Literacy Now

Writing is a critical literacy skill that plays an increasingly important role in everyday life. Our students need to demonstrate sufficient writing abilities, not only to meet schools’ curriculum requirements, but also to fully participate in social and civic activities.

Today’s standards place more emphasis on expository writing as well as writing as a tool to facilitate learning. However, students with language impairment (LI) tend to find writing particularly challenging. Therefore, it is critical that teachers understand how to provide writing instruction that supports students with LI.

Teach expository writing strategies

Research has shown that students with LI can benefit directly from learning strategies for planning, composing, editing, and revising expository essays. For example, the strategy mnemonic TREE BRANCH can help struggling learners to plan and compose compare–contrast essays:

• Tell what you are comparing and why
• Report important similarities and differences
• Elaborate on each point
• End with what the reader should learn
• Brainstorm idea words
• Recite self-talk
• Ask if ideas will meet goals
• Now, write with good organization, powerful words, and accurate information
• Challenge yourself to come up with more ideas
• Have a look for mistakes

Revision checklists can be used to facilitate revision of both content and mechanics.

Teach writing self-regulation strategies

It is important that students with LI understand how to self-monitor and self-regulate their performance during writing. Within the self-regulated strategy development model, students not only learn writing strategies, but also how to set appropriate writing goals (e.g., generating three superordinate categories for compare–contrast essays), instruct themselves on the strategy use (e.g., “OK, now I need to…”), monitor their own writing progress on a chart (e.g., recording the number of compare–contrast text elements included), and self-reinforce their performance (e.g., “I’ve done a good job writing up this paper!”).

Provide language support during writing instruction

Language difficulties make it challenging for students to generate key ideas (e.g., superordinate categories when comparing and contrasting two subjects/concepts) and use precise and impactful vocabulary in their expository essays. Therefore, teachers need to incorporate vocabulary support into their writing instruction. For example, complicated new words need to be presented to students multiple times and in varied contexts. Scaffolds such as picture cues and visual organizers could be presented to help students understand the meaning of the words. Teachers can also provide student-friendly definitions of keywords and discuss expository texts that effectively or ineffectively use these words.

Providing writing instruction that incorporates self-regulation strategies as well as language support could contribute to better overall writing performance for students with LI. Note that substantial time should be allowed for these students to practice and internalize the taught strategies.

Mei Shen completed her doctorate in special education at Michigan State University with a graduate specialization in language and literacy education. Her research focuses on providing evidence-based reading and writing instruction for struggling students with language difficulties.

Mei Shen will present a session titled “Empowering Students With Language Impairment With Effective Planning and Revising Strategies for Expository Writing” at the ILA 2017 Conference & Exhibits, held in Orlando, FL, July 15–17.

More than 80% of U.S. teachers are white, as are 80%–90% of students enrolled in U.S. preservice teacher programs.

Meanwhile, students of color compose more than 45% of the U.S. pre-K–12 population; by 2023, students of color will represent more than 50% of the U.S. student population. There is a significant divide between the demographics of the students in our classrooms and their teachers.

For decades, multicultural education and culturally relevant pedagogy have been fostering approaches to educational equity. Culturally relevant pedagogy, for example, aims to create inclusive instructional techniques and materials that align with students’ funds of knowledge—to make adaptations to a curriculum that is inherently not as relevant to students of color and those whose cultures are different from the white mainstream.

Culturally relevant pedagogy is a way to bridge the gap between the dominant, white mainstream culture of schooling and the diverse students who aren’t members of that culture. In doing the important work of culturally relevant teaching, teachers don’t often consider the systemic workings of our dominant white society that continue to make schools a place where instruction, materials, and curricula have to be adapted in order to meet the needs of diverse learners. Critical Whiteness Studies suggests that meaningful change for equity in our schools can come about only when we dig into the entrenched issues of race, racism, and white dominance that undergird schooling in the United States.

Carrying the Critical Whiteness Studies mantle is no easy task. It requires white teachers to reflect on their own racial identities in a society that systematically privileges their race. It requires examination of how schools are included among institutions in the United States that maintain and replicate a hierarchy of power that benefits whites.

These are not easy or comfortable topics to discuss. Building understanding about these issues should be part of ongoing professional development and learning for both preservice and inservice teachers. According to ILA’s Standards for the Preparation of Literacy Professionals 2017 (currently in draft stage and available 2018) professional development on issues of race, racism, and educational equity can help teachers challenge “their own cultures, belief systems, and potential biases” and engage in “reflective practice” with other teachers.

One approach to Critical Whiteness work is forming antiracism professional book study groups. These book groups can be facilitated in a variety of contexts and formats and can use a range of texts, including nonfiction, fiction, and multimedia resources. Book groups offer a space for in-depth and ongoing learning, reflection, and discussion that creates possibilities for meaningful change. 

Autumn M. Dodge is an assistant professor of literacy in the Department of Education Specialties at St. John’s University in Queens, NY. Her teaching and research interests include Critical Whiteness work through studying white teacher identity and antiracism pedagogy, leveraging literacy for LGBTQ+ advocacy, disciplinary literacy, and literacy and pop culture in education.

Autumn M. Dodge will present a session titled “Antiracism Education Through Teacher Book Study Groups” at the ILA 2017 Conference & Exhibits, held in Orlando, FL, July 15–17.

Eat more veggies, but not potatoes. Eat more salads, but only dark green leaves, no iceberg lettuce, and skip the dressing. Eat more fruit, but not bananas. And never strawberries—strawberries have pesticides. Avoid gluten, but make sure you eat your whole grains. Drink milk, it’s good for you. Don’t drink milk, it’s bad for you. Weigh yourself every day, it’s motivating. Don’t weigh yourself every day, it’s defeating.

Conflicting information about diet and nutrition will make you crazy enough to crawl under the covers with a big bag of Doritos. 

The only area of my life where I find more consistently conflicting information? TEACHING. Every time I read a journal, buy a new resource, collaborate with a colleague, or visit my curriculum materials, I’m given conflicting information. No matter what I do, I’m doing it wrong.

Make sure your students are reading classic books and literature, but don’t make them read old dead white men. By the way, every student should be exposed to Shakespeare, Orwell, Hawthorne, and Hemingway. 

Students should read material that they consider a struggle. It’s good for them. Students should read material that is at their independent level. Reading shouldn’t be a struggle.

Activate students’ background knowledge as much as you can before assigning a text. But don’t give them too much information up front, or they won’t see reading as a means of gaining information. If you tell them everything, they don’t have to read.

Make sure your students are reading widely and often, from a variety of genres. Track this to make sure. But not with checklists, book lists, or counting minutes. And never assign particular genres—allow choice. 

Collect data from assessments every week so that you can see progress and plan instruction. Use formative assessment often. But don’t continually stress your students out with assessment and data collection. By the way, assessments take away crucial instructional time, so limit assessment.

Follow the standards to the letter, but meet kids where they are. 

Differentiate, but ensure that every student completes the same common assignments. 

Read aloud to your students every day. Don’t read aloud to your students. It’s a waste of time because listening isn’t tested.

Make time every day in class to allow for independent reading. Class time is for direct instruction, and if students want to read what they choose, they should do it at home. 

My mantra has become one of common sense. All things in moderation. I read the journals, buy the new resources, collaborate and follow curriculum, but I keep the faces of students in my mind at all times. They need me to sort through all the advice and do what is best right now. Their needs change every day. 

Some days they need dressing on their green salad.

And if you need me, I’m under the covers with an empty bag of Doritos.

Julie Scullen is a former member of the ILA Board of Directors and also served as president of the Minnesota Reading Association and Minnesota Secondary Reading Interest Council. She taught most of her career in secondary reading intervention classrooms and now serves as Teaching and Learning Specialist for Secondary Reading in Anoka-Hennepin schools in Minnesota, working with teachers of all content areas to foster literacy achievement. She teaches graduate courses at Hamline University in St. Paul in literacy leadership and coaching, disciplinary literacy, critical literacy, and reading assessment and evaluation.

Math is often perceived as a challenging subject to teach and to learn. This line of thinking often stems from early learning experiences that relied on traditional teaching models. Today, more teachers are embracing non–content area books to help students understand and apply abstract mathematical concepts.

Our experiences with integrating reading and math have convinced us that if we teach math skills and concepts using popular children’s books, we can effectively engage and teach even the most reluctant learners.

In some important ways, learning to read and learning math are different. However, conceptualizing mathematical thinking using age-appropriate, quality children’s literature allows for productive experiences that enhance students’ mastery of the subject.
Working together, we developed guidelines for selecting books, concluding that the books must allow us to

• Connect to our students’ background knowledge
• Bridge abstract knowledge to concrete knowledge
• Apply new knowledge to real-world situations

With these guidelines in mind, we then generated a list of timeless classics. Two main selections and activities proved especially effective.

Amazing Grace. Mary Hoffman. Caroline Binch. 1991. Dial. Make spiders and have students number the legs on the spiders. Allow children to count (by twos) the legs on the spider. Push the math concepts of the book forward by providing coins from the U.S. and Trinidad so that students can compare the coins and use them to purchase the spiders made in class.

All by Myself. Mercer Mayer. 2001. Random House. Using ordinal numbers, recount the sequence of events in the book. Have children use teddy bear cookies as counters to vote on the kind of juice they want to have with their cookies for snack. To reinforce the book’s main idea, make a graph illustrating the number of students who have little sisters, little brothers, or neither.

The activities above can be used with a variety of books and adapted for use with children from pre-K through second grade. If early childhood educators use books that are carefully selected and pre-examined for their value in teaching mathematical concepts and skills, the children will be motivated to engage productively in learning. They will ask more questions, make more requests, and become involved in useful learning experiences, just as mouse did when he was given a cookie.

Delilah Davis is an assistant professor in reading and early childhood at Texas Southern University. She serves as the director of Field Experience and Clinical Practice.


Ingrid Haynes is an associate professor in reading and middle grades at Texas Southern University. She serves as the department chair for Curriculum and Instruction.

Delilah Davis and Ingrid Haynes, along with Summer Pannell and Reginald Todd, will present a session titled “Literacy Strategies for Improving Mathematics; Developing Autonomous, Self-Directed Learners” at the ILA 2017 Conference & Exhibits, held in Orlando, FL, July 15–17.

Classrooms are more diverse than ever before. In our interconnected world, students bring a range of languages, literacies, and cultural practices into their schools. As educators, we’ve often thought about culture as something associated with a student’s ethnic heritage. However, a newer approach to teaching and learning called culturally sustaining pedagogy challenges us to promote, celebrate, and even critique the multiple and shifting ways that students engage with culture.

Django Paris, associate professor of language and literacy in the College of Education at Michigan State University, developed culturally sustaining pedagogy to extend asset-based teaching approaches such as culturally relevant pedagogy for the 21st century. His approach challenges us to go beyond acceptance or tolerance of students’ cultures and to move instead toward explicitly supporting aspects of their languages, literacies, and cultural traditions. Culturally sustaining pedagogy also encourages us to consider the term “culture” in a broader sense, including concepts such as popular, youth, and local culture alongside those associated with ethnicity.

Recently, educators have taken up culturally sustaining pedagogy within particular academic content areas. My colleagues (Rebecca Woodard, Andrea Vaughan, and Rick Coppola) and I have examined what culturally sustaining pedagogy might look like in literacy classrooms in Chicago, IL. We’ve found a few practices that literacy teachers might try as entry points to this work.

Seek out nontraditional texts. In our research, literacy teachers sought out nontraditional read-alouds and mentor texts for writing. We’ve documented teachers going beyond canonical texts and incorporating videos, student writing, poetry, and more into culturally sustaining units. Teachers might also consider using blog posts, memes, podcasts, and other artifacts as reading material or writing models. In addition to potentially promoting students’ cultures, languages, and literacies, these texts encourage broader ideas about what counts as reading and writing in schools.

Explore and model meshing languages. Language is a critical part of culture. Rather than require only “standard” English in the classroom, culturally sustaining literacy teachers explore, model, and support the meshing and blending of language varieties. We’ve documented teachers speaking and writing in ways that blend languages, dialects, and formal and informal registers. In addition to helping students see themselves in the texts they write, this approach helps students note complex power dynamics surrounding language use.  

Encourage students to explore alternative cultural affiliations. Culturally sustaining literacy teachers understand that students engage with a wide range of cultural groups and encourage them to explore these affiliations. In our research, we’ve seen students explore Chicago culture, culinary culture, digital culture, and more. Teachers can ask students about spaces, places, and communities where they feel like cultural “insiders” and can help them connect with these communities in person or online. This practice helps students and teachers understand the complexity of culture and the multiple affiliations of every student.

These suggestions just scratch the surface of what it means to teach literacy in ways that are culturally sustaining. Teaching, like culture, is complex. However, by approaching our practices with this cultural complexity in mind, we may be able to see and understand our students’ languages, literacies, and cultural practices in deeper and more meaningful ways.

Emily Machado is a doctoral candidate studying literacy, language, and culture at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She researches equity-oriented writing pedagogies in urban classrooms. Previously, she worked as a public elementary school teacher in Washington, D.C. She tweets at @emilynmachado.

Emily Machado, along with Rebecca Woodard, Andrea Vaughan, and Rick Coppola, will present a session titled “Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy in the Urban Literacy Classroom: Lessons from Mr. C’s Class” at the ILA 2017 Conference & Exhibits, held in Orlando, FL, July 15–17.