What Really Matters for Struggling Readers

1. What Really Matters for Struggling Readers Designing Research-Based Programs By Richard L. Allington

2. BOOK CLUB MEMBERS • Beth Davis • J. Lynn Swartz • Shannon Singleton • Janelle Weinzierl

3. No Child Left Behind • Chapter 1 – National Assessment of Educational Progress – The gap between White and minority students and the gap between more and less advantaged students have not narrowed in the past decade.

4. Three Challenges for U.S. Education • Designing schools that are less parent-dependent, where all children can expect to be successful readers and writers. • U.S. schools need to enhance the ability of children to search and sort through, analyze, summarize, and evaluate information from the internet. • Our schools create more students who “can” read, than students who DO read. The challenge is to produce students gain interest in voluntary reading as they progress through grade levels.

5. How do we instill a LOVE for reading in our students? • READ, READ, READ, READ, READ, READ!

6. VOLUME OF READING • “More recently, we found the volume of reading students did during school to be one of the important differences between children’s experiences in more and less effective teacher’s classrooms.” (Allington, 36)

7. Strategies: • Have multiple genres available in your classroom library. • Do not succumb to stereotypes (Boys are the only ones who like nonfiction.) • Reading lessons should contain READING, not just strategies. • There should be MINIMAL interruptions during the day. • Create uninterrupted blocks of time for instruction. • Rethink the design of your special programs to meet the needs of more of your students. • Create standards for reading volume at ALL grade levels. • “Kids need to read a lot if they are to become good readers.” (Allington, 55)

8. Kids Need Books They Can Read! • Classroom is filled with books at different levels. • Teacher introduces new books and displays them in the classroom. • Teacher emphasizes effort in doing work. • Students are given choices in completion in their work. • Teachers engage students in AUTHENTIC reading and writing tasks. • Lessons promote higher order thinking. • Teacher uses small groups for instruction. • Teacher does expressive read-alouds!

9. Undermining Student Motivation: • Everyone does the same work. • Students do not work together on projects. • All lecture, no discussion • Teacher does not use think-alouds • Use of stickers, points, treats, etc. • Activities are routine and BORING! • Teacher calls out grades and posts them!

10. Appropriate Books • Make sure that you have many levels of text available for your students. • Students should have easy access to both your classroom library and your school library. • “Higher achieving schools have more books in classroom library collections than were found in lower achieving schools.” (Allington, 70)

11. Kids Need to Read Fluently • Practice, practice, practice! • Measurement of fluency = juncture, prosody, intonation, and stress, NOT reading rate. • We often teach our students SLOW READING – we interrupt, correct, and teach strategies constantly. We do not allow the student to just read.

12. Struggling Readers are: • more likely to read material too difficult for them. • asked to read aloud more. • interrupted more often and quickly. • more likely to wait for prompts. • more likely to be told to sound it out!

13. Better Readers: • read books at their level. • are asked to read silently. • are expected to self-monitor and correct. • are only interrupted at the end of a waiting period. • are asked to reread and cross-check, not to sound out!

14. Try these ideas for fluency! • Paired readings • Pair tutors • Chart progress • Chorale reading • Teacher models • Echo reading • Shared book experiences • Repeated readings • Rereading for performances – readers’ theater, etc.

15. Personal Connections to Reading • “Kids need to read a lot to become proficient readers. …we need to help all readers become more thoughtfully literate.” (Allington, 139) • Make the connection! –text to self, text to text, text to world • Make the experience MEAN something!

16. I’ve read the story. Now what? • Summarize • Analyze • Synthesize • Evaluate Strategies to help with these: activate prior knowledge, summarizing, story grammar lessons, imagery, question generating, and thinking aloud

17. Vocabulary knowledge is essential for thoughtful literacy. • Teach word meanings directly. • Focus on the words. • Teach these strategies: restating information, providing contrasting context, giving definitions in the text, and using gist clues

18. Helping Teachers to be Better Teachers Districts should take the following into consideration. • Support professional growth • Class size – keep it small • Access to appropriate instructional materials • Honoring instructional time

19. The Six T’s of Effective Teaching • Time – majority of time is spent reading and writing • Texts – enormous quantities available • Teaching – involved in active instruction • Talk – less lecture, more discussion • Tasks – provide more complex, differentiated tasks • Testing – evaluate on effort and improvement

20. The Struggling Reader: Interventions That WorkbyCooper, J. D., Chard, D. J. & Kiger, N. D. “Students are motivated to read when they are taught how to read.” Chapter 1: A Prevention-Intervention Framework • Remediation is a “process of correcting a deficiency”. • Intervention is the “process of coming into or between so as to hinder or alter an action”. • Prevention is the “process of keeping something from happening, to some degree done by providing sound core classroom instruction and intervention.”

21. What is the framework for core instruction? • Assess and diagnose • Teach and reteach • Practice • Apply • Reassess “What you learn from the assessment will help you determine whether to move on to a new area, or to continue working on the current one.”

22. Chapter 2: Oral Language “Whether a student learns to read and write with ease and confidence may depend on his or her oral language development.” How do we build a child’s oral vocabulary? The authors suggest the following activities: • Talk– model real-life conversation but don’t make the conversation a question and answer session. Make talk an important part of your day. • Read Aloud—We must read to all ages of children. Student mirror the language they hear. • Dramatic Play • Puppet Play • Reciting Poems and Singing Songs • Word Play • Elaborate Sentences

23. Chapter 3: Phonemic Awareness Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear and isolate individual sounds in words. Phonics is the ability to use the written language. Students with phonemic awareness can rhyme, provide words that begin with the same sound, blend sounds, and segment sounds in words. Students develop phonemic awareness through playing with words orally, engaging in rhyming activities, and writing versus expecting children to complete a series of worksheets silently at their desks.

24. Chapter 4: Word Recognition According to the authors, before students develop word recognition, they must: • Recognize the purposes of print • Recognize (some of) the letters of the alphabet • Understand that print represents speech • Acquire phonemic awareness

25. Chapter 5: Meaning Vocabulary “Struggling readers typically do not expand their meaning vocabularies on their own.” How do students acquire meaning vocabulary? • Wide reading, discussion, and life experiences • Think about words and their meanings • Direct instruction (Critical for struggling readers) • Learning vocabulary-related skills (i.e. suffixes, prefixes, base words, inflected endings, etc.)

26. Chapter 6: Reading Fluency A reader cannot focus on decoding and comprehending simultaneously. “Fluency allows readers to focus their attention on comprehension rather than decoding.” Repeated oral reading of familiar text has been shown to improve the fluency in students of all ages. Page 109

27. Chapter 7: Comprehension Comprehension is affected by word recognition and/or fluency, oral language, meaning vocabulary, prior knowledge and concepts, interests and motivation, text factors, and strategies. Most useful strategies are: • Identifying important information • Inferring and predicting • Monitoring and clarifying • Questioning • Visualizing • Summarizing • Synthesizing • Evaluating

28. Chapter 8: Writing for Struggling Readers There is reciprocity between reading and writing. Students need to learn to read and write simultaneously, not learning one before the other.