Literacy Now

The Common Core State Standards are facilitating a lot of conversations about what students should know and be able to do. One of the more interesting aspects of these standards, for me, is the focus on providing evidence from the texts students read.

I've been doing a lot of thinking about how to teach students to justify their responses. As I reflect on this, I have to admit that I have accepted a lot of student responses that do not provide justification and evidence. I know that the student is right, or I know where the student is coming from in terms of the response, so I allow the conversation to continue. I'm not saying that is always bad, but I am thinking about how I might push students thinking deeper and deeper into the text so that they learn to read closely.

Of course, not all texts require a deep reading, but some do. And I wonder if my students have develop the skills necessary to read texts closely that need that type of reading.

This has got me thinking about modeling again. Effective teachers model their comprehension as well as word solving strategies, their use of text structures to follow the author, and analyze the text features provided in the text. These are all well documented approaches for reading, and ones that comprise the modeling behaviors of many teachers.

I am thinking about my own modeling and how I can incorporate greater attention to justification and evidence as I read and think aloud. I know that is part of the category of comprehension, but I'm now thinking that it deserve more attention. I wonder if adding more attention to evidence, through teacher modeling, will help students integrate this habit into their own practices. I know this has worked with word solving, for example, as students learn to look inside words (using morphology and word arts) and outside of words (using context clues and other resources), so it make sense that this would help with justification and evidence.

I've also been thinking about the relative lack of attention to text features in most teacher modeling events. A close read of an informational text would require that teachers notice things like figures, diagrams, charts, illustrations, captions, italicized words, and so on. Attending to those text features may allow students to think more deeply about what they are reading and gain a better understanding of the text and what they can do with the information contained within the text.

I'm not suggesting that teacher modeling is the answer to everything, but I am thinking that we should try to model the things we expect from students. As such, we should probably pay increased attention to justification we use to frame our answers and the evidence we would provide in a discussion about what we were reading. In doing so, we might be able to prepare students for the collaborative work they need to do to move deeply into the text as they discuss their readings with others.


Douglas Fisher, Ph.D., is Professor of Language and Literacy Education in the Department of Teacher Education at San Diego State University and a classroom teacher at Health Sciences High & Middle College. He is a member of the California Reading Hall of Fame and is the recipient of an International Reading Association Celebrate Literacy Award, the Farmer award for excellence in writing from the National Council of Teachers of English, as well as a Christa McAuliffe award for excellence in teacher education. He has published numerous articles on improving student achievement as well as books such as In a Reading State of Mind: Brain Research, Teacher Modeling, and Comprehension Instruction (with Nancy Frey and Diane Lapp).



Members Only: Engaging the Adolescent Reader [member login required]

by Thomas DeVere Wolsey, Ed. D., Walden University 

Finding appropriate books for children aged 3 to 13 that feature high-quality literature, many cultures, and multiple languages is a challenge for schools and libraries with limited budgets. However, the International Children’s Digital Library (ICDL) Foundation, a unique project begun by the University of Maryland in 2002, seeks to provide digital books that are inclusive of many cultures and in many languages. Most books in this digital collection can be read on standard Web browsers or in Java-enabled devices.  The site is easy to navigate and the text of the books can be enlarged. Young readers can quickly find picture books and chapter books by country of origin, language, genre, or suggested age-range.  The Foundation “…aspires to have every culture and language represented so that every child can know and appreciate the riches of children's literature from the world community (Mission page, ¶3). 

At present, the library has 4469 digital books in 55 different languages. Some books are available in multiple languages providing a great advantage to second language learners. Language maintenance is a critical goal in many school systems, and with ICDL, children (and adults) who have immigrated to another country may still access books in their home language, as well. One example is the digital book, Calling the Doves by Juan Felipe Herrera, a recipient of the Ezra Jack Keats Book Award (1995). In it, the author writes vibrantly of his childhood in a migrant family. With beautiful illustrations by Elly Simmons, readers learn how Herrera chose his road to becoming an author. Click the link to view the book, and as you do, consider how you could share this book, or another in the ICDL, with your students on a laptop, in a computer lab, or with the whole class using a digital projector or interactive whiteboard. 

Reference: 
Herrera, J. P. (1995). Calling the Doves. San Francisco, CA: Children’s Book Press. Retrieved from http://www.childrenslibrary.org/icdl/SaveBook?bookid=hrrclln_00030003&lang=English&ilang=English

This article is part of a series from the Technology in Literacy Education Special Interest Group (TILE-SIG). 

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?

The Library of Congress launched a new traveling exhibition that will bring facsimiles of many of its top treasures and information about the millions of resources in its unparalleled collections to America. 

Photos: Library of Congress Gateway to Knowledge Exhibition in Washington, Illinois. (Library of Congress Photo/ Abigail Van Gelder). GTK Exhibition in Grinnell, Iowa. (Library of Congress Photo/ Abigail Van Gelder). 

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