By Amanda Walma

“I am arguing that this decline of attention to Science and Social Studies (seen in US Elementary Education) is also detrimental to Literacy learning. That is that Literacy actually requires, in the long term, strong understanding knowledge of the world. It requires students to know the things that authors assume they know. And so if we don’t have that in place, we don’t have all that vocabulary knowledge that goes with it, in that place, if we haven’t developed students’ ability to read and write inside science and social studies disciplines, then we are actually going to have long term pain,” Nell Duke.

By Erica Lee Beaton

In many places, students are taught a standard model to present their own points and “shoot down” elements of their opposition. While this feels triumphant, especially with a one-reader teacher-audience, it doesn’t equip students to communicate in healthy and productive ways.