Do's and Don'ts of using Newsela to Accelerate Literacy Skills

I had a serious oh nooooo moment last week at a training. I've been doing it all wrong. Consistently, intentionally, and over more than a decade: wrong. We have all been there - the moment when you realize that the thing you have been doing for students is not actually best practice. So, as teachers and lifelong learners, what do we do? We take a moment to throw our hands in the air and scream "Why didn't I know?", we take a deep breath, and then we figure out how to make it better for the students in front of us right now.

It was a two-day conference on adolescent literacy intervention. I was there with Brent Truchon and James Moore, the middle school instructional coaches, and Cera Putney-Crane, the literacy interventionist at HMS. This was my second time attending a conference led by Dr. Sarah Lupo, who specializes in adolescent literacy. James, Brent, Cera and I had many takeaways from this experience, including some specific things that we can stop doing and start doing instead.

Just before attending the conference, many middle school teachers celebrated at the news that we have secured the funding to renew our Newsela subscription. Teachers, myself included, love Newsela for the easy, searchable access to articles about diverse current, scientific and historical topics. The online program allows us to change the Lexile level of the text with the click of a button to meet different readers where they are. So when Dr. Lupo started talking about Newsela, our ears perked up. She had some very specific recommendations for how to use Newsela effectively as a differentiation tool for readers at diverse levels, as well as some specific ways that are not effective.

First, a couple of the highlights of what I learned from Dr. Lupo about research on adolescent literacy intervention: 

• Supports, differentiation, reading strategies and reading instruction all need to be in service of meaning-making.  

• Adolescent readers of all skills levels need access to and experiences with complex, grade-level texts. 

• Teaching vocabulary is essential, and also needs to be in service of meaning. Focus on building the vocabulary that students need to understand rich texts you have chosen, and provide regular
  opportunities for students to say, use, and write the words. 

As a middle and high school teacher, my routines for using Newsela went something like this: choose a topic or a concept that I want students to read and learn about, find 3-4 related articles, and choose different Lexile scores for each one. Group 1 gets an article with Lexile of 700, Group 2 reads an article at 1100, and Group 3’s article is at 850. My goal was for students to learn about the content with reading that was “just right” for them. 

Sound familiar?

It turns out this approach does not help students learn to read and it does not even help them learn the content better. According to Dr. Lupo, in Tier 1 secondary instruction,  we need to chuck the idea of “just right reading”. Students need access to and practice reading grade level text as often as possible in Science, Social Studies, Health, and Language Arts classes.  And they need supports for that: vocabulary supports, meaning-making supports, reading guides that help them activate prior knowledge and make connections, partner reading and turn-and-talk with good prompts. 

Ohhhhhh. My approach with Newsela was meeting students where they are, but it wasn’t doing anything to move them forward. 

So here are some do’s and don’t of using Newsela to accelerate the reading of our students who most need it. 

Do 

• Use Newsela to find and select readings on high-interest topics that relate to the content you’re teaching. 
• Keep the Lexile level at grade level or higher whenever possible. 
• Look carefully at the rich, complex text you have chosen and identify what will be challenging for readers. Then plan for how you will actively support students for those challenges. 
• Give everyone access to the same text.
• Choose 1-2 short, supplemental readings  with a lower Lexile (easier reading level) in order to build background knowledge or understanding in service of being able to access the complex, grade-level or higher text. You might also choose a short video or two for this purpose: to increase students capacity to access the hard text. 
• Provide lots of ‘touches’ with the text, with opportunities for students to interact, build meaning, learn, practice and use the complex vocabulary associated with the content.

Don’t 

• Don't each articles in isolation, unconnected to bigger, deeper learning that is part of an existing theme or unit of study. 
• Don’t choose a Lexile so low that the article no longer resembles “real” text. For example, if you choose the lowest possible Lexile that the program provides, you’ll notice that the text is so stripped down it barely resembles the original. 
• Don't give different students different texts, or texts with different Lexiles.

In the next few weeks, we'll share more of our learning from this conference, particularly about the implications for core instruction.