Over the past two years, as a professor of reading education, I have listened to, collaborated, and met with various PreK-12 educators virtually and in person. I collected questions, comments, successes, and challenges related to the ongoing transitions and demands of this post-pandemic era on teachers, students, and parents. The topics of student…

While there is a considerable body of research demonstrating benefits of book reading, the quality and depth of engagement children experience while reading is essential to ensure positive reading experiences and outcomes. In this article we describe four dimensions of reading engagement: behavioral, cognitive, affective, and social, illustrating…

Building content knowledge alongside the task of increasing literacy skills has become a goal for many elementary classrooms. Selecting and implementing texts for the literacy block that both increase content knowledge and develop students' literacy skills alongside increasing motivation for reading is a daunting task. The authors share a…

For most classroom teachers, recognizing when students are engaged in literacy activities--and perhaps more glaringly, when they are not--is a process that is key to evaluating the potential success of the instruction being offered. Students who are engaged have their eyes on what they are doing, are ardently attending to the teacher's read aloud…

Literacy engagement is critical to the development of reading proficiency. Yet, many students, having had varied and often limited experiences with formal literacy practices, begin schooling in an interstitial state that might more accurately be called "pre-engagement" where though eager to learn, they are unsure how to fully focus on…