John Schu talks with Patrick Allen about readers, writers, and his newest book, Louder Than Hunger.
Given your vast experience as an advocate for reading, what is one memorable connection you’ve made with young readers?
John Schu: I LOVE celebrating stories at CCIRA’s Annual Conference. I always tell people about what a WONDERFUL and INSPIRING conference it is.
I’m grateful you’re chatting with me today.
Oh, I’ve made so many connections with young readers and writers.
Mario is the first person who comes to mind.
I’ll never forget when he approached me, a bit shy and nervous. He seemed unsure and kept rotating himself to the end of the line, not wanting to share in front of the others. He thanked me for talking about The One and Only Ivan and for sharing that it made me cry. “I read it last year,” he said. “It made me cry a lot.” We talked about how sadness in books can help us better deal with sadness in our own lives and better prepare us for difficult moments in life. “I know sadness,” he said. “My sister died last year. Books helped me. Ivan helped me.” My heart was full when I left that meeting. Full of grief for his loss, but also full from the connection our hearts made through sharing Ivan’s experience—and through that, our own. When we create conditions where children are safe to experience life through the lens of characters and their struggles and successes, books can be a bridge to connect and restore us. Stories have the power to strengthen and heal hearts. A teacher-librarian put The One and Only Ivan in Mario’s hands, but probably had no idea, when they did so, that they were also tattooing love and light and laughter and hope on his heart. Or maybe they did, and that’s exactly why they did it. A book often walks into our lives when we need it the most.
Your picture book collaborations with Lauren Castillo and Veronica Miller Jamison are superb… What surprises you about their interpretations of your words in This is a School and This is a Story?
John Schu: I’m so lucky Lauren Castillo and Veronica Miller Jamison said yes to illustrating my poems. That they said yes to illustrating my very spare and lyrical odes to story and libraries and connection.
Both times, I was surprised and delighted and honored by how they interpreted my words.
Both times, I was reminded of how school and books can inspire us, connect us, and make us more compassionate. I couldn’t wait to share both picture books with readers of all ages.
You’ve joined the ranks of children’s authors. Who inspires you as a writer?
John Schu: That’s very kind of you to say. So many children’s book creators inspire me. I’m going to limit my list to ten creators.
Katherine Applegate
Kate DiCamillo
Margarita Engle
Erin Entrada Kelly
Deborah Freedman
Meg Medina
Dav Pilkey
Jason Reynolds
Jasmine Warga
Jacqueline Woodson
Tell us about your latest book Louder Than Hunger. First of all, talk to us about your writing process. Then, tell us what you hope readers will discover about themselves in the pages.
John Schu: Louder Than Hunger is a novel-in-verse that tells Jake Stacey’s story. Jake is battling a very loud voice inside his head. A voice that tells him that he doesn’t deserve to take up space. A voice that tells him that he doesn’t deserve food and love.
While Jake doesn’t usually feel comfortable taking up space in his everyday life, he’s very comfortable taking up a lot of space on the page. He loves playing around with the placement of words. He loves poetry.
I knew right away Louder Than Hunger needed to be told in verse. I cannot imagine the story told in any other way. The white space helped me write the story. The line breaks helped Jake find his voice.
I hope readers are inspired to listen to music from the ‘80s and ‘90s.
I hope they’re inspired to watch The Golden Girls, Family Matters, and Fraggle Rock.
Most importantly, I hope the story helps them ask for help if they are struggling with anorexia nervosa. I hope it helps them feel less alone.
John, you inspire and instill hope in educators. You love readers and you love books. What do you hope your legacy will be?
John Schu: Thank you! I love this question!
I’m going to answer your question by sharing what I hope people say at my memorial.
John Schu helped spread joy through story.
He made us laugh.
He made us cry.
He listened.
He gave away a lot of notebooks.
He inspired us to support libraries and librarians, see many Broadway musicals, and go on joywalks.
He cared.
John Schu has made a career out of advocating for the people and things he cares about most: kids, books, and the people that connect them. John is a children’s book author, a part-time lecturer at Rutgers University, and the children’s librarian for Bookelicious. His greatest joy is sharing his love of reading with countless educators and students around the world.
This post was written by Nawal Qarooni, an adapted excerpt from Nourishing Caregiver Collaborations: Exalting Home Experiences and Classroom Practices for Collective Care (Stenhouse/Routledge December 2023) by Nawal Qarooni.
When I was in second grade, I used to walk home with my dad a few short blocks from Mt. Lebanon Elementary School outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I remember a chalk-pink backpack slung on one shoulder with a lined piece of paper in my hand, perforated edges ripped wrong, my head down as my father berated me for spelling babies wrong on a ten-word spelling test. This was in 1989.
“Why would you write babbies?” he asked, shaking his head, seeming truly baffled.
He continued: “That says bab-ees . . . and your handwriting is sloppy. Doesn’t the teacher make you rewrite this?”
Fast forward three and a half decades to 2023, and I’m walking again as an adult, now a mother of four children myself.
My dear friend Rachel and I are bundled against the cold on the 606 trail in Chicago, large hot teas in hands, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. She hands me a belated birthday gift: an auburn knit hat with a cream-colored poof on top.
“You know,” Rachel tells me, “I can’t get Adrian to read anything other than junk. It’s all Captain Underpants and graphic novels.”
These vignettes aren’t a critique of my father or Rachel’s parenting, but I believe they reflect a persistent disconnect between what caregivers believe strong classroom practices look like and what we know as educators is currently more holistic practice.
And in nearly 35 years, little has changed. In this adapted excerpt from my forthcoming book on literacy practices that elevate both home and school collective care, I share ideas for how educators might reframe our understanding of family engagement.
A Love of Words
The conversations we have with caregivers today still reflect the same biases, assumptions, and concerns that I noticed in my own parents over three decades ago, even though our teaching methods today are more powerful. Caregivers are considered anyone who cares for and shapes a child—whether that be biological parent, adopted parent, aunt, uncle, chosen family, grandparent, or otherwise. Perhaps we haven’t done a good job as educators communicating with caregivers what we know is at the heart of literacy instruction: a love of words, authentic reasons to write, idea-building above polished finals, process writing over prompts, student talk above teacher lectures, in addition to building an independent reading life founded on interest and intimacy.
Classroom teachers today might ask students to decide on their own actions after reading, to create a visual story in response to learning, to decide what genre they want to write, to collaborate in book clubs. Teachers might ask kids to lead. If you are teaching in a workshop model, mini-lessons are likely taught whole-group, keeping direct instruction short, so the kids can think and work afterwards to grow their literacy muscles.
And then the real work begins, with kids doing the heavy lifting by practicing genre strategies independently and in small groups while teachers confer, meeting each child in a differentiated manner to support individual growth. In a reading workshop, students might read their choice of independent book in lieu of a whole-class novel, and teachers might meet with them individually to ask questions, apply skills and strategies to that independent reading book, and practice thinking side by side (Parker 2021).
This literacy classroom structure looks different than it did three decades ago, and even as you read this, instructional practices are continuing to evolve. But do caregivers know that? This is no different than the information you take to a new doctor who collects a history of your health and ailments. To support you and keep you healthy, it’ll take the intentional merging of your doctor’s expertise and your personal knowledge of your body and what you’ve experienced. Like doctors and their patients, sometimes a school’s expert knowledge and the wealth of information caregivers bring simply do not match. It is part of our work to ensure they do.
Perhaps the choice and autonomy in a more holistic vision of literacy instruction that is foundational in so many of our classrooms are what caregivers are ultimately confused by. We need to demystify for parents and caregivers our latest literacy practices so they can better support their children. Remembering that students spend more of their time across the year at home with caregivers than they do with us in schools, a true caregiver partnership is one of the most important pieces of the instructional puzzle facing schools today.
Caregivers, like all of us, are deeply human. They are multilayered beings who are not all bad or all good; they are learning, making mistakes, growing, and changing over time. So, we have to remind ourselves to resist labels or assumptions about who they are or how they parent based on a small number of interactions, a single event, or a minor sample of data. Nobody should be wholly labeled for isolated occurrences. I speak from personal experience, as a mother who sometimes snaps at my children, cries when I feel overwhelmed, smiles often, and wonders constantly if I am making the right parenting choices.
My own father is incredibly supportive but often lost his temper when I was young. Should he have been reduced to his singular parenting missteps? Never. He was unconditionally loving and faced an enormous array of challenges as an immigrant navigating life in a new country. He reflected, grew, and parented my younger siblings differently. It’s important to look at patterns and change over time.
Engaging Families Now
Similarly, we have to recognize that every single school and community is different when it comes to experiences around family engagement (Mapp 2021). There are different communication methods, reasons for connecting, events across the school year, assemblies and volunteer efforts, and timing for parent/caregiver conferences. Underlying all that are relationships that may or may not feel respectful and positive. In 2021, when I interviewed Chicago school leaders during a parent literacy engagement pilot program for the city’s Department of Literacy, at least half of those interviewed reminded me that their students’ caregivers faced educational trauma themselves.
And traumas such as those faced in one’s schooling, or even just a general sense of uncertainty, can manifest in a variety of mindsets families consciously or unconsciously bring with them as they engage with school systems, including:
The ways that families engage with schools are widely varied based on a variety of factors. We must eradicate judgment. Indeed, one of the most powerful comments I heard in a Los Angeles workshop I facilitated for school leaders named the realization that family engagement does not need to happen at school. Sometimes the work we do to bring families into the fold aims to further engage caregivers with their students at home and in their communities. My research and methodologies in school are a journey away from fearful, tentative, compliant, transactional, and toxic engagement toward the kind of engagement that is affirming and healthier for all families.
Historically, gender, race, and class have impacted parental engagement with school. School is a social institution. As such, our schools share all of the shortcomings of the society in which they are situated. For instance, a society that does not fully value the contributions of women designs schools that have a difficult time ensuring that all girls thrive. A society that makes war on its poor and working-class families condones schools that punish or criminalize them. A nation that cannot recognize the humanity of BIPOC folks is home to schools that dehumanize them.
Parents of children from historically marginalized and underserved groups know this, and they engage with school wielding that knowing as either a weapon, shield, or disengagement tactic. And they are not wrong in this. This is historically responsive behavior. We can build school experiences for all parents that write new histories of how we can be together and flourish in school communities. Building on the research of Janet Goodall and Caroline Montgomery’s parental involvement continuum, my work with teachers adds story and nuance to the ways we collaborate and invite families into our work, making evident from our very first communication the following beliefs:
All caregivers add value, no matter what their life experiences are or have been.
Teaching authentically and holistically means shunning a transactional, fear-based level of engagement.
Meaningful connections and relationships are the only way to learn.
Caregivers might not feel comfortable coming to the school building for any number of reasons, and these can be compounded when considering the historical ways gender, race, and class have impacted parental engagement. These truths are critical to keep in mind. Maybe your school tends to bring families in when students get into trouble. Maybe your school has established and longstanding processes for bringing families into the fold in meaningful ways beyond one-off PTA events. Either way, the key to building strong, positive, and respectful relationships with caregivers is to ensure they feel their innate power and that encounters are authentic, rich and generational, with clear intentionality and invitational conversations.
Think about the most marginalized, least heard parent voices in your classroom community. Would the person feel comfortable asking questions? Would they know what to ask? How would they feel showing up for parent nights, report card pick-ups, or other events? For caregivers to feel safe in partnerships with us, we must invite each one into our collective work in intentionally welcoming ways grounded in a shared goal to grow their children as literacy learners.
We must find shared ways to exalt all families and support all teachers. For that to happen, we weave the knowing of teachers and families together and learn evolved techniques for recognizing and communicating strong literacy ideas with every kind of caregiver, all of whom love their children, inherently want to do right by them, want to know how they can help, and, more often than not, have questions about what will ensure their children’s growth and positive development overall.
Because there are undeniable literacy strengths in EVERY child’s home.
Paying Careful Attention
As a mother to four multiethnic children ranging in ages from four to 12, I struggle every day with the pressure of deciding what is best or right for them when it comes to learning and education. And, like most families, their father and I want to raise compassionate, critical thinkers whose curiosities are served, who will contribute to their communities, and who care about the world around them—and the people in it. As a parent, I have discovered this: kids learn when we deeply listen. Kids learn when given choice, voice, and agency. Kids learn when we pay careful attention to what they’re telling us—in every way, not just verbally. Our kids learn with strong modeling, plentiful examples, and clear demonstrations. Powerful teaching is built on this knowing, as is powerful caregiver and home engagement.
And our kids learn despite us, showing up with different home experiences that lay the foundation for who they are and how they learn. I often joke that my fourth child, Eloisa, is the most verbose and has the strongest problem-solving skills, and that it’s because we’ve largely left her to her own devices. As a baby turned toddler at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, she breastfed during my Zoom calls, absorbing the conversations I had in every meeting alongside me. Her first words were, “Mama, charger,” as she teetered toward me with my laptop cord. And as the last child, Eloisa has had a very different experience than Eliana, our firstborn, whom we doted on with lessons from all kinds of baby classes. Eloisa is more verbal than them all, and it didn’t take pricey efforts.
Crafting literacy-rich moments with our children and for all families should feel deeply-rooted and sustainable. The time we have is sacred. Our task, together, is to celebrate what already exists so that families understand their power, while also considering ways we might invite them to support their children’s literacy growth even more. We must bring additional awareness and intentionality to what families already do and have always done.
There are opportunities to listen for, honor, connect to, and elevate family strengths while inviting them even further into our shared work and encouraging reflection around:
recognizing the journey of process
celebrating the role collaboration plays within the collective
using observational literacy to read the world
advocating for the power of talk to grow ideas and connect with others
giving children choice to make self-directed decisions
Traditions, Routines, and Habits
At night, when I rub Eloisa’s back to help her fall asleep, I tell her stories from my head about my cousin Sahar and me when we were very young, washing doll bums in sinks and making hideouts in the bushes in the side yard. I tell her about Uncle Jalal’s single-grain-rice-eating, sleepwalking behaviors and about Uncle Nezam getting smacked across the face at a Khoramshahr bakery, which propelled my irate grandfather to shut down the town’s single spot to buy bread for the week. Though these stories are true memories, I start with the Farsi yeki bood, yeki nabood, which is a Persian version of once upon a time.
Our families know. I think about the medical study that proved mothers can tell their babies have fevers more accurately by hand than most thermometers; how caregivers know at school pick-up how the child’s day went with one look at body language; I think about how intimately we know our own children (Teng et al. 2008). And I think about how all of these things are part of the natural way caregivers communicate—in ritual, practice, conversation, and reflection—that are critical ingredients in literacy learning. Chicago-based author Samira Ahmed builds stories with her children when they walk to school, one starting with a line and the other adding until a full story unfolds. (Check out her kidlit Amira and Hamza book duo (2021, 2022), which exalts the ancient Shahnameh oral storytelling tradition.) My childhood friend Sarah, a psychiatrist in Pittsburgh, concocts word problems connecting stories to math about cereal box nutrition at the breakfast table. My friend Francesco regales his children with Italian humor and games. He animatedly enunciates every word, slowly enough for his English-speaking wife Katie to understand what he’s saying. And families all over the world sing nursery rhymes in different languages.
Caregivers engage in these practices naturally.
There are children learning language at their grandmother’s knees, getting their hair braided, listening to wisdom from the past. My friend Acasia grew up listening to her mother sing gospel at funerals, which she says shaped her own love of words, drawn out, staccato, soulful. Watching my friend Chris-Annemarie quip with her sister and mother, visiting Chicago from Boston, I recognized the innate strength in that Jamaican Patois inserted every couple of phrases: familial, identity-shaping, intimate. I observed her young children absorb their grandmother’s language lessons while they ate mango at her feet. I know how my own children join me in belting ballads sometimes broody and deep, depending on my mood; Toni Braxton’s “Un-Break My Heart” (1996) and Lauren Hill’s “To Zion” (1998)are among our regulars. These rituals grow our children’s literacy lives.
There are children everywhere who add to their full linguistic repertoires simply by being in their community, like my own son, who has been raised in so many ways on the barber shop banter where he went weekly in Humboldt Park, Chicago, with his father for a shape up; now too in Montclair, New Jersey, since we moved back East. All of these varied world languages and practices come naturally and at the same time truly elevate what we try as literacy educators to achieve: discourse, fluidity, curiosity, problem-solving, and an ability to gather knowledge and move accordingly afterwards (Herrera, España 2020).
As I reflect on all of these stories, it leads me to one conclusion: in love and chaos and everyday weirdness, families know. They know because they live lovingly. They know because they navigate chaos. They know because they make mistakes. They know because they persist by consistently learning from them.
Families know. They have always known. We just need to listen.
Nawal Qarooni is an educator, writer, and adjunct professor who supports a holistic approach to literacy instruction and family experiences in schools across the country. Drawing on her work as an inquiry-based leader, mother, and proud daughter of immigrants, Nawal’s pedagogy centers the rich and authentic learning all families gift their children every day. Visit her online at NQCLiteracy.org, on X at @NQCLiteracy, or on Instagram and Threads at @nqarooni. You can reach her by email at nawal@nqcliteracy.com.
References
Ahmed, Samira. 2021. Amira & Hamza: The War to Save the Worlds. New York: Little Brown Books for Young Readers.
Ahmed, Samira. 2022. Amira & Hamza: The Quest for the Ring of Power. New York: Little Brown Books for Young Readers.
Braxton, Toni. 1996. “Un-Break My Heart.” Secrets. La Face Records.
España, Carla, and Luz Yadira Herrera. En Comunidad: Lessons for Centering the Voices and Experiences of Bilingual Latinx Students. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Goodall, Janet, and Caroline Montgomery. 2013. “Parental Involvement to Parental Engagement: A Continuum.” Educational Review 66, no. 4 (April): 339-410. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131911.2013.781576.
Hill, Lauryn. 1998. “To Zion.” The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. Rufflehouse Records and Columbia Records.
Mapp, Karen L., and Paul J. Kuttner. 2013. Education in A Dual Capacity-Building Framework for Family–School Partnerships. SEDL. Accessed May 14, 2023. PDF. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED593896.
Parker, Kimberly N. 2022. Literacy Is Liberation: Working Toward Justice Through Culturally Relevant Teaching. Washington DC: ASCD.
Teng, C. L., C.J. Ng, H. Nik-Sherina, A.H. Zailinawati, and S.F. Tong. 2008. “The accuracy of mother’s touch to detect fever in children: a systematic review.”Accessed May 26, 2023. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK75333/.
Velasquez, Elizabet. 2021. When We Make It: A Nuyorican Novel. New York: Dial Books for Young Readers.
By Katie and Maria Walther, 2024 Conference Presenters
On a recent Denver visit, the four of us drove to Green Mountain for a relaxing hike. We picked that spot to avoid icy trails, but we encountered an unexpected obstacle. Mud. The kind of gloopy mud that sucks your hiking boots down and hangs on. About halfway up the trail we faced a decision: Do we keep plodding forward or turn back? We mustered our collective energy to hike on, stopping every few minutes to scrape off our boots! In the end, the slog was well worth it as we were rewarded with scenic views and sunshine.
February tends to be the time of the school year when mucky mud can occasionally weigh us down. It comes in different forms—from a colleague’s negativity that oozes into conversations to the unrelenting uphill climb of daily classroom life. That’s why having the CCIRA conference in mid-February is perfectly-timed. The conference gives us the opportunity to muster our collective creativity and, together, figure out ways to scrape the mud off. We leave feeling energized and ready to trek alongside our readers until the end of the year. Staying rooted in evidence-based practices of read aloud and supported independent reading, we’ll branch out to offer some ideas that may lighten your step and make the trail ahead a little less sticky.
Lace Read Alouds Together: Play Book Tag
Let’s begin by considering one creative way to enrich your read-aloud experiences while helping students compare and contrast texts. Research confirms that reading aloud books with compelling themes and ideas supports future literacy experiences by building both word and world knowledge (Cervetti & Hiebert, 2018). We can do this by sharing text sets—an evidence-based technique for expanding students’ content knowledge and vocabulary (Wright, 2019). Curating and sharing text sets adds a layer to read alouds by inviting students to uncover the relationships between and among those texts. An engaging way to spark these discussions is by playing “Book Tag.” Here’s how it works:
Browse your upcoming curricular plans to target a standard, concept, theme, or content-area topic.
Curate a collection of three to five picture books that bring your selected target to light.
Engage in an interactive read-aloud experience for Book 1. Jot down any of your students’ noticings related to the target.
Read aloud Book 2. Invite students to tag Book 2 to Book 1 by sharing any connections they find like similar characters, themes, storylines, nonfiction text structures, and so on.
Continue in the same fashion for the remaining books.
Here’s a book tag text set to get you started!
Target: I notice how characters react to events and challenges.
Book 1: Hair Love (Cherry, 2019 ) Challenge: It’s a special day and Zuri needs a perfect hairstyle.
Book 2:Daddy Dressed Me (Gardner & Gardner, 2023)
Challenge: Ava has to recite a poem onstage.
Book 3:Sydney’s Big Speech (Newsome, 2024)
Challenge: Sydney has to give a speech.
If you work with older students who are reading chapter books or novels, consider shifting this experience to “Book Talk Tag.” Begin by having a reader share a quick book talk of a text they’re currently reading or have recently finished. Then, invite one learner at a time to connect a current or recent read to the first book. Encourage readers to continue tagging books as long as time and interest permit. As students notice similarities among texts, they are also discovering books they may want to read in the future.
Explore New Paths: Support Independent Readers
Throughout the first semester, you’ve worked to create a strong community of engaged readers. To explore new paths, take a moment and collaborate with your students to reinvent authentic ways that they can continue to take ownership of their reading journey. The insights you gain can provide a new focus and energy to your daily classroom reading practices. Begin this reflection with your students by following this process:
Brainstorm ways in which readers shape their reading identities and build reading habits throughout school and into adulthood.
Use this list as inspiration to experiment with activities that will help students build reading habits in new ways.
As you try out these experiences in your classroom, encourage learners to continuously reflect on what they are discovering about themselves as readers and how this might affect their reading lives going forward. Use these questions to guide readers’ reflections:
How has your reading identity changed, shifted, or stayed the same throughout this process?
Have you learned anything from this experience that you will use in your future reading life?
What do you still want to learn about yourself as a reader?
Using this thought process, we brainstormed a few ideas to try in the second semester:
To Help Readers Build This Habit . . .
Try This!
We create reading goals based on trends we notice in our reading habits.
* Show learners how to use Goodreads or Storygraph to set their own reading goals. (Note: Students will need to be 13+ years old to use these platforms.) * Provide time for students to interview teachers about how they set their reading goals.
We utilize the local libraries and Little Free Libraries to find books.
* Have readers pull up Google Maps to find libraries and Little Free Libraries near school or near where they live. * If your school has a Little Free Library nearby, take learners to visit it. * Invite librarians from your public library to come talk about the services their library offers.
We try different strategies to get ourselves out of reading slumps.
* Brainstorm a list of strategies that students have found successful when faced with a reading slump. Create a bookmark of these strategies for students to take home. * Offer a variety of short texts like articles, poems, song lyrics, and so on that students might try when they’re in a reading slump.
We read in a variety of ways (audiobooks, e-readers, reading multiple types of texts at a time).
* Create a “Read-o-Rama” week where students are encouraged to try as many different ways to read as possible. Can they listen to an audiobook, use an e-reader, alternate between two types of texts, and so on, all in one week? * If you have access to this technology, spend some time re-introducing the different platforms for audiobooks and e-readers in case students forgot about these options.
Use these “Try This!” suggestions as inspiration to explore new paths as you support readers in expanding their reading habits.
Tuck these strategies in your backpack, aim for the sunshine, and hike on! If you’re looking for more ideas to support your readers, check out our professional resourceA Year for the Books or connect with us on Instagram and X @ayear4thebooks. We would love to hear the ways you’ve found to scrape the mud off!
References
Cervetti, G. N., & Hiebert, E. H. (2018). Knowledge at the center of English language arts instruction. The Reading Teacher, 72(4), 499-507.
Wright, T. S. (2019). The power of interactive read alouds. American Educator, 42(4), 4-8.
Children’s Books Mentioned
Cherry, M. A. (2019). Hair love. (V. Harrison, Illus.). Kokila/Penguin.
Gardner, M., & Gardner, A. (2023). Daddy dressed me. (N. Fisher, Illus.). Aladdin/Simon & Schuster.
Newsome, M. (2024). Sydney’s big speech. (J. Orlando, Illus.). HarperCollins.
About the Authors
Katie Walther loves to read! In fact, she’s kept track of every book she’s read since fourth grade in Aurora, Illinois. Katie enjoys sharing her passion for reading with students and teachers alike. She taught middle school Language Arts for nine years, and is currently an instructional coach in Aurora, Colorado. You can find her on Instagram and X @ayear4thebooks.
Traveling teacher, author, literacy consultant, and picture book enthusiast, Maria Walther taught first grade for 34 years. Currently, Maria partners with teachers in their classrooms and inspires her colleagues through engaging professional learning experiences. What educators appreciate most about Maria is her focus on joyful, realistic approaches toward classroom instruction. All of Maria’s books are filled with helpful ideas for busy literacy teachers. Learn more about her consulting work and find other resources at mariawalther.com or connect with her on Instagram and X @mariapwalther.
Since 2019, CCIRA has supported educators through our professional blog. Each year there are favorites that are shared on social media and in professional settings. We are grateful for each post that is written by our network of literacy experts, national speakers and professional book authors and teachers.
Each year our blog gains more followers and becomes an even stronger voice for literacy teaching and learning. The posts this year have been some of the best. Below you will find the Top 5 Blog Posts of 2024, listed by order of popularity. We hope you will bookmark this post and come back to these gems when you need inspiration or another lens for reflection.
Over the past five years, some research buddies and I have visited over 90 innovative schools all across the country (and a few overseas). Fueled by learning equity and college / career readiness concerns, new technologies, and state policy changes, numerous new ‘deeper learning’ schools are emerging that aim to prepare ‘future ready’ graduates. Deeper learning schools are a small but quickly-growing number of institutions, constituting perhaps 1,000 or so schools out of 129,000 total schools in America. Although deeper learning can be defined in numerous ways, most of the schools that we have visited tend to share the following characteristics:
an emphasis on applied creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving;
high levels of student agency, control, ownership, voice, and choice;
opportunities to engage in authentic, real-world work in local and global communities; and
robust technology infusion.
A fifth characteristic that deeper learning schools share is that they are incredibly energizing and inspiring places to visit. For example, at any given moment, students in a deeper learning school might be investigating connections between their backyards and inland water ecosystems, creating kinetic art sculptures, learning about the relationship between chocolate-making and forced labor overseas, or building video game controllers for peers with disabilities. Students are thinking deeply, problem-solving collaboratively with peers and outside partners, and making significant impacts in their local communities, while still learning important, foundational course content and academic skills. As they find meaning and relevance in their work, students are excited and engaged learners rather than bored and apathetic.
What I love about the deeper learning schools that we have visited is the sheer energy and enthusiasm that students have around their learning. They’re eager to describe what they’re working on, what they’re mastering, and how they’re positively contributing to the world around them. It’s not just I’m excited to see my friends energy or I can’t wait to do my electives or extracurriculars today energy. It’s delight in the learning itself.
This learning engagement stands in sharp contrast to what we often see in more traditional schools. We’re so worried about ‘learning loss,’ we often engage in practices that feel fairly unproductive: Let’s add more reading and math blocks! Let’s extend the school day or calendar! Let’s create an intervention / remediation period during which students can catch up on the basics! Let’s require kids to attend summer school! Let’s force children to repeat a grade! We don’t actually change how we teach or what we do with students during this additional time. We simply double down on what they didn’t like in the first place.
Post-pandemic, we continue to see a great deal of student boredom and apathy. Some students are opting out physically, and we see many schools struggling with chronic student absenteeism. Other students are opting out mentally: even when they do show up, many of them don’t care much about the work that we ask them to do. The students who are compliant aren’t exactly excited about their learning either. They’re mostly checking off boxes and playing the game of school. If we’re honest with ourselves, we will admit that even our most academically-successful students often struggle to find meaning in the learning tasks that we put before them.
While there are no easy answers here, deeper learning schools show us that that leaning into
greater student ownership of their learning,
depth of student learning (beyond recall and regurgitation), and
student meaning-making (not just academic but also real world and applied)
can be powerful levers for student engagement. And just to be clear: This is not a teacher issue, it’s a systems issue. Together, we could create new visions for student success, establish structures and processes that treat our humans with dignity and respect, and redesign instruction in ways that are more interesting and engaging. We’re not helpless victims, trapped in systems that will forever perpetuate student boredom. We can do better.
How many of us are tired of constantly cajoling or disciplining students, pleading with or forcing them to do work that they don’t want to do? Me too.
CCIRA Professional Development Blog 