For these reasons, reading teachers in
my building work hard to discover the
growth students have made since taking
the most recent test. At the beginning of
the year, they assess students’ abilities
to find out whether the students are
truly struggling readers or just poor test
takers. We give our students the Gates-MacGinitie Reading Test to get a baseline score on vocabulary and comprehension. We also confer with students
and check for fluency, one on one, as
they read aloud to us. We have them
think aloud as they read so we get an
idea of their repertoire of comprehension strategies. In addition, we teach
students how to annotate text so we can
“see” in the margins what they are
thinking.
Each year, we have to see our
students with fresh eyes and give them
a chance to show new growth. If we are
too quick to judge, we risk demoralizing them and putting out the spark
that could ignite their learning.
Insight 4: Because reading levels
change, we should change
how we group.
A low test score doesn’t mean that a
student reads everything below grade
level. No one has the same reading level
for every kind of text. If I took a
reading test using a chemistry textbook,
my reading level would be about as
good as a 4th grader’s. On the other
hand, if I were tested using a passage
from an anthology of American literature, I would most likely be at the post-secondary school level.
Frequently, high school teachers ask
me how to help students who can’t read
the textbook. When I tell them to “find
something else that the students can
read,” they don’t like the answer. The
truth is that the best way to improve
comprehension is to read. Ironically, the
kids who need to be reading the most
have the fewest opportunities to do so.
When students
experience success
each day, they will
take the risks they
need to take in
order to learn.
Teachers worry that if they give
students time to read, they will run out
of time to teach their content.
Three factors affect readers’ ability to
understand texts. The first is background knowledge. The more background knowledge students have, the
more easily they can understand difficult texts. The second factor has to do
with motivation. If readers are highly
motivated to comprehend a topic, they
have the drive to push themselves
through the complexity. Curiosity often
motivates me to dig into a text that
normally would be above my reading
level. The third factor is purpose. If a
text is relevant to my life, I am more
willing to try to make sense of it.
Having a purpose for my reading also
helps me determine importance
because I have a way to sift and sort
information. When any of these three
factors are missing, even easy text
becomes difficult to read.
Making Grouping Work
Groups are fine—as long as the teacher
frequently changes the configuration of
the groups. However, reconfiguring
groups is daunting for secondary
teachers because they just have too
many students to manage frequent
group changes.
Grouping wouldn’t need to play such
a huge role in instruction if students
could choose from two or three texts
instead of having to all read the same
one and if they had an opportunity to
discuss what they read with others.
In addition, groups work well when
the time the readers are in the group is
short. The teacher might deliver a bit of
explicit instruction and then let readers
practice what they have just learned.
One problem I often see in schools is
that group time lasts way too long; the
teacher becomes the gatekeeper, rarely
letting students practice on their own.
“Groups” can become whole-class
instruction of students who score
poorly on standardized tests. This type
of grouping is really a classroom
management strategy that works for
teachers—but doesn’t work so well for
students.
What Matters Most
To this day, I think about the high
school principal’s question about struggling readers. It’s a good question to ask
because something isn’t working. In the
real world when people try to learn
something, they are frequently heterogeneously grouped. Rarely do people
improve when they are continually
grouped with unsuccessful learners.
Luckily, for my technology training, I
didn’t have to stay in the same group all
year. Once back in the real world, I
could decide for myself who I chose to
learn from. But for a split second, I
