Two Books that Helped Me Understand Struggling Secondary Readers

When I taught at a Title 1 school, over half of my 7th graders entered junior high reading below grade level. There were many challenges my first year there. First and foremost the junior high reading program was brand spanking new, with no curriculum. As a first year teacher, I was also responsible for writing it. I poured over experienced teacher's expertise and immediately put it to use. The results were unmistakable as students went from nonreaders to readers, from struggling without tools to realizing that the struggle was normal with tools to help them through the struggle, from uncertain to confident....

There were 3 specific pieces these books helped address: fluency, comprehension, and vocabulary. The "Vocabulary Gap" was clearly a problem in my classroom. One of the most helpful pieces of my college education was learning that children from lower-income families typically begin school with a much lower vocabulary than that of their privileged peers. Parenting styles and home life were the unfortunate factors for the majority of my struggling readers; for example, many of them had no memory of mom or dad reading to them as a child. It is a proven fact that these differences begin to surface before a child is even 2 years old! So the struggle begins early.

By the time children are school age, students from working-class families have heard a whopping 15 million more words than a student in a lower income situation. Many students from my small community are still entering school not ready to learn. As a result, teachers are playing catch up from the beginning. Students begin school behind and teachers play this "making-small-strides-while-taking-two-steps-backwards" game every single year. It's a frustrating, vicious cycle that has not gone away. I know we are not alone.

With that said...

Many of my students were stuck at a 4th grade level and had lost all desire to advance. When the struggle to read lasts for any length of time, most students become frustrated and quit. Especially 12 to 13 year olds whose struggle to read, even out loud, was a source of embarrassment from the beginning. Acting out and pretending not to care became their way of covering up their sense of shame. School was hated because their inability to read affected each and every class. Their first day of school, as text books were piled in their lockers (textbooks they knew they couldn't read), was a stressful beginning to their final years of required education. They were overwhelmed because they did not understand that good readers struggle and they did not have the tools to help themselves when the struggle became overwhelming. I truly felt the weight of what lay ahead and these books eased much of my anxiety. It wasn't until reading them that I really began to understand how to help. I found that these two books were my saving grace as I unraveled the difficulties these struggling readers faced and taught them to love books and literature.

When Kids Can't Read: What Teachers Can Do by Kylene Beers
Beers introduced the idea of read-alouds, or think-alouds, for secondary readers. When you teach a concept, show your students what it looks like in reading by thinking out loud as you encounter text that is applicable to the skill introduced. For example, as we read Sleeping Freshmen Never Lie by David Lubar, we focused on making connections and as I read it out loud I would stop and tell my students about the connections I was making as I read. I really hammered it in with this particular book. We worked on other skills as we read, but I wanted to this concept to be mastered. Teaching them about making connections was not good enough, they needed to hear how a reader did it.

She also illustrated this idea with a SEE your thinking activity called Syntax Surgery, because merely hearing a teacher think through a text was not good enough. They not only need to hear our thinking out loud, but they also need to see it.

I also appreciated her assessment to determine whether or not a reader was struggling. She had many great points and this one in particular stuck with me: a gifted reader or a struggling reader will encounter a text at some point and time in their lives that give difficulty. It isn't that a reader will struggle, because we all struggle at some time in our lives, it's what we do with that struggle!

She had fantastic before, during and after reading strategies that were easily put to use, rubrics, graphic organizers, how to set up your classroom suggestions, incentive ideas, and an especially helpful chapter on vocabulary.

Rather than introducing 20 words to junior high students each week, she suggested to think small. 5-10 is plenty. I began with 2 and went from there. I wanted the students to know vocabulary words like the back of their hand. Plus they learned synonyms to the words, which also introduced words they had never heard before. Her reasoning for doing so was more than convincing; all because she experimented with a group of teachers and a long vocabulary list. All the teachers agreed that it wasn't just the difficulty of the list, but the amount that overwhelmed them. It was this real-life activity that convinced me more than anything else.

Beers gave real-life examples throughout her book. She began each chapter with a letter to one of her students - where she failed and how she wish she would've fixed it. It was her years of experience, her experiments, and the results of her time in the classroom that had me utterly convinced her methods were worth trying.

I Read It, But I Don't Get It: Comprehension Strategies for Adolescent Readers by Cris Tovani
It was In Tovani's book where I learned the most helpful strategy for struggling readers: "the fix it" strategy. I also applied the "sticky note" strategy to my classroom, but it was the fix-it tips that were extremely helpful for my struggling readers.

It took that idea that Kylene Beers had about the struggle not being the issue and gave my students concepts to try while they struggled. So if they struggled with a text I was able to ask, Did you reread the text? Did you find and define words you did not know? Did you use print conventions? Did you ask questions about a confusing sentence or phrase? Did you adjust your reading rate? 

They had a list of strategies to apply to their reading when they were stuck or confused; strategies we were practicing during the read-aloud/think-aloud time. And it worked wondrously!

These are two books I recommend for any secondary teacher in any subject area. If you assign any book, any chapter in a text book, any reading assignments what-so-ever, you need to know why your students struggle with the text and then how to help them. Add these to your professional reading list ASAP!