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This forum highlights research that literacy teachers, students, and others can explore, use, or adapt as they provide literacy instruction and develop related programs and research agendas.

The authors describe a method for integrating video into the work of elementary literacy coaches. Drawing on their research in developing an online application of a successful literacy-coaching program called Content-Focused Coaching, the authors describe an approach that coaches can use to reflect with teachers on their video recorded lessons to advance the quality of their classroom text discussions.

As reasons to promote the inclusion of graphic novels in the curriculum expand, many teachers have yet to incorporate graphic novels into their teaching repertoire. In this article, two teacher educators describe a systematic approach that they use to teach preservice teachers how to read graphic novels, focusing on specific strategies in three major areas: visual literacy, key graphic novel vocabulary, and synthesizing images and words. The goal is to promote the use of graphic novels by preservice teachers for multiple purposes in future classrooms. These strategies are shared to encourage inservice teachers to develop a level of comfort with graphic novels by systematically trying out the strategies themselves and considering the addition of graphic novels to their curriculum.

Teaching is a profession that requires ongoing professional development and learning. This ongoing learning can take place in professional learning communities, structured professional development settings, and literacy coaching contexts. This department highlights the ongoing professional development of literacy teachers.

Simulations are an underpinning pedagogy and tradition in some professional fields, such as medicine, yet are seldom used in education. In this study, the author reports on the findings of a reading assessment situation activity that she did with preservice early grade (kindergarten to grade 6) teachers. In addition to giving preservice teachers practice conducting reading assessments, this simulation activity also allowed students the opportunity to reflect on teaching strategies (both how they themselves teach while on practicum and what they personally experience in their teacher preparation program). Results from questionnaires completed by the participants in the simulation indicate that the simulation was very valuable and expanded the preservice teachers’ perspectives on reading, assessment practices, and how they view students. There is very little published about simulations in education, particularly in literacy education, and this study adds an important perspective on using simulations in preservice classrooms and for professional development for practicing teachers.

The work of the authors as teacher educators spans contexts (in the United States and Southern Africa) that share both similarities and differences. In both contexts, the authors, as a team of teacher educators, seek out ways to improve the experiences that they offer beginning teachers in programs. In this commentary, the authors review the importance of field experiences for preservice teachers, especially experiences that operate in hybrid spaces. The authors provide an overview of what one such hybrid space looks like in the context of the Chitima Institutos de Formação de Professores (teacher training institute), located in a rural village in Mozambique. It is through their shared work that the authors hope to disrupt traditional notions of teacher education and literacy learning and teaching for the beginning teachers at the institute, as well as programs in other contexts.

The author teaches a literacy course for preservice teachers, which they take during the first year of their four-year course of study. One of the most important activities in the course is Story Time, which consists of the author reading a children's book to preservice teachers during every class, followed by a discussion of the story. After the read-aloud, they write a reflection emphasizing their feelings and thoughts. The author's primary goal is to invite these future teachers to experience the literature, not just discuss it. The result is a lived experience, not only a theoretical discussion. As future teachers encounter Story Time, the author hopes they begin to realize how reading literature with students is an aesthetic experience that plays an important role in the development of their subjectivity and opens their minds to new sociability.

Although modeling is an instructional approach commonly named in literacy education circles, the authors struggled to articulate the essential features of modeling to preservice teachers. This was a problem for them and for the preservice teachers with whom they worked. The problem also represents a larger one in the field, which is that educators are still building that which is the foundation of most other professions: a shared professional language. Efforts to build a shared professional language are important for literacy educators seeking to reflect on and improve their craft, literacy leaders working to make change at the school level, and mentor teachers and teacher educators tasked with preparing the next generation of teachers. The authors describe their efforts to articulate and represent modeling in elementary literacy instruction.

Often coauthored by university‐ and school‐based educators, preservice teachers, and youths, this department column considers how literacies are best developed through context‐crossing partnerships among university, school, and community constituents.

Teaching as a process of inquiry is the underpinning philosophy stated in the New Zealand Curriculum. Teachers are tasked with inquiring into the needs of their students and the efficacy of their own practice in the light of those needs. The results of ongoing inquiry inform how practice might be honed or changed. The authors consider how the context influences the ways in which teachers interact with research and with researchers to inform and support this inquiry. Although drawing on multiple literacy research endeavors with practitioners, the authors employ just one example of a partnership that focused on accelerating progress, particularly for underachieving writers ages 10–13, to illustrate how practices that were effective with these writers were jointly established.