Looking Back: Lessons Learned About Making Literacy Instruction Matter Instruction by Jeanne R. Paratore Jeanne R. Paratore, EdD, is Professor Emerita, Literacy Education, at Boston University Wheelock College of Education. She is faculty advisor to the Boston University/Chelsea Intergenerational Literacy Program. A former classroom teacher, reading specialist, and Title I director, she has also been principal investigator on several funded studies of family literacy and home–school partnerships. She has published widely on issues related to family literacy, interventions for struggling readers, literacy coaching, and most recently, the affordances of integrating digital media with the instructional routines in early childhood classrooms. She has served as co-curriculum director of the award-winning children’s television series, Between the Lions. She is an elected member of the Reading Hall of Fame, a recipient of the New England Reading Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Ida M. Johnson Award honoring distinguished alumni of Boston University’s School of Education.
Introduction
T
he invitation to contribute to this important issue of the Primer—in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Massachusetts Reading Association’s annual conference—is an honor—and it is also serendipitous, as it coincides with my own 50th year of teaching. So, the opportunity to share my thoughts on lessons learned over these five decades is quite gratifying. The seeds for this article were planted long ago, and some might recognize them as some variation of ideas I have shared in recent (and some not-so-recent) talks and presentations. Here, I’ve tried to revisit these ideas in the context of how our understanding of teaching and learning has changed over the decades, and reflect on what this means as we prepare to make our instruction matter tomorrow and all the days thereafter. As a backdrop for understanding the complexity of teaching in today’s world, I begin with a brief description of changes in the demographics of the children we teach and their families.
The Children and Families We Serve When I began teaching in 1970 (in a small school in a small, coastal New England town) the 23 children in my classroom could be readily described: all were white; all spoke English as a first language; all had housing. Compare those characteristics to the children we now teach. A majority of students enrolled in U.S. public schools, prekindergarten through grade 12, are now children of color—Black, Hispanic, Asian, Pacific
Islander, American Indian/Alaska Native and many of two or more races. On average, 1 in 10 children (and more in some U.S. states) is likely to be acquiring English as an additional language. Substantially more children are identified as needing special education services, changing from about 8% in 1977 (one year after the authorization of federal funding for disability services) to about 13% in 2018; and the majority of students with special learning needs spend most of their school day in general education classrooms (National Center for Education Statistics, 2018). Children’s economic lives have also changed. The rate of child poverty has increased substantially in the last 50 years, with 41 percent of children presently living in poverty, compared to a rate of 14-16% in the late 1960s and early 1970s (Skinner, 2013). Further, living in poverty is no longer associated predominantly with urban or rural communities. Between 2000 and 2015, the growth of economic insecurity in the suburbs surrounding some of the U.S.’s largest metro areas grew substantially (by 57 percent) (Kneebone, 2017). Children’s economic insecurity brings with it both nutritional and housing challenges. In the 2015–2016 school year, nearly one and a half million students— about three percent of students in U.S. schools, were reported as homeless. In short, the children we serve in today’s classrooms represent exceptional diversity—culturally, linguistically, academically, and economically. Without question, children’s diversity brings wonderful and rich opportunities for teaching and learning; but it also 7
