units. But it’s still early in the year so my faith is strong that I will be up to the challenge. (At least more up to it than I am when it comes to eliminating my egregious need to soothe myself during trying times with chocolate.)

2. I resolve to remain steadfastly committed to literature. Fiction still matters a GREAT deal. Classic books, YA fiction, stories of all types, and even though I can already foresee ill-informed checklist checkers sweating me for not chronically pimping non-fiction, as research shows (and as my teacher’s heart/mind knows), the benefits of reading fiction for young minds is irrefutable and irreplaceable.

3. I resolve to help develop strong, competent writers. Yes, Common Core is placing an unprecedented premium on writing, but as a thoughtful educator I have always felt that our schools have needed to place much more oomph on a student’s ability to write well (and much less oomph on a kid’s ability to choose A, B, C, or D in order to get credit for knowing things).
   
   By MLK Day my diet might already be shot (but that’s not due to willpower; biology has cursed me with a scientifically provable chemical infatuation with chocolate) and might already be on life support (I did walk to the fridge for the chocolate brownies, after all, as opposed to simply asking someone else to go get it for me, but the caloric expenditure probably didn’t balance out the caloric intake) yet doubling down on building better writers in 2014 is one that I believe has a lot of gas in the tank.

Okay, so I have three goodies. However, it’s time for the million dollar New Year question: Do I dare expand the list? To add more things builds more pressure on me. After all, I can swear off chocolate and vow to exercise, but if I take on meditation, philanthropy, learning Chinese and joining a crochet club (y’all do know how hard the crochet circuit parties, right?) then I am setting myself up for trouble.

Yet, when I look at the Common Core I know I also really need to deepen and expand my skills in areas such as:

• Amplifying Text Complexity for Low Achieving Readers
• The World of Essential Questions
• Building Authentic Student Engagement
• Closing the Close Reading Gap
• Providing Bulletproof Textual Evidence
• Elevating Visual Literacy
• Speaking and Listening (ten times over)
• Refining Argumentation and Rhetoric

Gulp…it’s a lot to tackle. And that’s not even all of it by any stretch. But yes I do. I will go for it.

Why? Because while I know obscene amounts of chocolate are bad for me I also know owning a wide variety of skillsets in the world of literacy instruction is good for me.

Thank goodness Annum Comminus Summa is also going to be the year of Annum Lorem Ipsum Auxilium, the year of intense professional development.

Alan Lawrence Sitomer is a California Teacher of the Year award winner and the founder of The Writer’s Success Academy. In addition to having been an inner-city high school English teacher and former professor in the Graduate School Of Education at Loyola Marymount University, Mr. Sitomer is a nationally renowned keynote speaker who specializes in engaging underperforming students. To date, Mr. Sitomer has authored 16 books with works ranging from hard-hitting YA novels like HOMEBOYZ, THE HOOPSTER and HIP-HOP HIGH SCHOOL to humorous and warm children’s picture books such as DADDIES DO IT DIFFERENT. Alan has two new books hitting the shelves in spring 2014: CAGED WARRIOR, a gritty tale about the underground world of teen mixed martial arts fighting, and DADDY AND THE ZIGZAGGING BEDTIME STORY, the next in his series of beloved children's picture books.