Welcome to Digital Learning Today. In this episode, Jeff Bradbury explores the strategic systems that shape the future of education, focusing on Instructional Coaching, Artificial Intelligence, Professional Learning, and the latest Educational Technology Trends. In this podcast episode, Rebecca Earnshaw, a senior director for product at World Book, shares insights on integrating reading and literacy strategies into content-area teaching, the role of AI in education, and how to support diverse learners in the classroom.

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In This Episode …

• Why every teacher plays a role in helping students read and understand classroom content
• How reading in science, social studies, and other subjects helps students think more deeply
• Why short, consistent reading practice can build student confidence and stamina
• How trusted informational text helps students build background knowledge
• How ClassMate uses World Book content and AI-supported assignments to save teachers time
• Why students need scaffolds such as audio support, vocabulary help, and translated assignments
• How supporting a student's first language can strengthen comprehension and classroom learning
• Why reading, writing, and critical thinking matter even more in an AI-supported world

Chapters:

• 00:00 Introduction and Personal Journey
• 00:53 Reading stamina and literacy challenges
• 04:19 Classmate for content-area reading
• 06:08 AI and trusted classroom content
• 06:43 Building background knowledge
• 09:27 Reading stamina: consistency over length
• 11:34 Why informational reading matters
• 13:33 Supporting readers below grade level
• 15:00 Supporting multilingual learners
• 16:32 What educators value in Classmate
• 17:58 What’s next for Classmate
• 24:19 Exploring Innovative Teaching Methods

Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

• https://classmate.worldbook.com/

About our Guest: Rebecca Earnshaw

Rebecca Earnshaw is the Senior Director of Product at World Book. Her career began in the classroom, where she spent more than a decade teaching and connecting with students firsthand. That experience shaped everything that followed. Rebecca moved into curriculum development and instructional design before stepping into educational product leadership, always keeping the needs of teachers and learners at the center of her work. Today, she leads the development of ClassMate by World Book.

Meet ClassMate by World Book

Meet ClassMate by World Book — the reading and learning platform built for and trusted by middle school teachers! For over 100 years, World Book has inspired curiosity and built reliable knowledge. ClassMate carries that legacy forward. Unlike AI tools built on the open web, ClassMate works exclusively within World Book's expert-written, editorially reviewed content library. Teachers create engaging classroom activities quickly and with confidence. The result: students build knowledge, strengthen literacy, and think critically, while educators spend more time teaching.

Links of Interest

• https://classmate.worldbook.com/https://www.facebook.com/WorldBook/
• https://www.linkedin.com/company/world-book/
• https://www.instagram.com/worldbookinc/

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Jeffrey Bradbury (: 00:01

My guest today is a senior director for product at World Book, where she brings more than a decade of classroom experience, curriculum development, and instructional design. It is a pleasure today to welcome to the show Miss Rebecca Earnshaw. Rebecca, how are you today? Welcome to Teacher Cast.

Rebecca Earnshaw (: 00:15

I'm so excited

to be here. thank you for having me here.

Jeffrey Bradbury (: 00:18

I am so excited. Of course, we're here in the middle of a five-part series with our friends at World Book, talking all about the great thing that's happening at World Book and also introducing classmate. We're going to be talking about all of that stuff coming up. But before we really start the conversation today, Rebecca, talk to us a little bit about your background. What did you do in education? And what are some of the great things happening these days with the World Book team?

Rebecca Earnshaw (: 00:42

Well, first of all, I was in the classroom for fifteen years as a social studies teacher in the middle grades and high school. And so I've walked the walk. I was I started before all the technology became so ubiquitous. So I remember those purple ditto masters. I remember the overhead projectors and all those things that have disappeared. so we had to do it the old school way, without computers and without technology. But as technology has become such an important part.

of how our students are learning. I'm really interested and convinced that technology be can use for for the better. it's the world that our kids live in and we need to prepare them for it and we need to embrace it.

Jeffrey Bradbury (: 01:26

Now, throughout this series, we've talked about a number of topics from making sure that our students have quality and vetted nonfiction material. We've talked about the importance that all teachers should be considering themselves ELA and reading specialists. And I wanted to talk to you today about where we are with this because here we are at the beginning of the school year. Actually, as we're recording this today, it's like my first week with our students. And I'm trying to figure out how to mold my technology digital media courses.

To support our young and emerging learners. Where should we be when it comes to making sure that all teachers are supporting language arts and making sure that all of our students are literate? Well.

Rebecca Earnshaw (: 02:09

Well, I

think the first thing to understand and and and embrace as a content area teacher, you know, I was a social studies teacher. And if you said, well now, Miss Earnthal, you're supposed to also be teaching reading, then it feels like, hey, that's one more thing that I have to do. And I'm I'm I'm already maxed out. I mean, I was maxed out when I was teaching in the nineties and the early two thousands, I'm sure

it's only gotten worse, right? There's the expectations are even higher today with differentiation and you know, all of the expectations, even technology in some ways, and it's in in all of our lives has made it better and worse at the same moment. And so when I when you say to a content area teacher, hey, you're also going to teach reading, it feels like one more thing. But that's not the right frame. The right frame is you can use reading to teach your content and it makes your life easier.

If your students can read and reading and writing are thinking, then they're thinking, engaging deeply with your content, which is what you are looking for and what you really want to accomplish in your classroom. So reading in the content area is really learning in the content area.

Jeffrey Bradbury (: 03:22

we were talking with Caroline in an earlier episode and we were using the word through, right? Like I'm teaching digital media through reading. I'm teaching digital learning skills through the art of ELA. What are some of the things as you look around where we are right now as a nation? What are some of the things that concern you the most? What are some of the things that you're seeing as far as test scores? What are some of the trends that are out there that maybe are that we should be really

focusing on this year? Well,

Rebecca Earnshaw (: 03:49

Well, there's so much

out there about and the the teachers I've been talking to about the lack of stamina that and the lack of fluency f especially for our middle school students that and then that's gonna follow them right on into high school. And then we're really talking about limits to their prospects as adults. I'm a big fan of the opportunity myth that the things that we are putting in front of students need to be meaningful experiences.

That are going to grow them into their next phase of life. And so what I hear a lot is, yeah, but kids, it's the TikTok generation. They want it short, they want it video, and they don't want to have to read. And so we need to serve content to them that way. Well, that's sort of like saying, our kids can't run. So let's put them in a wheelchair. Right? Like we, we have to be the adults in the room and say the only way you get to be a better reader is to read.

The only way you learn to run is to run. You there you have to exercise. There is no like shortcut pill you can take that's going to move that around. And when you think about AI and this generation growing into the workforce, which will be fully integrated, AI by then will be fully integrated, if they can't read, then where's their place in that, in that eco you know, in the in the workplace? So

We have to really be serious about confronting it and what it means, by providing it's it sounds really simple, but more reading. The answer is more reading.

Jeffrey Bradbury (: 05:29

So Rebecca, when we're looking around, where are we with our test scores? Are you seeing that there's an improvement happening? Are you seeing that stu schools and students really need to start getting serious about this?

Rebecca Earnshaw (: 05:41

I would say they have I mean, I think we're all in agreement, especially when we're, you know, we're so focused right now at World Book on middle school. middle school is so critical and we see lots of progress in elementary, especially early elementary with phonics, the science of reading. We're seeing real true gains as we've gotten focused on what actually works with kids. But when we go to look at what's happening in middle school.

We're seeing those lags and the test scores continue. And you can't really say it's COVID because it was there before COVID and it's here after COVID. And I've been doing a lot of thinking about okay, well, what was different before the decline started? Because if you go back long enough, you see that kids were reading. And, you know, digital moments took away textbooks. And again, it goes back to what kind of reading are we asking kids to do?

The most the when we looked at this at World Book, we saw kids were reading a lot of fiction and not much informational reading. But kids like informational reading, especially boys. And so when we think, well, how do we reach boys? Well, maybe one of those ways we reach them is through reading

Jeffrey Bradbury (: 06:54

So, one of the things I know that we focus on here with our middle school students is making sure that we're doing a difference here between content area reading and just general reading. I know for my own students, they love picking up books, they love reading, but really giving them the reading material, nonfiction reading material specifically, that's going to challenge them, going to make them ask questions. And in our episode that we had Tom come on, we were talking about how do you choose that nonfiction reading material.

And that's why I'm excited to have you on today is to talk about some of the things that are happening at Classmate. For those who haven't had a chance to check out our previous episodes, what is Classmate and how is it being supporting our teachers and our students in their classrooms this year?

Rebecca Earnshaw (: 07:38

So reading is one of the best things you can do as a content area teachers with teacher with your with your students. But that's not easy to do, right? Like you got to find something to read, you gotta make questions to go with it, because if you just hand it to them, well, that's just going in the bottom of their book bag and you'll never see it again, right? You have to get them to engage with that text. But creating activities or engage ex what we call assignment structures to get them to actually dig into it takes time. I remember writing out long form questions.

You know, one question for every paragraph in the textbook to make sure those kids actually read that paragraph. And that takes time. What classmate does is make that super easy by taking our great world book content, find anything you need, and then we use AI to generate an assignment structure that h helps kids engage with it and builds their literacy skills.

Jeffrey Bradbury (: 08:32

How does it do that exactly? If I'm a social studies teacher, how does that help me? If I'm a science teacher, does that help me differently? You mentioned it was content specific. How does it actually go through? What does a teacher do on through the platform?

Rebecca Earnshaw (: 08:45

Well, I'll give you a great example from what I was teaching. I love teaching the the Indian independence movement. I loved Gandhi and posters. And when we would talk about Gandhi, we would get to the salt march and the kids would always be like, wait, we missed earned something. You you can make salt. Like it's not just in your cupboard. It's not just at the grocery. And so it would be a great moment to build their background knowledge to teach them how to make salt. But where do you find an article that

talks about how to make salt that doesn't have ads that you can know is true and it's gonna teach kids something. Well World Book has that, right? So you can take that little piece of the salt article that talks about how salt is made. And in five minutes by selecting, okay, this one I'm gonna have kids really organize their ideas. So I say organize your ideas and the AI is going to generate an assignment and deliver it directly to my students. They each have one and it it walks them through it.

gives them a guiding question focused on what is salt or how do you make salt. And then it's gonna walk them through with a graphic organizer and then a little comprehension quiz at the end. So it gives me a really formative moment to get them engaged with the text and and building literacy and background knowledge at the same time.

Jeffrey Bradbury (: 09:59

For more information about classmate, you can head on over to classmate.worldbook.com. Now you kept mentioning Rebecca a couple of times, AI does this. And I know for a lot of teachers that brings up some red flags. should a

teacher feel confident in bringing classmate into their lesson planning?

How is your AI different than the others?

Rebecca Earnshaw (: 10:19

It's different because it's a small language model. We're not using an LLM. Our AI is trained only in these assignment strategies, literacy strategies. It knows the metacognition that you need to successfully use them. And it is designed direct, you know, it's it's only going to use world book content. The content that students are reading was written by your editorial team, not by AI.

We don't want kids reading a whole bunch of AI slop, like then they'll start writing like AI. And then we'll just be writing and reading AI slop with each other and we'll lose the ability to think.

Jeffrey Bradbury (: 10:58

Think that's so important that teachers have a spot that is being trained on appropriate content, vetted by humans. Again, the website out there is classmate.worldbook.com. And I want to talk to you a little bit about the year ahead, right? When we're looking at building in lessons to our classrooms, when we're looking at bringing in these literacy activities, what are some of the things that you remember doing? And even what are you working with teachers these days?

What do you feel works today in the classroom to get the point across to students?

Rebecca Earnshaw (: 11:29

Well, I think you know, when I was thinking about classmate, I thought about an activity that I did with my students, pre-technology, where I went and got all the Rome books out of the library, made copies of all the article, you know, they it's great informational reading about Rome, like you know, what the Romans ate, what they wore. And I made posters out of all of them because I couldn't make enough copies. And then we passed the poster boards around and the kids created their own understanding.

By reading of who the Romans were. And then I asked them like a big question. All roads lead to Rome. Is that true? And in what ways is it true or not true? And then they had to go through all the things that information that they collected and decide what fit and what didn't, and reach their own conclusion. So when I think about what we should be doing in our classrooms today, we should be helping students build their background knowledge.

And then take that background knowledge by creating their own meaning and their own expression and evaluation of it. Because those are the skills that are gonna matter in an AI world. So much is fed to us. Like if you're ever using AI, you know, right? Like it gives you a whole bunch of stuff, but some of it's not any good. And if you aren't able to discern what's important, then you really are gonna be at a disadvantage in the workforce.

Jeffrey Bradbury (: 12:55

What advice do you have for getting students to think critically about not only what they're reading, but also then what they're writing about what they're reading?

Rebecca Earnshaw (: 13:03

More reading of factual based content so that they have that baseline knowledge. I mean, it it's getting increasingly hard in this world. Almost everything that's put in front of us as adults has an agenda, right? Like there's somebody's trying to convince us of something, sell us something, scam us out of something, right? There's all kinds of messages that we receive. If we don't know, but but it's easier as adults because we have some grounding when the world wasn't that way.

But as it gets more and more sort of soft and squishy out there with what information we're getting, it's even more important that we our students have a really strong grounding in factual knowledge. And that's where World Book comes in. We don't have an agenda other than to teach children about the world. And we've really stayed true to that mission for the hundred and plus years that we've been around.

Jeffrey Bradbury (: 13:59

When we're looking at the content that we're sharing with our students, and when we're looking at what we should or shouldn't, is the recommendation, if I can call it that, short form, long form, one or two sentence paragraphs? I mean, we say that adults don't have attention spans, which is why social media looks like it does,

but our students are just a product of adults, right? When we're trying to get our students to read more, read more critically.

Is it important to give us five to ten sentence paragraphs or one to two sentence paragraphs?

Rebecca Earnshaw (: 14:34

I think that the may most important thing is not length but consistency. You know, it's very much like when you exercise. If you exercise once a week for an hour, you're probably not getting as much benefit as you if you did 15 minutes three or four days a week, right? So I really think the best approach is small servings given frequently. You know, we we say in classmate and one of our reporting metrics.

Is our kids reading 15 minutes a day? And so, you know, that's a lot of research has said 15 minutes is how you move the needle. But I think by having achievable goals and the hope is, and I think it will play out that when students are reading 15 minutes a day consistently from a high quality source like World Book, you're gonna see that they're gonna wanna read more.

Jeffrey Bradbury (: 15:29

It's a stamina thing, isn't it?

Rebecca Earnshaw (: 15:31

It really is. And it what's interesting to me is we've tested classmate with kids and they liked it. And they said it was hard. And they said, but we liked it.

Many, how many times do you hear that, right? Like, I think we've kind of lost that there's joy in difficulty. And that's what education is about. And that's kind of when those joyful teaching moments happen if you think about it. It's when you made something that was hard, feel good. And that's what I hope for teachers this year, like that you're finding those moments of productive struggle with your kids.

Jeffrey Bradbury (: 16:12

When we had Caroline on recently, she mentioned something to the effect of, and I'm gonna paraphrase here, reading is reading, whether it's fiction, nonfiction, whatever, even if it's an audiobook, they're getting the information, they're trying to synthesize it. When we're looking at putting stuff in front of our students, I think there's a difference between fiction versus nonfiction versus audiobook versus graphic novel versus something.

Other people might say, as long as they're reading something, they're actively engaged in their brains, what type of stuff should we be looking at? And I know you said you focus on middle school. So let's talk to me as the teacher and talk to me as the parent also here.

Rebecca Earnshaw (: 16:54

I feel like informational reading is the broccoli of reading. And so, you know, you really because think about you're kind of double dipping with a student. They're building content area vocabulary. They're probably informational reading generally tends to be more dense.

And they're gaining on that background knowledge that's so critical to being a good reader. I always use the example of cricket because I read books that are set in England a lot and I have no idea how to play cricket. And they talk about bats and they talk about but I don't know what that really means. And in, you know, I I I don't understand. I kind of skipped through that part because I don't really know what they're talking about. That's kind of like what background knowledge hampers you as a reader. If I was asked reading comprehension questions on that part of the book, I would have no idea.

To answer those, because I don't really know how to play cricket. If I knew how to play cricket, it made complete sense. So I think there is a place for fiction and there's the joy and love of fiction, and I'm a big fiction fan, but I think we we have to think, you know, if we're if we're really trying to get achieved we're looking at achievement and we're looking at at growing students, I think that informational reading wins.

Jeffrey Bradbury (: 18:11

If we're focusing on middle school students, we know that we've got students that are on grade level, above grade level, but I don't think it's far-fetched to say that many of our middle schoolers these days are a little bit below reading level. How do we support them and how do we get them caught up?

Rebecca Earnshaw (: 18:30

Well, it's kind of counterintuitive,

Jeffrey Bradbury (: 18:30

Well it's kind of

Rebecca Earnshaw (: 18:33

but we serve them grade level content with scaffolds that support them. I know and this is this is a difference in my training because when I was trained as a teacher, level text was not a thing. And that is a new development, and it's really kind of canon now. Like, we should get the just the right reading level for the student and serve them that, which makes assigning reading really challenging for a teacher.

Because now not only do I need to find something that's informative on how to make salt and no ads on how to make salt, but I also need to find it in three different or four different reading levels. And with informational reading, that's really hard to do. You lose a lot of context and vocabulary when you do that. What we suggest instead, and what we do in Classmate instead, is have students listen to it read to them. Have a dictionary where they can look up words. have knowledge our

AI chatbot who can help explain things if you need help. that's how you grow is it's got to be a little bit harder in that productive struggle than what you started with.

Jeffrey Bradbury (: 19:39

In that same respect, we have many students who are non-English native speakers. And

Rebecca Earnshaw (: 19:45

Mm-hmm.

Jeffrey Bradbury (: 19:46

our goal for any grade level is to help them support them, meet them where they are, but then help them learn how to read, write, speak, spell. What advice do you have? And maybe even how does classmate come in and help out with this? But when we have students that are coming from all across the globe into our classrooms,

How can we make sure that we're supporting every single student in front of us?

Rebecca Earnshaw (: 20:10

I think it's super challenging and I think we hear this all the time. All of our assignments can be translated into over a hundred different languages in classmate so we can give content area teachers the ability to to take a room of twenty eight or thirty-two and give them reading and know that those students who are more comfortable reading in a different language do have access to Portuguese or Arabic or whatever is it they're

their first language is.

our nudge also communicates in Spanish, Arabic. We have about five five languages, Chinese, so that students can get that help in their first language if they're more comfortable with it. And research kind of supports, especially for Spanish l language learners, that when they are communicating when they can communicate about what they're

thinking in Spanish and then write it in English, it can be helpful.

Jeffrey Bradbury (: 21:11

We're talking today to Rebecca Earnshaw from the classmate team, part of the World Book family. And Rebecca, as we're going through these video episodes together, all five of them, one of the things I'm learning is that the classmate application itself is proving to be a valuable tool for both lesson planning and supporting students in the classroom. But I want to know from you, what are you hearing teachers, administrators, and maybe even parents?

Say about the platform and the services and the resources that are available for teachers all around?

Rebecca Earnshaw (: 21:45

Well, the

number one thing they love is the that it's world book verified content. They don't have to worry about where it came from. They don't have to worry they're gonna be on the six o'clock news because they gave some some crazy source to their students. So they're very, very comfortable. and the other thing that they love is that it's got everything. So, you know, all of the great content, even if you're a social studies teacher, you have access to all the fine arts materials.

If you're a science teacher, you have access to all the mathematics materials and you have a lot of of access to content in current events. They love how easy and intuitive it is to use and engage with their students.

Jeffrey Bradbury (: 22:28

And one more time, you can find out more information over at classmate.worldbook.com. And of course, this is only one video podcast in a series of five that we're doing with the classmate and worldbook team. You can find more information over at teachercast.net slash classmate, where we're gonna have all of the episodes, resources, links, everything and more. So don't forget to hit that like and subscribe button and check that out today. Rebecca, first of all, thank you so much for coming on. As we look through that future, I want to ask you one more question, but what do you see as the future for classmates?

And what do you hope teachers and students are able to enjoy from it this year?

Rebecca Earnshaw (: 23:02

I think there's going to be lots more things, authentic offline text, being able to print out an assignment and hand it to your students and have them do it in handwriting. we are going to be launching a teacher trial pretty soon. So if you're interested in that, there's a there on the website, there's a place to sign up so you are in the first group because it's it's not an unlimited trial for the whole universe. so do

Do come and sign up for our trial. We'll have that launching later this fall so you can try it yourself and see how beneficial it can be for your students to learn to read within your content area.

Jeffrey Bradbury (: 23:40

We're gonna make sure we have the links to that and everything underneath of these videos. And of course, over on our podcast, you can find out again more information at classmate.worldbook.com. Rebecca, thank you so much for coming on the show today. I welcome you guys to come back on. And if you haven't had a chance to check everything out again, teachercast.net slash classmate for all of our shows with the classmate team today. And that wraps up this episode of digital learning today. Thank you guys for checking it out. Of course, we're available on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, and wherever you guys get your podcasts.

And on behalf of Rebecca and everybody here on Teacher Cast, my name is Jeff Bradbury, reminding you guys to keep up the great work in your classrooms and continue sharing your passions with your students.