What Teachers and Librarians Need Now

HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY! Illustrator Virginia Allyn sent in this illustration for February.  I thought it was perfect for todays post.

Hope your day is filled with hearts, love, candy, flowers, or other nice deeds from others. 

Today Christine Brower-Cohen has provided a good deed by being a guest blogger today. 

Here is Christine:

I was sad to read that Kathy was going in for surgery, and like all of you, I wish her a speedy recovery and look forward to seeing her at the next SCBWI event.

I thought I would take up her request for some guest posts as an opportunity to share what teachers and librarians REALLY need now.  With the new, national Common Core Standards and the Race to the Top, what kinds of books are teachers, administrators and librarians willing to spent their ever-dwindling budgets on?

Non-fiction!  If you read the new standards, you will see that there is a call for students to be reading more informational text, or non-fiction.  In grades K-5, the shift is for progressively balancing the amount of fiction and non-fiction.  For grades 6-12, however, the standards call for a larger percentage of informational text, or non-fiction works.

Teachers at all levels need engaging non-fiction.  We also need more challenging texts.  The new standards call for higher levels of text complexity.  Previously, text books were written at a reading level two-three years lower than the grade level.  The thinking was that students should not struggle to decode the words in order to learn content.  Therefore, in order to deliver science, social studies, math and even language arts content, the reading level of the text was lowered.  Students learned the content, but the reading levels of graduating high school students dropped over several years.

Enter the new standards, requiring students to read higher-levels of non-fiction text.  Not only that, but students are expected to read critically, uncovering the deeper meaning of the text for themselves.  For authors, this is a good thing.  Students are interacting with your carefully chosen words for themselves, not hearing the teacher’s interpretation of what the author really meant.

To facilitate this critical thinking, teachers and librarians need non-fiction texts that are dense with new ideas and rich vocabulary.  Hopefully, you authors will include higher level vocabulary words that students can figure out from the context of your sentence or paragraph.

So, if you have an area of expertise, this might be a great opportunity for you to get a non-fiction article published.  Teachers pull materials from the very children’s magazines to which you submit!

Happy writing,

Christine ccohen(at)wbschools(dot)org

Christine Brower-Cohen is a member of SCBWI who holds a Masters Degree in Elementary Education.  She has been published in Sprouts and has a picture book under contract.  She writes a literacy blog: https://sites.google.com/a/wbschools.org/literacylink/secondary/grade-6

Thank you Christine.  This is a very hot topic.  Along those same lines, Jane Kirkland will be doing a workshop at the NJSCBWI conference in June on how authors and illustrators can use a states academic standards to get school visits and promote their book.  Why not look at those standards before beginning your book (fiction or non-fiction), so when you are done writing, you will have a marketing hook to entice editors, agents and later teachers and librarians?  Using this method has made Jane’s author career.  I have attended her workshop and it is excellent – not to be missed. 

Talk tomorrow,

Kathy