Chapter 13
An Expanding Universe of Reading Partners
With an ever-expanding playground of educational materials being created for digital distribution, it is tempting to see digital resources as a solution to disparities. We hear it all the time: If only all children had these resources. We just need to get them more e-books. More learning games. More educational apps.
But communities and school districts could purchase more and more of these resources and still fall short. Remember the library study in Philadelphia that used the occasion of a $20 million upgrade to probe whether buying new technologies and more books would help close literacy gaps? Let us take you to the two libraries at the heart of that soon-to-be-classic study on literacy. These libraries—Chestnut Hill and Lillian Marrero—were the site of ten years of study by Susan B. Neuman, Donna C. Celano, and their research assistants, all of whom sat quietly in these libraries for years taking careful notes on how parents and children used the books and computers within. In 2012, in a slim but powerful book called Giving Our Children a Fighting Chance, they recounted what they saw.
Lillian Marrero Library is located in the Philadelphia Badlands, an economically abandoned part of town where, Neuman and Celano write, “makeshift garbage dumps line the sidewalks.” Many of the people who come to the library never finished high school and are struggling to find jobs. They use the books and computers to find Section 118 housing, to study for commercial trucking licenses, to lose themselves in poetry and dreams of a better life. Their children are often on their own in the preschool area, doing activities in “short bursts, picking up books and putting them down with little discrimination and involvement.” Here's a glimpse of how the researchers observed the use of the computers in the children's section:
We watch as a preschooler runs her cursor over a few icons, each of which shouts its name. Picking one called Green Eggs and Ham, she clicks on it and two options appear: “read to me” or “play the game.” She starts the game, but can't follow the narrator's directions. Soon she clicks to another program, eventually becoming equally frustrated. She starts clicking away randomly In less than two minutes, she clicks, switches, clicks, switches about 20 times. As her frustration grows, she starts pounding the keys as if they are a piano—that is, until the computer screen freezes and shuts down.
Chestnut Hill Library is eight miles to the northwest, though it feels like it is a world away. “Teams of families stroll the sidewalks with their babies and children ride their bikes The sidewalks and streets are swept clear of debris, expensively wrought metal receptacles are emptied before they get full, and meticulously designed window boxes, sidewalk planters, and hanging baskets add a homey splash of color.” The average household income in Chestnut Hill in 2012 was $110,000 a year. When you see children on computers in this library, here is what you see:
Four-year old Scott and his mother are having a great time playing Millie's Math House… His mother gives him directions, encouragement, and suggestions on how to play. She is very involved, laughing when something amusing happens on the screen and rubbing his back when he does something right. “See that one has seven jelly beans but you need five jelly beans for it to go in the number five slot. So what do you need to do?” Scott clicks on the appropriate thing and his mother rubs his back, saying “Good job!” He stays with this activity for a while—about 10 minutes—while his mother continues to sit with him.
Children at this library are getting the benefit of parents and grandparents who “carefully mentor” how they choose books and steer them to content that will challenge them. The differences between these experiences had little to do with children's access to resources. In both libraries, due to the generosity of the William Penn Foundation, books and computers were plentiful. Instead, the differences in interactions were emanating from a much deeper inequality. With low education levels, the parents and grandparents at Lillian Marrero had probably not received opportunities to develop skills for exploring the information available through books, let alone ask a librarian to help guide their children to materials appropriately challenging to their age. Their computer literacy was low too. Neuman and Celano saw example after example of adults with only rudimentary computer skills struggling to fill out forms or work with new software; they would wait in line to use the computer stations but were allotted only thirty minutes at a time and received little help.
“What became clear,” Neuman and Celano write, “is that while [an initiative to expand books and technology in the library] could greatly improve access to material resources, it could not make up for the intangible social and psychological resources—the parents and other adults who make the many pathways to reading and information-seeking meaningful and important to children.”
Other studies have painted similar scenes of parents lacking the confidence, knowledge, or experience to help their children make sense of the information coming at them. In the study on e-books and iPads, described in chapter 9, parents were rarely observed asking questions of their children. None of the parents who participated in the study used information from the e-books to connect to something their child might already know. “Only half the parents asked open-ended questions,” Katrina McNab wrote, “and only two parents discussed difficult or unfamiliar words.” More than half the parents, McNab said, reported that their children “preferred to read e-books independently, with one child resisting the parents' attempts to engage the child in shared reading by walking off.”
Co-reading with this kind of media is not always easy. In 2012, the Cooney Center studied the impact of highly interactive, multimedia experiences—enhanced e-books—on co-reading. The study compared three book formats: print books, basic e-books, and enhanced e-books. Researchers found that enhanced e-books offer observably different co-reading experiences than print and basic e-books. The highly enhanced e-books often distracted beginning readers from the story narrative and led to less positive interactions with the co-reading adult. In short, too many bells and whistles attached to otherwise engaging technologies were not helpful to building stronger reading skills. This mirrors results from the studies described in chapter 7 that found that parents were less likely to engage with children around a commercial e-book than a print-on-paper book.
But scholars have also discovered that the more an e-book was designed for learning, the more likely parents were to talk with their children, and even learn with their children, as they read together. Shared reading, joint media engagement, and serve-and-return conversation—all of this remains a critical component of literacy. “The provision of iPads is simply not enough,” wrote McNab and her doctoral adviser Ruth Fielding-Barnes in a recent article documenting what scientists know so far about e-books, apps, and the role of shared reading with adults. Wherever they are, whoever they are, children who are learning to read will still need reading partners.
A central challenge of the twenty-first century may be to avoid becoming so dazzled by new technologies that we assume children do not need an adult by their side. Can we embrace new tools while still learning to spot situations in which the technology is getting in the way of those connections? And are there any human-powered but tech-assisted initiatives that might actually foster co-reading moments?
Yes. We have encountered pioneers out there who resolve to find new ways to bring one-on-one reading and interaction time to children in disadvantaged circumstances by leveraging the communication power in today's technologies. The national nonprofit called Innovations for Learning deserves a long look. For twelve years, it has been marrying personalized one-on-one tutoring with on-screen reading assistance. And it is quietly becoming part of first-grade classrooms in school districts across the country.
Unusual Tutors at H. D. Cooke Elementary
It's 9:30 a.m. in a first-grade classroom at H. D. Cooke Elementary in Washington, D.C. The children are sitting in a semi-circle on the floor watching their teacher as she reads them a picture book.
A minute later, the group's reading time is interrupted by a ringing phone. Unfazed, one of the children stands up, walks over to a computer set up near the reading area, puts on a headset and says a quiet hello. “Is Jasmine* there?” asks the voice on the other end. “Yes, just a minute please,” the child says, motioning to her a classmate in beaded pigtails already making her way to the computer station. Jasmine takes the headset from her friend, sits down to face the computer, and tells the caller that she has arrived.
It's time for some one-on-one tutoring, Skype style.
Except that in this Internet phone call, no face appears on screen. Jasmine hears only the encouraging voice of her off-site tutor while her computer displays a storybook with two or three sentences per page. After a few seconds of shy greetings—“How are you?” “Good.” “How was your spring vacation?” “Good.”—Jasmine begins the session, reading into her headset as her tutor listens. Jasmine can see her tutor's on-screen movements as her cursor darts across the page and then hovers over certain words.
The story on the screen is about two sisters on a trip to the dentist. Jasmine reads haltingly: “We are twins We are missing our front teeth. My sister and I like…look…the same.” Jasmine pauses, then continues, “But we do not like the same—” Jasmine stops. Her tutor puts her cursor on the next word, things. Jasmine tries to sound it out: the, tuh. Finally it comes: “things.” “This is hard,” Jasmine says.
Then, through Jasmine's headset, comes the voice of her tutor: “You are doing great!”
Jasmine's eyes go back to the computer screen. The next ten minutes are about reading comprehension. The tutor flips back to some of the online book's first pages and asks Jasmine about the twin sisters she has just read about. “What do the sisters share?,” the tutor asks, testing whether Jasmine was following the story. “What is alike about them?”
“I don't know,” Jasmine says.
The tutor flips to a page and prompts again. Jasmine tries an answer, hesitating: “They like different foods?”
“That's what is different,” the tutor says, gently correcting her. “What is alike about them?”
“Duh know,” Jasmine says, her eyes wandering again.
“How do they look?,” the tutor prompts.
“They are the same height.”
Success! The tutor tells her she is right and they move on—the tutor prompting, Jasmine trying to focus, the cursor pointing to words to read on the page, Jasmine answering, the tutor asking another question and guiding her toward a response. Soon time is up, and Jasmine says a quiet good-bye.
Tutoring requires patience, as anyone who has volunteered in an elementary school knows well. Some students want to do anything but the task at hand. Now imagine tutoring through an Internet connection. The only teaching tricks available are the words on the screen and the sound of a disembodied voice. Yet for this program—called TutorMate and run by Innovations for Learning—the pros appear to outweigh the cons, at least if the program's growth is any indication. Since it started in 2003, the program has expanded into three hundred classrooms in fourteen school districts and continues to grow.
TutorMate tutors come from businesses big and small, but almost all of them are recruited from the metro area where the tutored children go to school. For example, several law offices, Boeing, and Booz Allen Hamilton provide tutors for the District of Columbia public schools. Employees from Janus Capital Group, Chase Bank, and Western Union volunteer in the Denver public schools. Quicken Loans, General Motors, and Chrysler volunteers help in the Detroit public schools. About 110 companies around the country have become involved. The advantage for the tutors is that they do not have to leave their offices in the middle of the day and travel back and forth to the schools. They simply reserve thirty minutes of their work week to login from their computers, make a phone call, and then spend that time with their assigned first grader. “Even with this flexibility, companies say: we still aren't sure we can commit,” said Dan Weisberg, national director of the program. He travels the country and makes phone calls every day to answer questions and persuade companies to donate some of their employees' time.
Weisberg's persistence appears to be paying off: As of early 2015, more than 2,600 people had registered as tutors. Among them is Neil Bush, President George W. Bush's brother and the board chairman of the Points of Light Foundation and the Barbara Bush Houston Literacy Foundation. He has been working each week with a first grader in the Houston Independent School District and is helping to spread the word to other school districts. In December 2014 he tweeted a photo showing a little boy holding a laptop: “Had fun tutoring Hector today 30 min. Easy, guided, proven. @TutorMate Help a 1st grader read http://www.connect4literacy.org.”
TutorMate Combined with TeacherMate
Making sure the tutors are in sync with the school takes training and coordination. Each school district has a “teacher ambassador” who is charged with connecting teachers to tutors, coping with technological hiccups, and keeping track of district policies. Tahra Tibbs, the ambassador for Innovations for Learning, floats between fifteen schools and thirty-five classrooms in the D.C. public schools. Within her first two years on the job, she had to relearn the DCPS system as schools were reclustered and new instructional superintendents were put in place. “We've had to be more visible, talking with principals more,” Tibbs said.
Innovations for Learning has built a related program called TeacherMate that enables teachers to make reading and phonics-based assignments for individual students and keep track of their progress in a more systematic way than is possible with TutorMate. The nonprofit would prefer that schools sign up for both programs and use them in tandem so the tutoring sessions are aligned with what children are doing every day in their classrooms. At Cooke Elementary, TeacherMate is part of the routine, and the two first grade teachers—Caroline Doctor and Nicole Henderson—are even bigger fans of the TeacherMate program than the tutoring program. They teach children in small groups and split up their morning time so that sometimes one group of children can be on the computer using the software while one or two other children sit at a table for a more intensive session with their teachers. “It enables us to lead an interruption-free reading session,” Henderson said, “because at the end of the day, that's what the kids need. That's the most important thing we do.” Other school districts that use TutorMate and TeacherMate together include the Chicago public schools, Houston public schools, and the Duval County public schools and Broward County public schools in Florida.
Having tutors as reading partners can give teachers another connection to their students as well. After we observed the tutoring session of Jasmine (as well as another child, an energetic boy who spoke excitedly and whizzed through lessons with his tutor), Doctor received a message that afternoon from Jasmine's tutor worrying that Jasmine did not seem to be answering some of her questions and asking if there was something she should do differently. “I appreciated that the tutor wrote to me,” Doctor said. With a class of more than twenty five students, teachers cannot always tune into when individual students may need an extra boost.
TutorMate lays bare some of the drawbacks and benefits of using online communication for learning. Because tutors are not in the school, they cannot possibly know the context of the children's mornings nor see the distractions in their classrooms. And because the tutors do not see the faces of their students, they may not be getting all of the subtle cues about when and if students are engaged. At the same time, the tutors have the opportunity to make a one-on-one connection with students without leaving their offices or driving across town. There are many barriers to volunteering, and two big ones are the hassles of transportation and the need to participate at a fixed time each week. TutorMate eliminates those barriers. Weisberg and some teachers have also noted that the focus on voice and text alone can ensure that tutors do not make assumptions about children based on their skin color or dress. Instead they can converse more freely as in a routine phone call.
A few months after the day we observed Jasmine with her tutor, we stopped by again to watch a poignant end-of-year meeting during which tutors and their tutees meet each other in person, often for the first time. The tutors arrive in the morning and await their “unveiling.” They first huddle in the school's front office, exchanging tidbits of knowledge about their students and relating what it was like to call in to the school each week. As they enter their students' classrooms, the six-year-olds hush each other and wiggle with excitement.
One of the tutors steps forward. His name is Tyrone Umani, a tall young man wearing a white button-down shirt with his employer's AT&T logo. He's got a twinkle in his eye as he asks children to raise their hands if they had a TutorMate tutor this year. “Let me guess who my student is,” he says, scanning the expectant faces. A boy leans forward and smirks, giving himself away. “You're José,” he predicts, as José says hello. “You're the guy who beat me at tic-tac-toe every week.”
Similar scenes played out that week across the District of Columbia, where eighty public school classrooms used the tutoring program that year. Yet as much as the children enjoyed the program and the two TeacherMate teachers saw it as a success, the program did not return to Cooke Elementary the next year. The school's leadership changed that summer, and the new principal was committed to a different reading system for her students. But nearly all the other D.C. principals found the program worth it: thirteen schools and thirty-two classrooms signed up to continue the program. The combination of the personalized software and the one-on-one experiences with the tutors was too good to pass up.
Media Mentors
Technology now allows for an expanded universe of reading partners. Coaches, tutors and reading guides can come into children's lives from almost anywhere in the world. Parents can search YouTube to find an abundance of videos and tutorials that can help their children comprehend new vocabulary or learn a foreign language. Apps like A Story before Bed capture the warmth of personal narration and make it available for anytime listening—a boon for parents in the military who may be away from their children for long periods of time. Google Helpouts, a new space for people seeking online assistance, has also been considered as a tool to help families. In Missouri in 2014, the home-visiting program Parents as Teachers partnered with the Google program to see how it might better serve parents with questions about their babies' development.
Even grandparents using FaceTime or Skype can enable one-on-one story time that would not have been possible ten years ago. Already scientists are seeing that video-chat conversations can help young children. A recent study led by Sarah Roseberry Lytle, a researcher at the University of Washington, showed that while toddlers could not learn new verbs from non-interactive video, they could learn those verbs over Skype.
In addition, the proliferation of new media has led to a need for some partners of another sort: people who can help parents and teachers make sense of the stream of material coming at them. Not only is literacy fostered with the presence of thoughtful human beings, whether first graders in Washington, D.C., or kindergartners in Tel Aviv, it also requires people with expertise in the marketplace of media, e- or otherwise, who can model the smart use of media with young children and know how to match it to a child's needs.
Tapping the Expertise of Children's Librarians
Librarians, for example, can play a huge role in modeling what it looks like to read print books and e-books with children and to help build discriminating tastes in quality books, e- or otherwise. Just because a book is in print, for example, doesn't mean that it's of higher quality than an e-book. Print books, wrote the librarians Maryanne Martens and Dorothy Stoltz, can just as easily feature “poor writing and mediocre illustrations that often function as promotional material for other branded merchandise.” And just because a book is interactive doesn't mean that it is going to be more engaging than one in print.
Some literacy experts are what we and others have come to call media mentors for children and families. In the twenty-first century, as reading skills are increasingly critical and notions of literacy expand, we need these mentors more than ever. Institutions such as the TEC Center at Erikson Institute and the Fred Rogers Center for Early Learning and Children's Media, not to mention some schools of library science at universities, are starting to provide fellowships and training to help equip educators with this expertise. (The TEC Center, in particular, is a leader in providing professional development in this arena; don't miss the recent book edited by the center's founder, Chip Donohue: Technology and Digital Media in the Early Years.) And fortunately, in pockets across the United States, some innovative children's librarians are already starting to fill this role.
Cen Campbell, the founder of a blog called LittleELit, which focuses on children's e-books with a literary critic's eye, is one of the librarians leading the charge. Petite, gregarious, and unafraid to dye her hair bright pink, Campbell is often seen at literacy and education conferences dashing from one forum to another to raise the flag for children's librarians and remind early childhood teachers that libraries are a key resource for navigating digital media. “Evaluation and curation of children's media have always been essential elements in the children's librarian's job description,” she says. Now those skills need to be applied to the app marketplace and brought to parents in an accessible way.
A number of projects around the country show this can be done. In the Arapahoe Library District just south of Denver, Colorado, librarians have renovated the children's sections of their branch libraries to spark both pretend play (children can climb on platforms and crawl through a makeshift treehouse) and adult-child interaction with digital media (tables are available for two or more people to sit together and explore touchscreens). In 2013, the libraries started offering story times titled “Tech with Tots” to give parents ideas on how to use e-books to promote sing-alongs and conversation with their children. We have seen these kinds of workshops pop up in California, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Oregon in just the past two years. Today's “media mentors” are also taking their message to teachers and child care professionals. In 2014, Washington County in Oregon hosted a media workshop for child care providers who take care of multiple children in their homes. In 2015 the early childhood division of Fairfax County, Virginia, opened up weekly workshops to its educators on topics such as “The Connected Classroom,” “Creative Outlets,” and “Digital Storytime.”
To get an even clearer picture of what media mentorship is starting to look like, meet Rachel C. Martin, an early childhood specialist in Fairfax County with a master's degree in early childhood who is now studying for a master's in library science. She designed the Fairfax courses so that she could give parents and teachers some tips on using media to its full potential as a literacy tool. A key aim is to show them how to be selective about what types of media they might choose. We got a hint of her growing abilities to discern quality in e-media when she offered to take a look at a free website called Unite For Literacy that had come across our radar screen. Within a few minutes of looking at the site, which provides simple e-books with audio narration in more than a dozen languages, Martin e-mailed back to say the site was “impressive in the quality and accuracy of the narration” and that she would mention it to providers as a new resource. Then she explained how the site could be even better: “I think it would be more powerful if they translated the text into multiple languages along with the narration. Having the narration is wonderful but pairing it with English text may be limiting. I would love to see bilingual text options. Then of course, adding text scaffolding to match the narration would just be excellent.”
Media mentors like Martin can lessen frustration, help children find more engaging materials, prompt teachers and childcare providers to be more selective about materials, and give parents some encouragement to see themselves as part of their children's learning. They could be valuable partners for media developers as well. Readialand needs these mentors. Wouldn't coping with the avalanche of technology be easier and less stressful if those of us raising and working with children had a guide with this kind of expertise at our side?