Voices from the Middle - Volume 24, Issue 4, 2017

The team at Pop Culture Classroom makes a great case for using comics in literacy education, pointing out the various ways this visual storytelling style scaffolds reading comprehension.

In their debut column, the facilitators of The Nerdy Book Club blog discuss what literacy means in the current educational climate that emphasizes quantifiable, testable skills and places more value on opinion than fact. What’s next in reading depends on answers to larger questions that teachers and communities will work together to answer.

The author, an award-winning teacher and scholar, discusses the literary conversations students can have with a small group, the entire class, partners, and even themselves in the form of in-the-head conversations. She includes specific tips for guiding student-led literary discussions.

While it’s crucial for students to be allowed independent reading time, it’s also important to teach them how to be engaged with their reading. The author includes several strategies for helping students set reading goals, including regular conferences with students to provide feedback in the form of conversation rather than critique.

On a return visit to her former school, the author reflects on the importance of her school library and a supportive teacher in setting her on the path to being a writer.

The New Voices column explores the struggles, successes, and dreams of early-career middle level educators, from preservice through sixth year. In this issue, Chris interviews Nicole Dixon, an early-career teacher in New York City who has been using reading to develop thoughtful citizens.

Reading aloud to students is often relegated to the elementary classroom—the early grades in particular. Here, the author gives guidelines for reading aloud to all ages.

In this essay, the author expands on lessons she learned while researching for her coauthored book Connected Reading: Teaching Adolescent Reading in a Digital World. It is important for teachers and other experienced readers to reflect on and model our reading practices for students so they can being to think critically about the various modes of texts they experience in their daily lives.

Culturally responsive teaching can be a complex concept to educators. They must stay flexible and organic to respond to the challenges faced by students’ cultural, linguistic, and social group affiliations. This article suggests layering three different aspects into the classroom to support culturally responsive teaching: the development of community, supporting collaboration, and authentic literacy.

Annotation is a recommended strategy for supporting comprehension and developing metacognition while reading, but now that we are digitizing, archiving, and sharing texts by way of course management sites and mobile technologies, we need new methods for marking text. So, “what’s next” in annotation? How do we introduce and promote digital annotation in the middle grades? In response to these questions, a sixth-grade teacher implemented a four-week unit in which she and her students read, annotated, and responded to short story PDFs on iPads. This article summarizes insights and implications resulting from this pilot project.

When students face challenges in reading because of pedagogy, practices, or programs, they can become accommodating readers rather than gifted readers, especially when under pressure for meeting expectations along a continuum. When students like the one featured in this piece are allowed to discover autonomy by volume and strategic reading, their gifts—a combination of perception and comprehension—flourish. As a result, disenfranchised readers become more committed and engaged readers.

Linda Rief crafts this column, writing alongside her middle school students, to show the beauty and possibilities that lie within the words our students use to make sense of their world. In this issue, she discusses the interconnectedness of reading and writing and notes that creating readers and supporting them through avid discussion helps fuel imagination and confidence, allowing those students to feel successful as writers as well.

When discussing collaboration in an educational setting, most thoughts turn to teacher-teacher collaboration. The authors give us a reminder that teacher-librarian collaborations can be useful in teaching twenty-first-century skills, including information analysis (fake news vs. news), and discuss how to apply Patricia Montiel-Overall’s four-level model of collaboration to enhance instructional strategies, facilitate learning, and achieve learning outcomes.

In this article, we explore ways our mother-daughter book club provides opportunities for participants to identify and, in some cases, challenge various dominant constructions of adolescence.

Integrating nonfiction picture books into reading instruction can provide middle level learners with motivation, engagement, and mentor texts. When teachers combine picture book instruction with teaching text structures, middle school students gain a better understanding of how texts are organized, strategies for recalling information, and approaches to use in their own writing. In this article, the authors discuss classroom practices appropriate to for teaching text structures through nonfiction mentor texts and provide a list of popular children's books appropriate to use in this instructional practice.

This column brings news from the NCTE Middle Level Section steering committee. In this issue, get a glimpse of what’s happening specifically for middle grades at the 2017 NCTE Annual Convention in St. Louis, MO, in November.