In any given week, Kelly Payton's fifth-grade pupils might read newspaper articles about immigration or Syrian refugees or climate change.
By consuming current stories about the concerns and plights of others, Payton, a teacher at a public school in Union City, Calif., has noticed her pupils developing more empathy.
That was the goal of "A Mile in Our Shoes," a program from the news curating start-up, Newsela, which takes content from a variety of credible news sources like The Associated Press, The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, and rewrites the articles at five reading levels to make reading news accessible to all ages.
Newsela was the brainchild of entrepreneur Matthew Gross, who began his career in education working for Teach for America, where he observed that in today's digitized world, traditional textbook teaching failed to develop in children a love or skill for reading and deeper comprehension. It simply didn't engage them.
"Relevance means so much to students," Gross says. "When students feel as though a topic is relevant they perform better on standardized tests, it feels applicable to them. It doesn't mean we throw out historical documents, but it brings it much more to life when you can tie it to things in their lives and the communities around them."
So in 2013, Gross developed an interactive platform, used by about 1 million teachers across America, where children from grades two through 12 could read content that interested them in language they could understand.
For example, here's how Newsela presented an AP article about sanctuary cities.
The original AP story began:
"Ignoring fresh threats from the White House, city leaders across the U.S. are vowing to intensify their fight against President Donald Trump's promised crackdown on so-called 'sanctuary cities' despite the financial risks."
The version rewritten for the lowest reading level began:
"Some U.S. cities are very welcoming when it comes to immigration."
Recently, Newsela unveiled its new experience categorizing stories by different communities. Newsela's team of full-time and freelance writers culls stories that highlight the successes, the challenges and the overall experiences of different groups. In partnership with the Southern Poverty Law Center's Teaching Tolerance curriculum, the story groupings include a series of discussion questions around issues of identity, diversity, justice and action.
Adding this element to Newsela wasn't intended to be political, Gross says, but was a response to concerns he heard from teachers after the election that their students weren't getting exposure to different perspectives. Instead, children were repeating the sound bites they heard at home from parents entrenched in their own echo chambers.
"We're a reading company," Gross says. "We want them to be interested and to read critically. Teachers were noticing a lot of finger pointing. This is helping students find middle ground and learn about the lived experience of others ... so students who might have no exposure to these communities can go deep beyond what they might see in a social media headline. You can't learn empathy 140 characters at a time."
Payton has used the website for three years with her students, and says she was excited when Newsela added this element.
In her classroom she has noticed her students are responding to incidents they read about with deeper concern and a greater desire to help.
"You guys are friends because you both like Harry Potter and baseball, though you're completely different if people were to look at you," she says she has told them. "That's what we want to achieve, that's the kind of America we want to have."
Family on 04/26/2017