AdLit News Headlines

What are some good adult reading possibilities for teens? A longtime children’s and teen librarian offers a wide selection of mystery, romance, nonfiction and science fiction selected by fellow librarians and teens.

Researchers at The University of Miami will use an Institute of Education Sciences grant to study the effects of an intensive reading program for middle school students with or at-risk for reading disabilities.

A climate of disinformation in students’ homes lives is making it harder to teach critical thinking.

The NY Times invites students (age 11-19) to choose an issue or question in science, technology, engineering, math or health, then write an engaging 500-word explanation. Contest Dates: Feb. 2 to March 9, 2022.

Hundreds of students, parents and residents in York County, Pa., protested limits on books told from the perspective of gay, Black and Latino children.

Assignments that align with standards and hone students’ critical thinking skills can boost their engagement in learning.

Rather than buying into the false assumption that high-achieving kids will do fine on their own, we need to do a better job of making sure that all high achievers, including those from low-income backgrounds, get the education they deserve.

Teachers can support students in developing skills that allow them to effectively evaluate content from a variety of media sources.

An online petition to reinstate slavery that made its rounds at a high school in Kansas City this month is the latest in a series of incidents sparking outrage from parents and students who say race-related controversies at the school are an all-too-common occurrence.

In America, around 17 million children are battling hunger. An entrepreneur has teamed with rap star Gunna to open a free grocery store inside his old middle school in Georgia to try to begin to change that.

Students missed homecoming, field trips and classes, while also handling anxiety and economic precarity. Now, they must leap into the future, with the school’s help.

Monica Zepeda is a triple threat of the literary variety. She is a teen librarian at the Beverly Hills Public Library in Los Angeles County, a debut young adult author, and an award-winning screenwriter. Her first YA novel, Boys of the Beast, won the Lee & Low 2019 New Visions Award for new authors of color, and will be published in February 2022. Zepeda spoke with PW about her role as teen librarian, and the journey she took while crafting Boys of the Beast.

More and more kids are talking openly about their mental health and while that may feel alarming, it’s actually a good sign that young people are confiding in adults. Now that in-person learning is back in session in most parts of the country, many school systems are trying to meet the overwhelming mental health needs of students. 

Listen in as Kacen Callender talks about the pressure to make characters from marginalized backgrounds “good,” and the fun you can have when you ignore some of that pressure.

As Halloween creeps up, these five audio dramas deliver chills and thrills. 

Teacher collaboration across disciplines provides middle school students with work that reinforces learning and develops their research and writing skills.

If the ultimate goal of K–12 education is to offer equitable access to high-quality curricula leading to greater college access and success, policymakers need to rethink their approach to AP and look beyond it.

The open letter by Martin Luther King Jr. is an excellent resource for teaching persuasive writing and much more.

The middle grade graphic novel boom of the past several years has publishers looking at new ways to tell old stories, and two trends have emerged: faithful adaptations of backlist books, particularly series, along with imaginative reinventions of classics in the public domain.

Listen to twin brothers from rural Arkansas who reflect on their path to college in the midst of the pandemic.

Grade inflation is awful. Giving students higher grades than they earned rewards them with grades they don’t deserve and makes them think they know more than they do. Right? Maybe not.

Listen as Jason Reynolds, an award-winning author and National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, speaks with Manoush Zomorodi about reaching kids through stories that let them feel understood.

‘Black Boy Joy’ brings together 17 stories of positivity. Kwame Mbalia came up with the idea for his book during the summer of 2020 protests. He wanted to show that Black boys’ lives aren’t only about the “bad stuff, the trauma” often shown in the media. 

Executive dysfunction is perhaps the most visible and debilitating symptom of ADHD for middle school students, many of whom would benefit from a 504 Plan with thoughtful accommodations. Here, learn how to pursue the most appropriate supports for your teen.

As we go back to school, many students of color are hurting and want to be heard

Many middle-schoolers wouldn’t leisurely read a book about Greenland, but, then again, they probably haven’t picked up one of Ellen Prager’s adventure stories.

Hastings Middle School students are seeing a lot of success with a recently implemented program that uses goal setting to close the gap on academic shortfalls.

Her new book “The Beatryce Prophecy” sprang from a draft she started and then abandoned after the death of her beloved mother. 

There are novels about Black boys finding joy, nervy thrillers, fantasies filled with magic, angsty romances and much, much more.

Recent national surveys have show that the majorities of teens are pessimistic about the country’s future but optimistic about their own personal futures. Are certain groups of teens more optimistic than others? Yes!

These podcasts for elementary through high school students address emotions, kindness, mindfulness, choices, bullying, homework, and being the new kid at school.

Despite years of work by some educators and advocates to increase equity in career and technical education, the Department of Education’s newly released data on student enrollment in career and technical education classes shows deep racial disparities remain. 

A recent viral news story reported that a generation of young men is abandoning college. The pattern has deep roots.

Sixty educators from across the United States built a community around teaching with The Times. We hope their projects can inspire your own.

This eclectic roundup of YA titles features the latest by Anna-Marie McLemore, Indigenous literature from Latin America, and some delectable rom-coms.

For more than a decade, suicide rates have been increasing in Black children and adolescents, and a new study says the sharpest rise occurred among young girls.

The 2021 Library of Congress National Book Festival will include an extraordinary lineup of authors for children, teens and kids of all ages – all featured in videos on demand accessible from the start of the festival, which runs Sept. 17-26.

2021 might be more than halfway over already but there certainly has been no slowing down in the publishing industry and especially in middle grade as things are getting even more interesting! 

When teachers act as facilitators of class discussion rather than leaders, students see themselves as valuable contributors to their own learning.

A review of three inspiring, new YAL novels that let “young people who have who have seen and lived through recent history — tell their stories.”

Four educators write about necessary supports for students and their families this year to proactively address pandemic stress and trauma.

The 2021 Young Adult Colloquium was launched with the goal of sharing the magic of Black characters with educators, while also preparing those educators to take what they learned and apply it to the classroom. 

A chat with author Tanita S. Davis about her new middle grade novel, Partly Cloudy(opens in a new window), along with book recommendations, writing, and more! From award-winning author Tanita S. Davis comes a nuanced exploration of the microaggressions of middle school and a young Black girl named Madalyn who learns that being a good friend means dealing with the blue skies and the rain—and having the tough conversations on days that are partly cloudy. 

We have long known that a transmission-of-knowledge model, where students passively receive and then reproduce information, isn’t how learning occurs. Better to flip the script and examine what’s getting in the way of learning, realizing that there are cognitive barriers to effective teaching.

From great new books to favorite classic reads, from news to the latest in on-screen adaptations, the Hey YA podcast elevates the exciting world of young adult lit.

A biography of Lewis Hine, whose photos were vital to changing child labor laws, and a collection of Depression-era photography show how photos have long been used to document the human condition and inspire change.

Monthly vocabulary challenges for the 2021-22 school year that can help students engage with words through writing, drawing and video-making, and connect their language study to what they read in the newspaper and observe in their own lives.

Middle and high school teachers can take simple steps to help students feel confident of success in their studies as they begin to transition into adulthood.

New research findings on depression and anxiety signal that the pandemic’s toll is steep, and hold lessons for parents and teachers navigating the return to school.

Advocates for social and emotional learning (SEL) have pushed for schools to embrace the teaching of healthy life skills to students. This can take many forms, from school-wide policies that foster a positive and exemplary culture for students, to a program where teachers are taught to model behaviors in their classes for students to learn from, to a course where social and emotional skills are taught from a curriculum.

So why an explicit approach? And what about parents’ concerns about teaching SEL? First, the types of difficult conversations I experienced with my students may not come up naturally in typical classroom settings, and not all teachers have the ability to properly address them if they do—especially those without formal training in SEL instruction. The more explicit approach that my school took guaranteed that important skills and development were addressed clearly, directly, and effectively.

Today’s high school students, often called “digital natives,” generally feel comfortable navigating the internet or learning a new app. On the other hand, these same students may have less familiarity using physical nonfiction books. Many teachers grew up around books and may not realize that students don’t share the same level of proficiency navigating nonfiction texts.

Students will need to be able to use books for research and academic assignments, especially if they plan on college. By teaching the parts of a book, educators can help students become more efficient at reading nonfiction texts.

Anyone familiar with Lewis’s celebrated “March” trilogy (whose final book is still the only comic to win a National Book Award) knows that graphic novels can handle nuance quite adeptly. Run, Book One, most of which was completed by Lewis and his team of collaborators before he died in the summer of 2020, picks up where “March” left off, with the civil rights movement winning important legislative gains in the 1960s but still very much unfinished in its aims. There’s a timeliness to “Run,” a reminder that the efforts to keep prospective voters from casting their ballots that are so much in the headlines these days are nothing new.

Kareem Neal, a 24-year veteran educator, noticed something surprising when his school went all virtual last year: Not only did most of the students in his self-contained, special education class navigate the change better than he expected, three of them blossomed academically. All three are on the autism spectrum and have a tough time navigating the social aspects of school. But during virtual instruction, “they were fine with just hours of academic instruction happening at home,” said Neal, who works at Maryvale High School in Phoenix and was an Arizona teacher of the year in 2019. “All of those other things were off their plates, and there was just their work, and they loved it.”

Most students didn’t make much progress—or flailed—in online learning during the pandemic. But a subset who may have struggled with in-person learning in the past—like Neal’s trio of kids—actually thrived. Now many of those students, some of whom have learning and thinking differences or mental health conditions like social anxiety, must return to the traditional classroom, an environment that did not work for them before COVID.

This is the third year that the Student Podcast Challenge has been up and running — it’s headed by our friends over at NPR’s Ed Team. And it’s the first year that the contest has had a category for college students. (Spoiler alert: Those entries were really good.) So this week on the pod, we’re featuring some of our favorite student podcasts about race and identity. We’ll have you moose hunting in Alaska, eating Vietnamese-style crawfish in New Orleans, and gawking over beautiful tattoo art in Illinois. You can listen to all of the finalists — including a bunch that didn’t make the episode.

As schools nationwide emerge from a pandemic that upended educational norms, and caused rates of depression and anxiety to increase among teenagers, reformers hope educators will use this moment to remake middle school, turning it into a place where early adolescents not only survive, but thrive.  

More districts are turning to K-8s, but the research is still murky, and financial considerations usually outweigh what’s best for kids

A new book explains how school leaders can support teachers and students by sharing their vision of what it means to be a successful student today.

They waited with bated breath, hoping the moment for when all the hard work of practicing and performing their speeches had finally paid off — and it did, despite a global pandemic. “I watched them in their final round as they were competing in front of the computer, and I was just crying just because I was so happy, because I knew what that meant for them,” said Corin Serrano, coach of Santa Ana High School’s speech team. The group of young women accomplished what nobody else who looks like them had been able to achieve, being the first all-Latina team to win a National Speech Schools of Excellence Award — one of only 20 across the U.S. However, doing it all remotely meant no teammates to cheer for you.

How can you learn your students’ strengths, challenges, and passions right at the start of school? Assign a playful report to their parents and guardians—it may be useful all year long. Middle school teacher Cathleen Beachboard gives homework to her students’ families a few weeks before school starts—she asks them to describe their child in a million words or less. The information she gets back allows her to get a jump start on forming relationships with her students that will help them bring their best to the classroom throughout the school year.

Heather Bradley is an ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) teacher in Silver Spring, Maryland, where she teaches adult ESOL students. When the English proficiency assessment her program uses moved online several years ago, many of its corresponding course materials also went virtual, making her program’s transition to distance learning less difficult materials-wise. Yet towards the end of their first semester of virtual learning, Bradley began encouraging her students to write their notes on paper. The action of writing down new words by hand from the reading, rather than copy-pasting from devices, allowed her students to more thoughtfully consider each term. She found that her students’ applied reading skills improved as a result. The process also eliminated the need to toggle between screens when taking notes. While especially helpful for her students with less digital experience, it also seemed to lessen the technology fatigue of her students overall.