Literacy Now

At the 2011 IRA Annual Convention, literacy leaders from twenty-five states gathered to discuss the Common Core State Standards. We discussed a variety of issues, including:

• how to unpack the Common Core Standards
• what the expectations are for students to read and write across different types of text and media
• how to teaching writing that explains, informs and argues in kindergarten through high school and in history, social studies, science and the technical subjects
• why students will need to learn to read increasingly complex text as they progress through the grade levels.

This exciting discussion revealed that there is a great deal of work to do in order to implement these standards and that states—and state councils—are approaching this work differently.

As a literacy professional working with teachers to understand the Common Core, I have found that unpacking the standards is an essential task. Just as the standards ask us to teach students how to “undertake the close, attentive reading that is at the heart of understanding and enjoying complex works of literature,” we have to give these standards a close attentive read. And as skilled readers, we will want to discuss our thinking with others.

IRA Engage offers us an opportunity to collaborate with others across the nation that are working to make sense of this complex text, and think about what these standards mean for literacy instruction in our nation’s schools.

It is important to note that these standards were constructed by thinking about what students need at the end of grade twelve to be college and career ready, and then progressing down the grade levels to kindergarten. Although these standards have been adopted by many states, there are still concerns. For more information on some of these concerns, see Freddy Hiebert’s post about complex text in Kindergarten.

Yet, David Coleman, one of the lead writers of the Common Core State Standards, reports that according to ACT data, the single most reliable academic predictor of whether or not a student is going to succeed in college and/or a career is the ability to “read a complex text independently with confidence.” He then goes on to model his view of what a close read of complex text should look like with Dr. Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”

A literacy educator watching this video may be taken aback by his dismissal of the many pre-reading activities that are typically part of our practice. So, how do we take this image of the expectation of what students are supposed to be able to do independently, according to the Common Core State Standards, and think about what our teaching should look like in kindergarten, when children are just beginning to learn about text, through 12th grade, when students should be able to read complex text independently?

I think that the key to the conversation lies in understanding that the standards describe what students are supposed to know and be able to do at each grade level, while our teaching reflects how students are going to get there. As teachers, we know that students will arrive in our classrooms differing in their background knowledge, experience with print, language, cultures, and attitudes toward books and writing.

We also know that some students will be curious, passionate about specific topics, eager, able to persevere, confident and ready to explore any text, while others will be hungry, anxious, limited in their world and literacy experiences, and as a result, tentative toward learning. I believe that knowledge about our students and knowledge about multiple approaches to teach students to read, coupled with a passion for literacy is how we will help students read complex text independently and where we need to focus our energy.

We can recognize the differences between these standards and our current practices. These standards call for a greater emphasis in reading and writing informational text. From kindergarten on students are encouraged to engage in reading activities with informational text and draw connections across those texts. They are encouraged to share their opinions in pictures and words. When we look at these standards closely, we can start to think about how our classrooms will look differently with this greater emphasis on informational text and writing.

We can recognize that these new standards place a greater emphasis on disciplinary literacy, the specific ways of reading and writing in the disciplines of history, social studies, science and technical subjects. For teachers in grades six through twelve, this means that they will have literacy objectives in addition to their content objectives.

We can also recognize that these standards call us to integrate new literacies into the work we do with students. A recent YouTube search turned up this video, in which two year olds are playing with iPads, suggesting that some children who come to our classrooms will have multi-media literacy activities at their fingertips, literally.

Fortunately, at IRA there are so many excellent researchers and teachers who have written on these topics. I know that I will be using the knowledge that I have gained from these publications as I look at the Common Core Standards and think about creating classroom practice that will address the diversity of readers we teach. And, of course, we have each other. I hope that you will join this discussion. Talk about the standards that you are thinking about and working with, and share the resources that assist educators in helping students to understand and enjoy complex works of literature.

I do want to point out that the standards include the word “enjoy.” The key to engaging students is to create a joyous literacy environment—one where reading and knowledge gained from reading is celebrated, and sharing the books we read for pleasure becomes a classroom norm. The challenge is to support joyous inquiries for each of our diverse students while integrating opportunities to engage with different texts of varying complexity. And it is a challenge, but I remain optimistic.

After all, we have this IRA community, and all the knowledge that exists within it. Now, with Engage, we also have the ability to communicate with one another 24/7, from anywhere in the world.

Lori DiGisi serves as an educational specialist for the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. Previously, she worked as a literacy specialist at Fuller Middle School, in Framingham, Massachusetts. She's a past president of the Massachusetts Reading Association, the current president of IRA's Secondary Reading SIG, and an active member of the Legislative Action Team.



Teaching Tips: What Should Be Common in the Common Core State Standards?

Most students think of history as a boring list of names and dates, a series of wars, treaties, and political events. Many textbooks introduce history in just this way, serving up events as themes. It's no wonder readers aren't inspired.

History is so much more than the dates a particular king reigned or the spread of a particular technology. It's the story of all of us throughout time. Studying history should be like having an adventure in another time and place.

One reason I write historical fiction and biographies is because I want kids to see how exciting real history is. Textbooks may be boring, but going right to original source material rarely is. When I wrote the diary of a pioneer girl taking the Oregon Trail in 1850, I read stacks of pioneer journals, some published, some not. I felt like I was looking over the writers' shoulders, fording rivers alongside them. The result, Rachel's Journal, is meant to give students the same thrill I got, the same sense of being close to an experience that happened in a completely different era.

The Oregon Trail or the American Revolution are obvious subjects. Every student learns about them, but few are excited by them, despite each having a history that's truly riveting if only it were told like a great story. This is what writers owe readers, what teachers owe students—a sense of the story that tells the history.

One way to grab students is to tell them tales they don't know about, giving them that wonderful sense of discovery. I love stumbling on little-known stories that grab both my imagination and sense of history. Those are the stories I turn into books, the tales of courage and achievement against the odds that deserve to be widely known. These are the kind of stories kids can really care about.

Maggie Gee was that kind of lucky discovery. I found her in a local newspaper article about WWII veterans, published, naturally, on Veteran's Day. I didn’t know that women had flown warplanes in WWII and it seemed like an important story for kids (and adults) to know about.

I looked Maggie up in the phone book, called her and asked for an interview. That interview and the many conversations that followed became Sky High: The True Story of Maggie Gee. What impressed me about Maggie was her drive, her optimism, her courage. Sure, there was discrimination against her, both as a woman, and as a Chinese-American, but she barely mentioned such problems when she talked about her life.

Although her mother had lost her U.S. citizenship when she married Maggie’s father, a Chinese immigrant, that didn’t deter her from working as a welder on Liberty ships during the war, nor from encouraging her daughter to join the Women’s Army Service Pilots. After the WASP were disbanded, Maggie went on to charge through more doors, becoming a physicist and working on weapon systems at the Lawrence Livermore labs, another job that was rare for a woman, let alone an Asian-American woman.

Since Sky High came out, Maggie, Carl Angel (the book’s illustrator), and I have done many school visits, presenting both the book and the subject of the book, a rare event. The students are always inspired by Maggie, her infectious optimism, her advice to ignore barriers and focus instead on opportunities. Meeting Maggie is like meeting living history in the shape of your grandmother. She shows the kids that anyone can make history. At one poor school in Oakland, a boy was so moved by Maggie, he asked her to sign his most prized possession—his soccer ball.

I thought of Maggie’s grit, her enthusiasm for taking risks and following her dreams, when I started looking for a Civil War story. I wanted to find a woman who had made similar daring choices, but I wasn't sure where to look. So I read widely, about both the North and the South. I learned that more than 400 women had disguised themselves as men and fought as soldiers for one side or the other. Could one of those women’s lives hold the story I wanted?

I plowed through books about nurses, soldiers, spies, but they all lacked some essential characteristic. Some were there to be with a husband, brother, father, or fiancé. Some were adventurous, but not particularly patriotic or admirable. Very few cared about the issue of slavery.

Sorting through all these women, I found one that seemed promising. The first book I read about her didn’t tell me much, but it gave me enough of a sense that I wanted to learn more. When I saw she'd written her own memoir of her soldiering life, that I could hear in her own voice her motives and intentions, it was like finding a treasure trove. Again, that magic "aha" moment of discovery!

That woman was Sara Emma Edmonds, a.k.a. Frank Thompson. She was everything I'd hoped for—she had integrity, bravery, loyalty to the Union. As a bonus, she wrote movingly about the horrors and wrongs of slavery.

But there was more. Edmonds was the only woman to successfully petition the government after the war for status as a veteran. She wanted her charge of desertion changed to an honorable discharge, and she wanted a pension for her years of service. Suffering from malaria she’d caught in the Virgina peninsula campaign early in the war, she needed medical care she couldn't afford without it.

It took several years and two separate acts of Congress, but Edmonds received the legal recognition she so richly deserved. Men she'd served with testified on her behalf, praising her steadiness under fire, her work as a battlefield nurse, a general's adjutant, a postmaster, and even a spy.

Hers was a great story, a vast canvas that covered many of the pivotal battles of the war. Now that I'd found my subject, I had to shape this big life into a book. And a short book at that. I first wrote about Sara Emma Edmonds for a picture book, choosing to showcase her first spy mission, one emblematic event to stand for such a complicated life. That text became Nurse, Soldier, Spy, beautifully illustrated by John Hendrix, and published in April 2011 by Abrams.

Though the subject is complicated, students find the story compelling. It makes them think and ask questions. Why would a woman need to dress as a man to serve in the army? Why would you choose to fight in the Civil War? What did it mean to be a spy in those days? And that's how you learn history, by asking just these kinds of questions.

A picture book like this makes history accessible to younger children, but as pleased as I was with the picture book, there was so much more to say about Sara than could fit in that constrained format. I went on to write a middle-grade novel, with the luxury of chapter upon chapter to unfold the many facets of Sara. I could show her tenderness as a nurse, her bravery as a postmaster on lonely roads known for ambushes, her fierce loyalty to her fellow-soldiers in battle, her quick-thinking as a spy. And I could show the loneliness and stress that her disguise cost her, the burden of living a lie on a deeply ethical and honest person.

Sara had to dress as a man to serve the country she loved. Maggie could enlist, but had her opportunities curbed because she was a woman. Women in the military today aren't officially allowed "in combat," but since they’re in active combat zones, they face the same risks as the men without the same possibilities for promotion and recognition.

One hundred and fifty years after the Civil War, women are still living little-known stories that we’ll only learn about later. They are truly history in the making. Someday we'll read about how courageous and capable they’ve been in Afghanistan and Iraq. As they've always been, whenever they've been given the chance or secretly taken it.

These are other questions students are inspired to ask: who is making history now? What are they doing? What matters enough to be "history"? What doesn't?

Anyone who asks those questions is already a historian.

Marissa Moss has written and illustrated many books for children, including the popular Amelia's Notebook series and her middle-grade novel THE PHARAOH'S SECRET. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.



The Gorillas in the Library

I started my career as a New York State Certified Special Education Teacher, working with elementary students. The kids I was drawn to and chose to work with had a broad spectrum of behavioral and emotional difficulties. I couldn’t help but notice a pattern. Every child that was challenged emotionally and behaviorally also struggled with reading. Not only was reading moderately to extremely difficult for them, but they also lacked a desire to connect with books. It was hard not to jump to some quick (and possibly even accurate) conclusions about these kids, and once I started thinking about them I couldn’t stop. But one question kept returning more than all the others—how were these two issues linked?

I know the problem isn’t actually as simple as asking if behavior issues cause reading problems or if the reading problems cause the behavior. I’m painfully aware that there are additional factors to throw into the mix. Parenting and economics are just a sample. And perhaps it isn’t always a cause and effect relationship at all. There are so many variables it makes my head spin. But, as a teacher, I had little or no control over most of what was going on in these children’s lives. So I did what I could, to the best of my ability. Some days that made me proud and sometimes it made me cry.

It wasn’t long before I left the teaching profession, but it was for a really good reason. I now had three wonderful boys of my own. My oldest, who is now ten (I’ll call him J) has reminded me that you can leave a job, but you can’t walk away from the questions that knock on your mind.

J is dyslexic. He’s a great kid, smart and always well behaved at school. Yet, at home I was running into behavior problems. Nothing major. But every year the struggle to keep up with homework, learn sight words, study for spelling tests, and write it all down was causing more and more friction between us. Just like the kids I taught, I was seeing that emotions and behavior were walking hand-in-hand with his reading difficulties.

The one place where I didn’t see the pattern repeating itself was with his love for books. I’d been reading to him incessantly since he was an infant and we’d also made the natural progression into audio books. Now he devours stories, in an audio format, at an unbelievable pace. That’s when one of the pieces of the puzzle fell into place for me. This was an issue of access, but by access I don’t mean just the ability to unlock words. This was about allowing kids to share the emotions of being a reader. This may sound strange, but for a non-reader—sometimes reading isn’t about reading at all.

For this blog post, I decided to ask my son a couple questions, I first reminded J that he was a talented and very smart boy. Even though he has transferred to a school specializing in dyslexia and is doing well, I asked him if he could tell me what it felt like to be a kid in a classroom full of readers. He became quiet and his voice dropped and he said…

“It’s strange. And disturbing. It makes me upset.”

I then asked him what it felt like when someone read to him or he listened to books in an audio format. He stood up straighter and bounced on his toes, his whole face lighting up.

“It makes me happy because I can do stuff that other people can do. It’s my way of reading.”

I know you can feel and visualize the difference between those two remarks, but I think it’s the next one that is the most enlightening. One day my three boys were sitting around discussing what characteristics they shared with my husband and myself. They were comparing looks, personality, interests and talents. J commented that he looked just like his Dad, which he does. Then he looked at me with his eyes bright and his chest puffed out and said…

“But I’m also just like Mom; we both have a passion for books.”

This is a kid who hates to read. He will implore any trick he can find to avoid decoding the words on a page. He has a passion for books. I’ll always cherish this comment and it will remain high on my list of moments I’m proud of. I remember thinking how cool it was that I was raising the most well read, non-reader that most people had ever seen.

Yes, it is our job as educators and parents to give our students and children the gift of literacy, but it is equally as important and maybe even more necessary that we give them a desire for stories.

Do behavior issues cause reading problems or do reading problems cause the behavior?

I still don’t know. And maybe it doesn’t matter. Perhaps it’s just as important to rethink the parameters of reading. Instead of focusing on how a child digests a book, we should spend more of our time making sure that we provide access to stories that fill them. It is my belief that learning new things, sparking the imagination, finding heroes and envisioning potential is what combats the things that break children’s emotions and challenge their behavior.

I’ll never stop helping J become a reader in the traditional sense of the word. Conquering that mountain is to his advantage. It will make his life easier and broaden his access to the books he loves. But, I’ll be honest with you, when I look at my son, I don’t see him as being broken. I see a boy who is gifted. I see a child who believes that anything is possible—because he’s read it in a book.

Kimberly J. Sabatini is a former special education teacher who is now a stay-at-home mom and a part-time dance instructor for 3, 4, and 5 year olds. After her dad passed away in 2005, she used writing as a way to make sense of the experience and discovered that she’s full of questions that need to be answered. She lives in New York’s Hudson Valley with her husband and three boys. Kim writes young adult fiction; her debut novel, Touching the Surface, will be released by Simon Pulse in fall 2012.

I’m embarrassed to say how long I have been sitting here, trying to come up with a good idea for this blog. Maybe this is shameful because I know it’s going to be read by teachers, who are not people who like to hear you are unprepared. There’s also the fact that I am a “professional writer,” so this shouldn’t be like pulling teeth. (I use quotes because I still can’t quite wrap my mind around that, for some reason. When asked what I do, it is still always my first instinct to say, “Waitress,” even though it’s been over ten years since I last served a dish of salsa to a customer. Why is that?)

It’s not like I’m an inexperienced blogger. I’ve had my own, which I update about three times weekly, for almost ten years now. I started it when not that many people were blogging, stuck with it when everyone was, and now find myself in dwindling numbers as the world has moved on to the more concise forms of tweets and status updates.

So few folks are still blogging regularly, in fact, that I’ve given a lot of thought lately to quitting it altogether. I have a lot of followers on Twitter and Facebook, and there is an admitted ease in just having to do little bits, a sentence here, a sentence there, rather than paragraphs of entire cohesive thought. And no one has long attention spans anymore, anyway, if you believe the media. (The same media also recently reported that parents aren’t reading their kids picture books anymore. But if the bookcase I just tried to organize in my daughter’s playroom—stuffed to bursting with Knuffle Bunny, Llama Llama and others—is any indication, this isn’t necessarily true either.)

To be honest, I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with my blog. I like having something so immediate I can put out there, without waiting the two years or so that it takes me to get a book fully ready for release. Once I began working full-time as an author, leaving my teaching job at UNC-Chapel Hill, the blog also became my water cooler, a place where I could always find someone up for discussing American Idol and my obsession with coffee and chocolate.

At the same time, though, it requires discipline and a certain amount of creative energy, two things that are often in short supply when I’m deep into working on a book. It’s hard enough to keep a novel going during that dreaded stretch (for me, anyway) after the fun burst of the beginning and before the rush towards the end without trying to come up with something else to say every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

And yet, I do. Why? Well, I actually think it’s good for my writing. If novels are marathons, blogging is a quick mile, just to keep my legs strong and get some air in my lungs. When I feel the same dread sitting here, staring at a blank blog page that I do a half-finished chapter, there is nothing better I can do for myself than push forward right into that hollow, anxiety-filled place and just start writing something. Anything. It’s a leap of faith I can never take enough, because no matter how often I land on my feet, I’m convinced it won’t happen the next time I’m poised on the cliff.

And you know what’s the weirdest thing? When I do just start, and trust it will somehow come and make sense, it does. The entries are not always perfect or even good, but neither is every word of every draft.

With tweeting and Facebook, I can take two minutes and tinker to come up with something (hopefully) witty and worth reading. But a blog entry requires more patience. It forces me to do one thing I am not good at except when I am writing, which is slowing down. (There is nothing slower than being at about page 250 of a novel you are already sick of, knowing you have another 100 pages to go. Nothing.)

The truth is, we live in a world that is moving faster and faster every day. In response, our lives are abbreviated, as are our conversations and our reflections. Writing is one thing that forces me to be still and take my time. Reading is another. And judging by the uproar in the comments section of my blog whenever I’ve mentioned giving it up, I’m not alone.

And see, this blog itself is perfect proof of my point. I was sitting here, chewing on a thumbnail, wracking my brain for something to write, and now it’s finished. One mile down, 25 or more so to go. But that’s okay. What matters is that there is still room, out there in this swirling media universe, for something that takes more than 140 characters to say.

I just can’t promise that mine won’t have to do with television or chocolate. Sorry about that. 

Sarah Dessen grew up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and attended UNC-Chapel Hill, graduating with highest honors in Creative Writing. She is the author of several novels, including Someone Like You, Just Listen, and Along for the Ride. A motion picture based on her first two books, How to Deal, was released in 2003. Sarah's tenth novel, What Happened to Goodbye, hit bookstores yesterday.



Engage - In Other Words