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Sentence stems are widely used by teachers, but what do we know about developing sentence stems and using them effectively? Sentence stems are intended to facilitate students’ participation in academic conversations and writing and support students to develop the language expected in school, but sometimes the stems do not provide the support intended. The authors explain how to develop supportive sentence stems.

This department focuses on literacy leaders, including school and instructional leaders, teachers, and external partners, who are working to improve outcomes for adolescent and adult learners in a wide range of education settings. Columns investigate the challenges and complexities inherent in such work and share lessons learned, impactful strategies and approaches, and promising pathways forward.

Eye‐tracking studies have indicated that there are different kinds of silent reading. Simply having eyes on text does not always result in adequate comprehension. Understanding common eye‐tracking measures that distinguish productive reading behaviors can help teachers promote better reading habits among students. This research synthesis highlights the need to focus on reading goals and mindful reading, rather than merely promoting eyes or time on text. The authors provide several instructional options for promoting mindful reading based on eye‐tracking research and suggest ways to coach a more metacognitive approach to comprehension.

Early elementary teachers are under great pressure to teach all children to read and write at highly proficient levels while simultaneously emphasizing STEM instruction to prepare students for the 21st century. Traditionally, literacy skills are taught in isolation from science instruction. However, reading and writing are the perfect tools to use for inquiry and reasoning, for creating a hypothesis, and for gathering, evaluating, and analyzing data. In this article, the authors describe how literacy and science instruction can be merged to create innovative, stimulating, and enriching learning experiences for young children.

Many professionals, including members of the International Literacy Association, are concerned with the lack of reading materials in classrooms across the world. In this paper, the authors present the creation of high‐quality, locally produced, complementary reading materials in Malawi, where there are very few children's books and few opportunities to read extended texts. The authors describe their approach to the creation of those materials, using engagement as their theoretical frame. Because many teachers in countries such as Malawi (and in many schools in the United States) often receive books that are culturally and linguistically inappropriate, the authors argue for the importance of local reading materials that take engagement into consideration as teachers make decisions about the reading materials they use in their classrooms.

This article describes how second‐grade students’ literacy learning was enhanced as they used their developing knowledge of nonfiction in an integrated English language arts/science unit toward the creation of multimodal nonfiction science books. After explaining the Common Core State Standards that guided the unit, the author outlines the theoretical practices of project‐based learning that informed the teacher's instruction. Then, the author explores how the teacher guided her students to an understanding of the genre and positioned her students as authors of nonfiction, taking readers through an outline of the students’ process of creating research questions, writing in their own words, establishing a purpose for their writing, and conveying scientific information through multiple modes. As a result, students had a deeper understanding of the genre of nonfiction and were engaged in scientific inquiry, learning how to convey and share nonfiction information through multimodal books.

This department column is a venue for thoughtful discussions of contemporary issues dealing with policy and practice, remixed in ways that generate new insights into enduring dilemmas, debates, and controversies.