When I first started teaching middle school, I did everything my university prep program told me to do in what’s known as the “workshop model.”

I let kids choose their books. I determined their independent reading levels and organized my classroom library according to reading difficulty.

I then modeled various reading skills, like noticing the details of the imagery in a text, and asked my students to practice doing likewise during independent reading time.

It was an utter failure.

Kids slipped their phones between the pages of the books they selected. Reading scores stagnated. I’m pretty sure my students learned nothing that year.

Yet one aspect of this model functioned seamlessly: when I sat on a desk in front of the room and read out loud from a shared classroom novel.

Kids listened, discussions arose naturally and everything seemed to click.

Slowly, the reason for these episodic successes became clear to me: Shared experiences and teacher direction are necessary for high-quality instruction and a well-run classroom.

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Over time, I pieced together the idea that my students would benefit most from a teaching model that emphasized shared readings of challenging works of literature; memorization of poetry; explicit grammar instruction; contextual knowledge, including history; and teacher direction — not time practicing skills.

But even as I made changes and saw improvements, doubts nagged at me. By abandoning student choice, and asking kids to dust off Chaucer, would I snuff out their joy of reading? Is Shakespearean English simply too difficult for middle schoolers?

To set my doubts aside, I surveyed the relevant research and found that many of the assumptions upon which the workshop model was founded are simply false — starting with the assumption that reading comprehension depends on “reading comprehension skills.”

There is evidence that teaching such skills has some benefit, but what students really need in order to read with understanding is knowledge about history, geography, science, music, the arts and the world more broadly.

Perhaps the most famous piece of evidence for this knowledge-centered theory of reading comprehension is the “baseball study,” in which researchers gave children an excerpt about baseball and then tested their comprehension. At the outset of the study, researchers noted the children’s reading levels and baseball knowledge; they varied considerably.

Ultimately, the researchers found that it was each child’s prior baseball knowledge and not their predetermined reading ability that predicted their comprehension and recall of the passage.

That shouldn’t be surprising. Embedded within any newspaper article or novel is a vast amount of assumed knowledge that authors take for granted — from the fall of the Soviet Union to the importance of 1776.

Just about any student can decode the words “Berlin Wall,” but they need a knowledge of basic geography (where is Berlin?), history (why was the Berlin wall built?) and political philosophy (what qualities of the Communist regime caused people to flee from East to West?) to grasp the full meaning of an essay or story involving the Berlin Wall.

Of course, students aren’t born with this knowledge, which is why effective teachers build students’ capacity for reading comprehension by relentlessly exposing them to content-rich texts.

My research confirmed what I had concluded from my classroom experiences: The workshop model’s text-leveling and independent reading have a weak evidence base.

Rather than obsessing over the difficulty of texts, educators would better serve students by asking themselves other questions, such as: Does our curriculum expose children to topics they might not encounter outside of school? Does it offer opportunities to discuss related historical events? Does it include significant works of literature or nonfiction that are important for understanding modern society?

Related: PROOF POINTS: Slightly higher reading scores when students delve into social studies, study finds

In my classroom, I began to choose many books simply because of their historical significance or instructional opportunities. Reading the memoirs of Frederick Douglass with my students allowed me to discuss supplementary nonfiction texts about chattel slavery, fugitive slave laws and the Emancipation Proclamation.

Reading “The Magician’s Nephew” by C. S. Lewis prompted teaching about allusions to the Christian creation story and the myth of Narcissus, knowledge they could use to analyze future stories and characters.

Proponents of the workshop model claim that letting students choose the books they read will make them more motivated readers, increase the amount of time they spend reading and improve their literacy. The claim is widely believed.

However, it’s unclear to me why choice would necessarily foster a love of reading. To me, it seems more likely that a shared reading of a classic work with an impassioned teacher, engaged classmates and a thoughtfully designed final project are more motivating than reading a self-selected book in a lonely corner. That was certainly my experience.

After my classes acted out “Romeo and Juliet,” with rulers trimmed and painted to resemble swords, and read “To Kill a Mockingbird” aloud, countless students (and their parents) told me it was the first time they’d ever enjoyed reading.

They said these classics were the first books that made them think — and the first ones that they’d ever connected with.

Students don’t need hours wasted on finding a text’s main idea or noticing details. They don’t need time cloistered off with another book about basketball.

They need to experience art, literature and history that might not immediately interest them but will expand their perspective and knowledge of the world.

They need a teacher to guide them through and inspire a love and interest in this content. The workshop model doesn’t offer students what they need, but teachers still can.

Daniel Buck is an editorial and policy associate at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the author of “What Is Wrong with Our Schools?”

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There is a long overdue movement in states and districts across the country to update K-3 reading and math curricula to ensure they adhere to research-proven practices. However, this movement has a big blind spot: preschool.

Close to half of all four-year-olds in the U.S. now start their formal education in a public preschool classroom, and this share is steadily growing. States invested well over $10 billion in pre-K programs in 2022-23, and the federal government invested $11 billion in Head Start.

Most public preschool programs succeed in offering children well-organized classrooms in which they feel safe to learn and explore. But they fall short in building the critical early learning skills on which a child’s future literacy and math skills depend.

Strong preschool experiences matter. The seeds of the large, consequential learning gap between children from higher-income and lower-income families in language, literacy and math skills in middle and high school are already planted by the first day of kindergarten.

Related: Our biweekly Early Childhood newsletter highlights innovative solutions to the obstacles facing the youngest students. Subscribe for free.

Many studies in widely differing locales around the country have shown that attending preschool boosts children’s kindergarten readiness, and that its effects can — but don’t invariably — last beyond kindergarten and even into adulthood. This readiness includes the ability to follow teacher directions and get along with peers, a solid understanding of the correspondence between letters and sounds, a strong vocabulary and a conceptual knowledge of the number line — all skills on which elementary school curricula can build and all eagerly learned by preschoolers.

But as with all education, some programs are more effective than others, and curriculum is a key active ingredient. Most preschool programs rely on curricula that do not match the current science of early learning and teaching. The good news is that we don’t have to start from scratch to do better. As a new National Academies report explains, we have ample research that points to what makes a preschool curriculum effective.

Three practical changes will help to move today’s curriculum reform efforts in the right direction.

First, public preschool programs need to update their lists of approved curricula, based on evidence, to clearly identify those that improve young children’s learning and development. In the 2021-22 school year (the most recent year for which figures are available), only 19 states maintained lists of approved curricula, and those lists included curricula that are not evidence-based.

Related: Infants and toddlers in high quality child care seem to reap the benefits longer, research says

Second, because the most effective preschool curricula tend to target only one or two learning areas (such as math and literacy), programs need to combine curricula to cover all vital areas. Fortunately, preschool programs in Boston and elsewhere have done precisely this.

Third, tightly linking curricula to teacher professional development and coaching is required for effective implementation. Too often, teacher professional development focuses on general best practices or is highly episodic, approaches that have not translated into preschool learning gains.

We can’t stop with these three changes, however. Children learn best when kindergarten and later elementary curricula build upon preschool curriculum.

None of these changes will solve the problem of the inadequate funding that affects many preschool programs and fuels high teacher turnover. But they can provide teachers with the best tools to support learning.

Getting preschool curricula right is crucial for society to receive the research-proven benefits of early education programs. Evidence shows a boost in learning when programs use more effective curricula.

What’s next is for policymakers to put this evidence into action.

Deborah A. Phillips and Christina Weiland are members of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Committee on a New Vision for High-Quality Pre-K Curriculum, which recently released a report with a series of recommendations to improve preschool curriculum, as is Douglas H. Clements, who also contributed to this opinion piece.

This story about preschool curricula was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s biweekly Early Childhood newsletter.

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This podcast, Sold a Story, was produced by  APM Reports and reprinted with permission.

There’s an idea about how children learn to read that’s held sway in schools for more than a generation – even though it was proven wrong by cognitive scientists decades ago. Teaching methods based on this idea can make it harder for children to learn how to read. In this new American Public Media podcast, host Emily Hanford investigates the influential authors who promote this idea and the company that sells their work. It’s an exposé of how educators came to believe in something that isn’t true and are now reckoning with the consequences – children harmed, money wasted, an education system upended.

Episode 10: The Details  

Some of the teachers, students, parents and researchers we met in Sold a Story talk about the impact the podcast has had on their lives and in schools — and share some of their hopes and concerns about the “science of reading” movement. 

This podcast, Sold a Story, was produced by  APM Reports and reprinted with permission.

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This podcast, Sold a Story, was produced by  APM Reports and reprinted with permission.

There’s an idea about how children learn to read that’s held sway in schools for more than a generation – even though it was proven wrong by cognitive scientists decades ago. Teaching methods based on this idea can make it harder for children to learn how to read. In this new American Public Media podcast, host Emily Hanford investigates the influential authors who promote this idea and the company that sells their work. It’s an exposé of how educators came to believe in something that isn’t true and are now reckoning with the consequences – children harmed, money wasted, an education system upended.

Episode 9: The Aftermath

Schools around the country are changing the way they teach reading. And that is having major consequences for people who sold the flawed theory we investigated in Sold a Story. But Lucy Calkins, Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell are fighting back — and fighting to stay relevant. And so are organizations that promoted their work: The Reading Recovery Council of North America and the publisher, Heinemann.

This podcast, Sold a Story, was produced by  APM Reports and reprinted with permission.

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A wave of new laws across the country is attempting to transform how elementary school children learn to read. Most states have in recent years passed legislation aimed at aligning policies and practices with the “science of reading,” a term that has become associated with more phonics instruction but, if done well, also includes reading fluency, vocabulary building, comprehension and other skills.

What makes a current reading reform effort in New York state more unusual is its emphasis on strengthening the foundational skills of young children well before they reach kindergarten.

“Anything I’ve heard about the science of reading always seems to start with kindergarten, when the kid hits school,” said Jenn O’Connor, director of partnerships and early childhood policy at The Education Trust-New York. The organization is leading the effort to integrate the push for the science of reading with stronger preliteracy instruction for children ages birth to five.

But she added, “I wouldn’t want anyone to think we’re putting two-year-olds in classrooms at desks and drilling them on phonics.”

What the organization is asking for is that prekindergarten be included in a set of comprehensive reading reforms under consideration by the state legislature. The proposal calls for schools to use “scientifically proven” reading curricula by 2025, and to invest millions in retraining teachers.

Later this year, Education Trust-New York also plans to release resources and ideas related to the earliest years. “It’s crucial to think about what children are getting even before they enter pre-K,” O’Connor said.

The effort in New York is an anomaly for even attempting to incorporate children younger than 5 in a meaningful way, said Susan B. Neuman, a professor of childhood education and literacy development at the Steinhardt School at New York University.

“For the most part, early childhood education and literacy reform are seen as very separate entities, and it’s very discouraging to me, frankly,” Neuman said.

Neuman believes that the heavy emphasis on phonics and decoding in the current reform efforts excludes not only children younger than 5 but many kindergarteners as well. In prekindergarten and at the start of kindergarten, the emphasis should be on encouraging kids to talk and develop their oral language skills, engaging teachers in responsive talking and listening to children and helping kids recognize letters and begin to understand the relationships between letters and sounds.

“These years are a wonderful space where we could be doing so much in terms of instruction,” she said. Even though some states have described their reading reform efforts as encompassing pre-kindergarten through third grade, Neuman said none of the plans she has read spell out how the style and mode of instruction and teacher training should be different in pre-kindergarten and much of the kindergarten year. “I fear that some of them will actually say, ‘Let’s do phonics in pre-K,’” Neuman said.

Partly for this reason, the effort in New York includes some partners that have long modeled what effective literacy development can look like in children as young as infancy.

One of Education Trust’s nearly 80 partners, ParentChild+, works primarily in the homes of children ages 16 months to 4 years old, moving through a curriculum aimed at supporting caregivers to get the most out of reading with their child, and interacting with them in all kinds of settings. “We believe parents are the first and primary teachers of a child,” said Andre Eaton, ParentChild+’s New York director.

Early learning specialists, many of them parents who participated in the program themselves, visit homes twice a week for 46 weeks, modeling and guiding caregivers in terms of how they might teach their children about colors and numbers through books, for instance. In more recent years, ParentChild+ has adapted an abbreviated version of its curriculum for home-based child care providers.

“While I believe in the scientific methodology of phonics,” Eaton said, “we know the development of early literacy skills and the love of learning is really important early on.”

The bill in New York contains only one line specific to pre-K, noting that students at that age will be assessed based on their cognitive abilities and social-emotional learning. But for O’Connor, who pushed to add the line in a later draft of the bill, it’s a crucial step in the right direction to have anything in a piece of potential reading reform-related legislation specific to pre-K.

It’s a start at getting reading reform advocates thinking — and talking more about the youngest learners. And “whether the bill passes or not, [we] are committed to helping school districts and child care programs access resources,” she said.

This story about preliteracy was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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If you worry about your own screen time, just think about the young people in your life.

The amount of time they spend consuming media and scrolling through content might alarm you. Teens are glued to screens for more than eight hours a day, reports show. So much screen time could pose risks for adolescents — including exposure to toxic misinformation.

With millions of Americans voting in federal, state and local elections this year, misinformation poses grave challenges to our democratic processes.

Standards-based news organizations carefully fact-check information with an eye toward fairness and a dedication to accuracy. Yet much of what populates our social media feeds is user-generated, unvetted and of varying reliability.

Too often, it’s difficult to separate fact from fiction in the onslaught of information we face. Many students — our next generation of voters — have no idea how to tell the difference between what’s meant to inform them and what’s meant to entertain them, sell them something or even mislead them. Luckily, a growing number of states are tackling this problem by helping students become more media literate. More states must follow.

Related: One state is poised to teach media literacy starting in kindergarten

In 2023 alone, New Jersey and California passed laws requiring that students be taught media literacy skills. Those states join others, including Delaware, Illinois and Texas, that led the way for mandating such requirements.

Media literacy teaches students how to access and evaluate all types of communication. News literacy falls under the umbrella of media literacy, and is focused on helping students understand the importance of a free press in a democracy and on developing the ability to determine the credibility of news.

News literacy teaches students how to think, not what to think. It develops a healthy skepticism — not cynicism — about the news.

Students who learn news literacy skills, for example, are more likely to notice when a social media post does not present credible evidence, assessments show. Studies have shown that “prebunking” — preemptively teaching people the common tactics used to spread false and misleading information — can effectively teach people to resist it. At a time of historically low levels of trust in news organizations, news and media literacy builds appreciation of and demand for quality journalism, a cornerstone of our democracy, and prepares students to be informed participants in our civic life.

States have taken different approaches to helping students find credible information: In Illinois, students must receive at least one unit of news literacy instruction before graduation. New Jersey has gone even further, requiring students in every grade to learn “information literacy,” an umbrella term that includes the ability to navigate all forms of information.

Related: The in-school push to fight misinformation from the outside world

Legislation to require media literacy instruction is a powerful part of the solution to misinformation, but it won’t solve the problem alone. Doing so will also require help from social media and technology companies, media organizations, civic organizations and the philanthropic community.

We need to do away with the myth of the “digital native.” Just because young people have grown up with technology does not mean that they instinctively know how to navigate the challenges of our information landscape. A recent report showed that teens receive more than 200 alerts on their phones a day. It’s important that we teach young people how to recognize the different types and quality of information they’re bombarded with, or we will leave them vulnerable to information that is unreliable or even intentionally misleading.

Most Americans are concerned about misinformation. As we head into an election cycle with AI technologies becoming more widely available and social media companies scaling back moderation efforts, it’s more important than ever to make sure everyone knows where to turn for accurate information about where, how and when to vote. This is especially true for our students who are just becoming old enough to cast their ballots for the first time.

By ensuring that more people are news literate, we can build a stronger, more inclusive democracy.

In 2024, let’s expand this work in schools and at home.

Ebonee Otoo is senior vice president of educator engagement at the News Literacy Project, a nonpartisan nonprofit that teaches people how to identify credible sources of news and information.

This story about teaching media literacy was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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Nearly one year ago, Tennessee school districts warned thousands of parents that because of a new state law, third grade students could be held back a year if they are not reading on grade level by spring.

The law — which created “a little bit of a firestorm” according to one of its legislative co-sponsors — was seen by supporters as a necessary step to address lagging literacy rates in the state. Concerned parents and school staff flocked to community meetings and legislative sessions to speak out against it.

But of the roughly 44,000 third grade students who scored low enough to be at risk of retention, just under 900 students, or 1.2 percent of all third graders who took the test, were actually held back because of their reading scores. That’s similar to retention rates in previous years — a report from the Tennessee Education Research Alliance shows that around 1 percent of third graders were held back each school year between 2010 to 2020.

Tennessee’s law was modeled after a much-praised literacy program in neighboring Mississippi that includes tutoring, improved literacy training for teachers and a retention policy for third graders who don’t pass its state test. Mississippi held back 8 percent of third graders in 2015, the first year its retention policy was in place. That includes some students held back for other reasons.  

So, what happened in Tennessee?

By the end of spring 2023, about 40 percent of third graders achieved a “met expectations” or “exceeded expectations” score on the Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program, or TCAP. That was a higher passing rate than previous years, but 60 percent of third grade students were still set to be held back because they scored in the “below expectations” or “approaching expectations” range.

However, the law was written to offer several escape hatches for students with low scores.

About 24 percent of all third graders who took the test this spring were exempt from retention because they either had a disability, were an English language learner with less than two years of English instruction, were previously retained or “met other exemptions determined locally,” according to the state’s report.

An additional 10 percent of students were granted a waiver because their parents appealed.

Related: Tennessee law could hold back thousands of third graders in bid to help kids recover from the pandemic

Just under 5 percent of students re-took the test and earned a passing grade. About 2 percent of students scored “approaching expectations” on the test, attended summer school and showed “adequate growth” by the end of the summer.

That leaves more than 12,000 students, or just under 17 percent, who were promoted to fourth grade but are required to receive high-dosage tutoring throughout the year. For these students, the threat of retention still looms.

The law says students who are promoted but required to attend tutoring could still be held back in fourth grade if they do not pass the reading portion of the test or show “adequate growth” by the end of the year.

“For those 12,000 students, the story is not over,” said Breanna Sommers, a policy analyst with The Education Trust in Tennessee.

The definition of “adequate growth” is a complicated formula that includes student’s TCAP scores and the probability that they’ll reach proficiency by 10th grade. During a recent meeting of the Tennessee Board of Education, the department said they are projecting 5,000 to 6,000 fourth grade students will be held back this year.

In Metro Nashville Public Schools, 77 third graders — or 1.4 percent — were held back last school year when the law went into effect. In the five prior years, the district only held back between one and 10 third graders a year. Nearly 1,200 fourth grade students in the district are required to get tutoring interventions this year.

To fill the demand, the district is providing teachers with a stipend to tutor students during their planning periods. Metro Nashville Public Schools has also hired full- and part-time tutors and contracted with an online tutoring service called Varsity Tutors.

Sonya Thomas, co-founder of the parent advocacy group Nashville PROPEL and a supporter of the law, said Tennessee’s renewed focus on reading was a long time coming, though her own children are now too old to benefit from it.

“It’s one of the strongest literacy packages that this state has ever put into place,” Thomas said. “I’m excited about the momentum that it’s going to create in the state.”

Related: Third graders struggling the most to recover in reading after the pandemic

But she’s still concerned that most children did not pass the reading portion of the third grade test this spring.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that we’re going in the right direction, it’s just a matter of the quality of instruction and the quality of interventions that need to be given to children with a sense of urgency. We should not have to wait until third grade to know whether a child is going to pass or fail,” Thomas said.

Studies on the impact of retaining students are generally mixed, but the practice is more successful with younger students and when it is coupled with resources and support aimed at helping students catch up.

Education analysts are still studying the effects of Tennessee’s law — the state has not released demographic data on who makes up the 1.2 percent of third graders held back or the more than 12,000 fourth graders who could be held back this spring. Research on retention laws in other states indicates Black, Hispanic and economically disadvantaged students are more likely to be retained.

“We all share a common goal of wanting our kids to read on grade level. We definitely want to maintain high expectations and know that our students can exceed and reach those. And we still believe that retention is a high-stakes intervention that should only be used in very limited cases in which it’s paired with extensive support,” said Sommers, the Education Trust analyst. “We’re looking forward to more long-term outcome impact data to see. We’ll be really excited if the tutoring was impactful or if summer camp was impactful.”

This story about grade-level reading was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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The thing that surprised me most about my teacher preparation program was that we never talked about how kids learn.

Instead, we were taught how to structure a lesson and given tips on classroom management. I took “methods” classes that gave me strategies for discussions and activities.

I assumed that I would eventually learn how the brain worked because I thought that studying education meant studying how learning happens.

But in my training in the late ’90s, the closest I got to cognitive science was the concept of “practitioner inquiry.” I was told to study my own students and investigate what worked best. That sounded hollow to me; surely more-experienced hands knew better.

But discussions around teacher effectiveness — what methods are scientifically proven to support cognitive development — were painfully rare. Eventually, I concluded that I never learned, and we never talked about, how the brain processes information because scientists didn’t know much about it.

I was wrong. If you are a mid-career educator like me, perhaps this sounds familiar. Maybe you have also been surprised to find out that cognitive scientists actually know quite a bit about how we learn. Over the last several years, many of us have had the uncomfortable realization that there is a gap between how we teach and how scientific findings suggest we should teach.

Many of us first felt this uneasiness when we heard about the “science of reading” in a series of podcasts by Emily Hanford. Since it aired, reading educators have engaged in a great national conversation about the discrepancy between what science understands about how students learn to read and how we often teach it in schools.

The discovery of the science of reading has led to the larger, more practice-shattering realization that educators know very little about the science of learning itself.

Related: The ‘science of reading’ swept reforms into classrooms nationwide. What about math?

Just as scientists have made great gains in understanding how students read, they have also made tremendous gains in understanding how students learn. Although some educators are familiar with this research, most of us are not. It is time to know and do better.

A 2019 survey of teachers uncovered some of these gaps. In answering one question, only 31 percent endorsed a scientifically backed strategy over less effective ones. In other answers, the vast majority of respondents voiced faith in scientifically disproven concepts – such as “learning styles” and the “left-brain, right-brain” myth.

Over the last several years, many of us have had an uncomfortable realization that there is a gap between how we teach and how scientific findings suggest we should teach.

Much of the disinformation stems from training like my own. A 2016 study found that not one textbook in commonly used teacher-training programs adequately covered the science of learning.

Delving into that science is beyond the reach of this editorial but here is a quick check to see where you stand. If any of the following six terms — central to what cognitive scientists have discovered about learning — are unfamiliar, you probably had a teacher training program like mine: retrieval practice, elaboration, spacing, interleaving, dual coding and metacognition.

If these concepts are part of your current practice as an educator, nice work. But if you are among the majority of us who have not fully encountered or employed these ideas, I humbly suggest that you have some urgent reading to do. All these ideas are established learning science.

Related: Student teachers fail test about how kids learn, nonprofit finds

One of the first principal syntheses of these findings with clear recommendations for the classroom was a 2007 federal report, “ Organizing Instruction and Study to Improve Student Learning.” The seven recommendations in the report represent, according to the U.S. Department of Education, the “most important concrete and applicable principles to emerge from research on learning and memory.”

Sixteen years later, we have no one to blame but ourselves for these ideas not taking hold in every classroom.

Scientists are trying. The 2014 bestseller “Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning,” by Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III and Mark A. McDaniel, made an urgent case for these ideas. Psychology professor Daniel Willingham and middle school teacher Paul Bruno, working with the organization Deans for Impact, summarized these concepts in a concise 2015 report, “The Science of Learning.” Willingham’s books are also tremendous primers for educators who want to know more about cognitive science.

Yet the simple fact remains that these concepts remain tangential to most of us when they should be central.

Now that we are being bombarded by headlines about students’ pandemic learning loss, perhaps we should focus on what we educators never learned. If we are to overcome these recent setbacks, we need to do so with the most effective tools.

M-J Mercanti-Anthony is the principal of Antonia Pantoja Preparatory Academy, a public school for grades 6-12 in the Castle Hill neighborhood of New York City, and a member of the Board of Education of Greenwich, Connecticut.

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While the reading and math “wars” have gotten a lot of attention in education in recent years, writing instruction has not received that same focus. That is, until the release of ChatGPT last year.

There isn’t really an agreed-upon approach to teaching writing, according to Sarah Levine, an assistant professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education. But now that ChatGPT is here to stay, experts like Levine are trying to figure how to teach writing to K-12 students in an age of AI.

“The question that teachers are having to ask themselves is, what’s writing for?” she said.

ChatGPT can produce a perfectly serviceable writing “product,” she said. But writing isn’t a product per se — it’s a tool for thinking, for organizing ideas, she said.

“ChatGPT and other text-based tools can’t think for us,” she said. “There’s still things to learn when it comes to writing because writing is a form of figuring out what you think.”

Earlier this year, Levine and her team conducted a pilot study at a high school in San Francisco. Students in an English class were given access to ChatGPT to see how they engaged with the tool.

Some were given prompts that asked them to create an argument based on directions, such as, “Some people say we should have a new mascot at our school. Some people say we should keep our old mascot. What do you think?” Other prompts were more creative, such as asking students to write an outline for a movie script about a new superhero based at their school.

Levine and her team found that students looked to ChatGPT, primarily, for help in two categories: Ideas or inspiration to get started on the prompt questions (for example, “What kind of mascots do other schools have?”) and guidance on the writing process (“How do you write a good ghost story?”).

“What the kids are now getting from this AI is what expert writers already have: a big bank of examples that they can draw from when they’re creating,” Levine said. Using ChatGPT as a sounding board for specific questions like these can help students learn to be stronger writers, she added.

Related: How college educators are using AI in the classroom

While the study is ongoing, the early findings revealed something surprising: Kids weren’t excited about ChatGPT’s writing. “They thought it was ‘too perfect.’ Or ‘like a robot,’” Levine said. “One team that was writing said, ‘We asked ChatGPT to edit our work, and it took out all of our jokes so we put them back.’”

Levine said that, to her, that was the big takeaway of the pilot. She’s heard teachers say they struggle to help students find their voice in writing. When students could contrast their own writing to ChatGPT’s more generic version, Levine said, they were able to “understand what their own voice is and what it does.”

Mark Warschauer, a professor of education at the University of California, Irvine, has spent years studying how technology can change writing instruction and the nature of writing itself. When ChatGPT was released, he decided to tailor some of his research to study ways generative AI could help students and teachers, particularly English language learners and bilingual learners.

Like Levine, Warschauer, director of the university’s Digital Learning Lab, said he believes ChatGPT can help students who struggle with writing to organize their ideas, and edit and revise their writing. Essentially, it could be used as an early feedback tool to supplement the work of a teacher, he said.

As part of a project on the effectiveness of ChatGPT as a tool for giving students feedback on their writing, his team at the Digital Learning Lab placed student essays that had already been evaluated by teachers into ChatGPT and asked the AI to provide its own feedback. Then experts blindly graded both the human and AI feedback. While the experts found the human feedback was a little better overall, the AI feedback was good enough to provide value in the classroom. It could help guide students as they progressed on an assignment, allowing teachers to spend more time with students who need extra support, Warschauer said.

Warschauer’s team has also partnered with UC Irvine’s school of engineering to create an intelligent writing coach, to be called PapyrusAI. The tool, which the teams plan to release next year, would be tailored to help middle school and high school students improve their writing through intensive coaching, he said.

In addition, he said, the tool is being designed to provide a safe and protected way to use AI, to address parents’ and educators’ concerns about student data and privacy on ChatGPT, which stores students’ data.

Stanford’s Levine also sees value in using ChatGPT to coach students on writing. 

“A lot of teachers feel intimidated when it comes to teaching writing, because they themselves don’t necessarily feel like they’re the best writers,” Levine said. ChatGPT can help teachers fill in gaps in writing instruction by working as students’ debate partner or coach she said.

ChatGPT could also help teachers more quickly analyze trends in student writing, identifying areas of success or struggle. If students “don’t understand how to connect one idea to another,” Levine said, Chat GPT could provide this feedback instead of teachers having to write, “Try connecting these ideas using a transition,” on every paper. Teachers could then devote more time to developing lessons that focus on that skill.  

“Writing should be and is a human experience,” Levine said. Teachers can retain that experience, even when using AI. If they help students learn how to use the new tool effectively — much as they now use spellcheck or Grammarly — students will understand that ChatGPT is “more or less a giant autocomplete machine, as opposed to a place that has facts,” she said.

“If we think that clarifying your own thinking is something worth doing, then we need to teach writing,” Levine said. “In other words, writing is a way of learning. It’s not just a way of showing your learning.”

This story about AI writing was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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School libraries should be places where students can learn independently and think creatively outside the traditional classroom. But that won’t happen under a new plan proposed for Houston, the largest school district in Texas. Instead, spaces once reserved for quiet contemplation of books will now be transformed into disciplinary spaces for troubled students.

This summer, the Houston Independent School District decided to close school libraries and replace them with discipline centers. Parents and educators are concerned that this might harm struggling students in a state with the country’s fourth-lowest literacy rate, and fear that the new policy will do nothing to address some of the root causes of student misbehavior, which often include difficulties with literacy.

Superintendent Mike Miles, who was appointed by the Texas Education Agency to lead the district after it was taken over by the state, is pushing the policy. In an NPR interview, Miles explained that disruptive students will be sent to these discipline centers and then rejoin their classmates virtually.

Schools have attempted to address misbehavior with stricter discipline practices for years, but resorting to virtual participation — and virtual problem solving — is not the answer.

Districts should examine why a student chooses to communicate an unmet need by disrupting the classroom. All behaviors are a form of communication; misbehavior specifically is sometimes the only form of expression available to a student at the time.

More times than not, misbehavior is a response to a perceived stressor in the child’s environment hindering them from making more “appropriate” choices in the moment. Learning how to read, write, speak and listen — communication — requires more than understanding phonemic awareness, spelling or vocabulary. It requires the activation of the frontal lobe, which is responsible for reading fluency, speech, grammatical usage and comprehension.

Related: The newest form of school discipline: Kicking kids out of class and into virtual learning

In their book “The Whole-Brain Child,” Dan Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson refer to this area as the “upstairs brain.” They explain that the lower and mid parts of the brain (the “downstairs,” or survival, brain), must feel cool, calm and collected before access is granted upstairs. Many things can contribute to the downstairs brain hijacking everything and revoking access to the part our students need to control their impulses, problem solve and excel in communication.

Traumatic experiences are the main culprit. They include not only the difficult childhood events we often hear about but also detrimental community and environmental experiences, such as structural racism, low pay, a global pandemic and climate crises. All can have negative effects on growing and learning. If Houston’s plan is truly a systemic reform, as its proponents claim, why aren’t we also holding these larger systems responsible for the impact they have on student behavior?

Struggling with any academic skills can bring feelings of shame, which is a vulnerable emotion often hidden under challenging behaviors.

Feelings of anger, frustration or stress, which can be caused by struggles with reading or other comprehension, can also lead to the downstairs brain hijacking the upstairs brain. When this hijacking happens, it can look like students are highly anxious or behaving aggressively toward themselves or others. Struggling with any academic skills can bring feelings of shame, which is a vulnerable emotion often hidden under challenging behaviors, many of which could get a student sent to the proposed “team centers.” A library and supportive librarian would benefit them more.

Not every misbehavior is the result of an issue with literacy, but every misbehavior communicates a need. While discipline is necessary, it should not end there.

Districts and school administrators need to recognize that a student’s behavior might be a trauma or stress response, and they need to learn how to respond constructively. This is known as a trauma-informed approach. Concurrently, restorative discipline practices focus on repairing any harm caused, while sparing the dignity of the student without excluding them from their community.

Not only does student behavior deserve to be fully understood and supported, but our educators, including our librarians, deserve to be allowed to work in their areas of expertise. When students are feeling unmotivated or defeated and communicate this through disruption, they should be met by individuals who not only understand the function of that behavior but also use their unique skills to quiet the downstairs brain to better attend to the upstairs brain, putting students in the best place to learn and grow. This is true system reform.

Related: OPINION: Teachers and students are not okay right now. More mental health training would help

Educators cannot do this alone. Caregivers can also integrate trauma-informed and restorative practices at home. Parents know their children better than anyone and have a responsibility to advocate and assist schools in understanding the child behind the behavior.

Infusing trauma-Informed and restorative practices into schoolwide policies and procedures will help schools attend to the root causes of misbehaviors without the risk of re-traumatization.

Protecting learning, literacy and libraries and addressing discipline issues are not mutually exclusive. Our school systems can and should do both.

Stephanie F. McGary is a licensed professional counselor-supervisor, registered play therapist and a Public Voices fellow with The OpEd Project. She is the director of clinical programming at Communities in Schools of the Dallas Region.

This story about school discipline centers was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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