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.

A dynamic speaker and inspiring educator, we interviewed Dr. Fierro about his fascinating life and why he believes teacher knowledge is paramount to helping ELLs (and all learners) develop the literacy skills that will help them succeed both academically and personally.

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

In today’s world, digital content is quickly and easily accessible and can be found on devices many of us carry with us wherever we go. However, that reading isn’t what we, as educators, often see as “real reading,” yet this type of reading is authentic to the world we live in. It’s part of our everyday lives and, if we are being honest, it’s also a skill we should probably spend some time honing. We skim, we watch, we interact, but that may seem superficial because we don’t go very deep. Could that be an opportunity? I tend to think so.