What’s Hot in Literacy Instruction

In January, the International Literacy Association (2020) released the most recent What’s Hot in Literacy: 2020 Report. For more than 20 years, this report has offered the wider literacy community a snapshot of the literacy topics that gained a lot of attention over the past year and the topics that survey respondents believe should receive even more attention. The What’s Hot in Literacy: 2020 Report highlights the responses of more than 2,000 literacy professionals from 91 countries, and it serves as the backdrop for this issue. In this issue’s The Inside Track, O. García challenges literacy educators to recognize the unbounded and dynamic actions of bilinguals as they leverage their entire linguistic/multimodal repertoire when reading, writing, listening, and speaking. Bilingual readers can tap into all of their meaning-making resources as they engage with text when educators give them permission and actually encourage these practices, thereby increasing equity and opportunity for all learners. Two feature articles and two teaching tips in this issue also address the hot topic of increasing equity and opportunity for all learners. The first set of articles highlights partnerships with families. The authors encourage literacy educators to tap into familial assets as valuable resources for increasing equity and inclusion but also seek to disrupt common school practices. In their feature article on homework, C. Clarke and Comber present findings from their study of 10 families in Newfoundland, Canada. They found that some literacy practices assigned as homework had an impact on how families read together. Relatedly, the two teaching tips in this issue also address school–family partnerships. Jennerjohn explains how educators can forge strong partnerships with families and increase equity and opportunities for all learners by meeting with families outside of school to co-create culturally sustaining texts. L.W. Clarke presents a teaching tip about Walk a Day in My Shoes. This curricular project was designed to facilitate cross-cultural understandings between elementary-age students in the United States, Morocco, France, Romania, Malaysia, and Ireland. Students used photography and digital storytelling to share a typical day in their lives. Students who are engaged in learning have more academic success than those who are less engaged. Robertson and Padesky also address equity and access with their article on interest-based instruction. They present four teaching actions—approaching curricular planning intentionally, contextualizing learning, building relevance and value for a topic, and incorporating inquiry and project-based learning—as ways to increase engagement and motivation. Also a hot topic for 2020 is the need to build early literacy skills through a balanced approach that combines both foundational and language comprehension instruction. Four feature articles and one department address aspects of early literacy skills. Critical literacy continues to be a vital skill for learners in the 21st century. McLaughlin and DeVoogd move beyond critical literacy as questioning to include critical expressionism, which encourages other modes of response beyond discussion. They propose multimodal texts, dramatization, and singing as ways to engage in critical response. Portman examines the benefits of journaling in his fifth-grade classroom. He notes the positive effects of journaling on students’ attitudes about writing and the benefits of journaling as it relates to building community and tapping into emotions when writing, and he provides a suggested framework for implementation. Goodwin, Petscher, Jones, McFadden, Reynolds, and Lantos describe an app-based, gamified assessment that measures language skills related to morphology, vocabulary, and syntax. They explain why assessing language development is vital and how the assessment results can inform teaching decisions. G.E. García, Sacco, and Guerrero-Arias draw on two qualitative research studies to describe how teachers in different instructional settings can teach bilingual students to use cognates to improve spelling, writing, and reading performance. Finally, Callow and Buch’s Global Literacy department highlights early literacy skills teachers might not readily consider. They draw attention to the idea of metalanguage—that is, how language and other meaning systems work to communicate meaning. Metalanguage includes not only grammatical terms such as nouns, verbs, and adjectives but also the use of narrative structures, literary features, and visual images. This column explores how various curricular documents around the world include students learning how to use a metalanguage as part of becoming literate global citizens. Two articles in this issue address another hot topic: providing access to high-quality, diverse books and content. Gultekin and May describe how Middle Eastern Muslims are represented in a text set of award-winning picture books. They found that most books were written from an outsider perspective and were usually about antiquated times and practices or war-stricken countries and dangerous journeys. The authors also offer points to consider as teachers facilitate classroom conversations about these books. Koltz and Kersten-Parrish also offer teachers helpful tips for integrating high-quality books about diverse topics in discussion. These authors recommend using picture books with messages related to social skills and situations. More importantly, though, they present a framework for engaging with these books in restorative circles, a specific restorative justice practice to promote conversation about challenging topics. The final group of articles in this issue relates to the hot topic of professional learning and development for practicing teachers. In their article, Cloonan, Paatsch, and Hutchison draw from their professional learning study of a large education system in Australia. The team examined how teachers integrate literature circles and digital technologies that acknowledge student identity practices. The authors report specifically on the findings of an eight-week novel study using multimodal responses. In conclusion, Morgan and Bates, authors of the Literacy Coaching and Professional Development department, explore the essential aspects of note-taking in coaching, especially as a reflective, decision-making tool. They present ideas for organizing coaching notes and make suggestions about what to capture in coaching notes. Mindfulness is not only a hot topic in education but also an important topic for our greater society. In this issue’s Voices From the Classroom essay, Sedenka, a fourth-grade classroom teacher from Maine, shares her journey to promote mindfulness in her classroom through read-alouds and mindfulness minilessons. As the editors of The Reading Teacher, we celebrate the dynamic, exciting, and innovative practices of literacy educators around the world. We consider it a great honor to read, review, and publish the work of outstanding literacy teachers. In our minds, literacy educators like you will always be a hot topic in literacy instruction. Thank you for making a difference.