Newsela Redefines the Student News Experience

Matthew Gross, CEO and co-founder of Newsela, says most education software is terrible because it puts the centuries-old textbook online. In 2015, Gross explained how Newsela brings students current events and news at their own reading level, aligned with the standards expected in today’s classrooms, and why he believed textbook publishers should be nervous.

Software as good as everything else students use

“Most education software is terrible. It represents an effort to take the centuries-old textbook model and put it online,” Gross said. “Software that teachers and students use in school should be as good or better than the software they use for everything else in their lives. Same goes for the things they read.” The shift, he said, “is to focus more student reading on nonfiction that helps them understand, participate and be ready for the world they will inherit.”

He was equally clear about teachers: “Too much software tries to replace the teacher’s professional judgment and expertise — when software tries to automate the art of teaching, it fails miserably. Empowering teachers is where it’s at.”

Publishers should be nervous

“The fact is that publishers don’t have a stronghold on the market,” Gross said. “Districts I visit across the country are putting textbook adoptions on hold or scrapping them altogether. Less than half of the money schools spend on instructional materials goes into textbooks, and that number is going down, purchase order by purchase order.” In his view, “In five or 10 years, the biggest education companies in the world will be ones that didn’t exist five or 10 years ago.” Asked whether publishers were worried, he said: “Publishers should be nervous. The pace of change is incredible. I don’t see how they’ll keep up.”

He pointed to what students did after reading Newsela articles. “They’ve written letters to President Obama about the use of drones. They got a Johns Hopkins engineer they read about in Newsela to make a 3-D printed prosthetic hand for one of their teachers. That only happens when the education experience really reaches students on their terms.”

Write and Annotations

“We know from our own analysis that students who actively engage with the text comprehend more and perform better on our quizzes,” Gross said. “That’s why we introduced Write and Annotations last year.” Write “provides thought-provoking prompts, or teachers can create their own, so students can write about what they’re reading. It encourages close reading and critical thinking.” Annotations “help make students’ thinking visible and allow for a collaborative dialog with the teacher,” giving teachers “tremendous insight into each student’s understanding of the text.”

What school leaders notice

When school leaders look at Newsela, Gross said, they often comment on three things:

• “Amazing content on topics students really care about and can read at their own reading level.”
• “Practical formative assessment that fits seamlessly into instruction and demystifies what’s going on with students’ reading abilities.”
• “An implementation process that is measured in minutes, as opposed to months.”

What came next

In the short term, Gross said, Newsela would keep rolling out content and features such as Text Sets, which let teachers build their own collections of articles. Newsela had just launched 99 Text Sets for Literature, collections of news articles tied to the themes of widely read novels such as “1984“, “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and “Lord of the Flies“. Newsela en Español, Newsela Elementary and iOS and Android apps were on the way. “In the long term, our mission is to unlock the written word for everyone. And we won’t stop until we do.”

Original story courtesy of the “Down the Hall” column on Scholastic District Administrator.

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