As educators, our mission is to provide all of our students with opportunities as they move into the working world. Sadly, 32 million adult Americans read below a basic level. Locked into low-wage jobs, nearly 60 percent of those with low literacy earn less than $16,000 annually. These are people who lack foundational reading skills. What can we do about this issue?

Parents, teachers, and students can be baffled when students earn poor grades. The remedy isn’t as simple as considering a student’s effort. There are a variety of reasons why students struggle to display, communicate, and assimilate knowledge.

Dr. Fierro shares why teacher knowledge is paramount to helping ELLs (and all learners) develop the literacy skills that will help them succeed both academically and personally. We spoke with Dr. Fierro about the experiences that led to his career in education and why he’s passionate about ELLs and literacy.

Social emotional learning is a prevalent topic in education today, with a recognition that how children feel is as important as their academic growth. However, this perspective infers there is a dichotomy of skill sets, social emotional skills and academic skills. To this point, some early childhood programs have intentionally focused on young children’s social emotional skills and discouraged including academically related skills with a sense that social emotional skills need to develop before children are able to learn other skills. Consider these skill sets as all interconnected and integrated, instead of being a dichotomy, and that social emotional learning is dependent on executive function skills, which are interrelated to cognition, which is connected to oral language. Social emotional learning develops as we effectively learn to use the background knowledge we have gained through experiences and skills acquired to help us with tasks

For educators, the most important task and often the most challenging, is to ensure every student succeeds to the very best of her/his ability. Understanding that, educators recognize the importance of offering quality instruction, best practices, and instructional materials that have been shown to achieve the outcomes required for that student population. It is incumbent upon decision makers to select from among those instructional materials that already offer evidence of those outcomes.

Only one-third of American students entering high school are proficient in reading (National Assessment of Educational Progress). Many students lack the basic, foundational reading skills necessary to be successful academically.