In this solo presentation, literacy specialist Lois Letchford (the "Literacy Problem Solver") discusses how Black Lives Matter informs her approach to teaching reading to African‑American adolescents. She recounts working with two 10th‑grade students, Twain and Pedro, who struggled to read beyond ten words. Letchford pairs students, uses a multimodal curriculum that weaves poetry, decoding, sight‑word instruction, and phonemic awareness, and emphasizes the importance of seeing oneself in literature. She describes adapting two existing stories—"Lift" (a family with a mother and father) and "Mouthful" (a single‑father narrative about girls)—to better reflect the students' single‑parent homes and gender interests. By swapping a father for a mother in "Mouthful," she creates a version that resonates with the boys, leading to engagement, laughter, and a breakthrough in reading confidence. Letchford concludes that culturally relevant, representative literature combined with systematic decoding instruction can transform learning outcomes for marginalized students.
Chapters
Hello, I'm Lois Letchford. I'm the Literacy Problem Solver, and this week I really want to focus on Black Lives Matter and literature and how literature impacts a child's learning. I've taught a number of African American students, and my first student was Twain, and he was a real introduction to teaching minority students. Twain was 15 years old when we met. He was in the 10th grade and he could read about 10 words. It was a really tough deal for him to come to me and to say, I'm struggling with reading. So what do you do with a 10th grader? And he was also with a buddy, so I had 2 students in this group. And that was a huge benefit for me and for them to be together and share their learning experience. I did what I do. I did the poetry, which was ever— but it was very important to me that my students were given literature. I do poetry, I teach decoding, and I teach literature one after the other. It's multimodal. Is what I'm teaching. And so I started with the story Lift, which I had written for Christian, adapted for Christian. I don't write it, but I adapt it from Paul Jennings' work because it's funny. This did not work with my students, Twain and Pedro. Why? You have to ask why. Because this is about a family, a father and a mother inviting the father's boss It works for children who have a family with a father and a mother. Both Twain and Pedro came from single-parent families, so that in itself was a problem. So I put it away and I went to this other one, Mouthful. However, Mouthful also had a problem. Mouthful is a story about a father, a single father, And his daughter and the daughter's friend. So I was dealing with girls. And I distinctly remember saying to the boys, boys, this story is really, really funny, but it's about girls. And they're both saying, no, no, no, we're not going to listen to a story about girls. But it was really funny. And Pedro said, okay, I'll listen. At the end of the story, they both roared with laughter because it's very funny. And then I said, boys, we cannot— I cannot ask you to be girls. Let's switch the story around. I'll play a mother instead of a father. We'll turn the story to a mother, and we can have the 2 boys— 2 girls as 2 boys. How does that work? Yes! They said, and that was the first moment where the boys are seeing themselves in literature, know that they can read these parts and enjoying it. And as you can see from here, with the beauty of something like this is they've only got to learn one line or read one line at a time of important words. And that became a huge starting point To my teaching of my students. So we're teaching decoding, we're teaching sight words, we're doing phonemic awareness, but I'm also giving them— this is how language works in the real world and a story that is engaging to them. Thank you. Lois Letchford. Hit subscribe, hit like, and I'll be back tomorrow. Thank you.
