A Recipe for Raising Reading Levels

Seven Simple Practices That Accelerate Student Progress

I was listening to a news story on the radio about how schools are helping struggling readers. One school had taken a group of low-reading 9th graders and put them into a special class. Reading levels in the group ranged from 3rd to 5th grade and, predictably, many kids admitted they really didn’t like to read. As the teacher called the class together to begin the lesson, something caught my attention. Everyone in the class was reading To Kill a Mockingbird.

Now, the last time I checked, To Kill a Mockingbird was well above the reading level of kids with 3rd-5th grade abilities. So how were these kids going to improve when the only book they were reading was a book they couldn’t read? How many kids would be likely to do extra reading on their own at home? How many kids would improve their reading fluency? How many would increase their stamina for long sustained reading sessions? How many would become hooked on books as a result of spending several weeks on a text that might be several years above their independent reading level?

If this were an oddity, I wouldn’t bother mentioning it. But I see it in almost every school I visit. The whole class novel is the sacred cow of American reading instruction, so sacred, in fact, that we can’t imagine any other way for kids to become better readers. And yet, whole class reading is the structure that is least likely to help a classroom full of kids raise their reading levels in a hurry.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not against the classics. To Kill a Mockingbird is a terrific book. It’s beautifully written, the story is well told, kids can relate to it, and it covers important issues that still resonate with us today. It’s most often taught in middle or early high school and most of the grade level listings put place it somewhere between 7th and 9th grade. It’s a great book for teenagers but not if they read at pre-teen levels.

This kind of instruction goes on everywhere in our schools, not just in special reading classes and not just at the high school level. For the sake of tradition, or convenience, or a teacher’s personal preference, or merely to follow a requirement, teachers routinely pick whole class texts when they know that many of their students can’t read them. When I see this in a classroom where I’m consulting, I often ask the teacher how it works. If the kids can’t read the book, how do they learn about it? Teachers tell me that they read the book to the kids, that they play a CD of someone reading it, or that they show the movie. These are all nice things to do but none of them helps kids learn to read.

All across our country, we have literally millions of kids who are not proficient readers. If we extrapolate results from the most recent reading test of the National Assessment of Education Progress, the number of kids reading below grade level could be as high as 20-25 million. Clearly, there’s some catching up to be done. And setting up special classes for low readers isn’t necessarily a bad idea. But making them read the same book when it’s well above their reading level is.

Even if we don’t teach a special reading class, we all encounter kids who are far behind in reading. Think about how hard school is for them. Almost every class they take requires some reading and virtually everything their teachers give them is above their reading level. When I see kids that are two, three, or more years behind, I know I have to be very focused in the way I help them. And what I need to be focused on is raising their reading level—fast. To do that as quickly as possible, I focus on the following practices:

• Spend most of our time reading individual, student-selected, “just right” books. Kids have to read their own books because I want each of them reading at their independent reading level. That’s the fastest way for them to improve and the best way to make sure they are motivated to do the hard work that becoming a better reader requires. When kids spend most of their time reading texts that are too hard for them, they develop bad habits that can actually leave them even farther behind. Teaching kids how to choose their own “just right” books is also the best way to motivate readers who probably don’t like to read. There are many ways to define what a “just right” book is, so I start with something simple: a “just right” book is a book you like and can read well.

• Focus on fluency. The key to raising reading levels is improving reading fluency. Much of my instruction, therefore, will focus on reading rate, phrasing, and expression. I’ll support kids in this by providing them with more efficient decoding strategies and by showing them how and when to reread passages they may at first have difficulty with. I’ll model fluent reading extensively and give them lots of scaffolded practice through choral reading.

• Provide individualized instruction while kids are reading. The best time to help kids improve their reading skills is while they’re in the act of reading. Even though I’ll give plenty of whole class lessons, most of my instruction will come during individual conferences with kids while they’re reading in self-selected texts at their independent reading levels. This gives me the best vantage point for assessing their needs. It also gives them the best opportunity to apply the strategies I’m teaching while I’m sitting beside them ready to help.

• Teach questioning as the most important strategy. Struggling readers aren’t in the habit of paying close attention to what they read. They read the words they can read, skip the words they can’t, and rely on skills unrelated to decoding text to maintain minimal levels of comprehension. It’s counterproductive to bombard them with a huge list of strategies. But if I can teach them how to question—the easiest and most natural comprehension strategy—they’ll become instantly more engaged in their reading in ways that will help them fill the gaps in their understanding. Questioning leads naturally to making inferences and inferences lead naturally to clarifying understanding. Questioning also generates predictions and connections. It’s the foundation of almost all other comprehension strategies, it can be initiated by any level of reader in any text, and it’s a perfect tool for kids whose comprehension is often incomplete or unclear.

• Use journaling to capture comprehension. Kids who struggle with reading also struggle to articulate their understanding of what they read. They often try to read intuitively depending more on non-text elements than on textual details. As a result, they may have trouble recalling finer points in discussions or on tests. Journaling gives kids the time and the freedom they need to express their comprehension in more detail. With a journal, they can read a short passage, write about it, read over what they’ve written, and compare it with what they’ve read. Looking across a set of entries made over time, I can also see patterns in their comprehension that help me assess their strengths and weaknesses.

• Use book talks as a culminating event. After kids finish a book, the best thing they can do is talk about it with other readers just like them. In a book talk, I instruct students to briefly summarize what they’ve read, to tell their audience about their favorite parts, to relate the book to other books kids may have read, and to make general recommendations about who might like to read it. Then we turn the tables and let the audience ask questions. As the reader answers, we learn more about the book and about the reader. Book talks stimulate interest within our reading community, they give kids a way to interact socially around books, they increase the number and kinds of books kids are exposed to, and they challenge both the person giving the talk and other readers in the audience to improve their thinking about books.

• Make sure kids read regularly and in high volume. Kids who are behind need to do more to catch up. I want kids to read every day for a sustained period of time in class and again later on at home. Depending on their reading level, I want kids to complete between 20 (if they’re in high school) and 50 (if they’re in the primary grades) books a year. More than anything, I want kids to develop the habit of reading. I also want them to experience, probably for the first time in their lives, what it feels like to have read many books and learned about many others.

In my review of reading practices, I find that programs for struggling readers are almost mirror opposites of what I’m suggesting here. I also know from my consulting work that even the suggestion of practices like these is enough to get me banished from a district. And yet the biggest successes I’ve seen in schools around the country come out of classrooms structured along these lines.

What keeps us from setting up our reading classrooms like this? In most cases, it’s just past traditions and present-day politics. Everyone takes reading very seriously. No subject is more controlled, no information is more guarded than the way a school teaches reading. When teachers are told to teach reading a certain way, they do it, or else. And that means that reading instruction doesn’t change much. The basic tradition of a whole class of kids reading the same book, the same way, at the same time (whether most of them can read it or not) remains essentially unaltered from an era when children learned to read by memorizing the Bible.

If the dominant paradigm for reading instruction in America is the whole class novel, and millions of kids remain below grade level despite the pressures of high stakes testing, unprecedented federal funding, and a decade of standards-based reform, I think it would be wise to look into other classroom structures for helping kids learn to read. Personally, I favor individual reading of “just right” books with frequent teacher conferencing and an instructional emphasis on fluency. It’s not a complicated recipe, every element of it is research-based, and it certainly can’t produce worse results than what we’ve been doing all along.

Comments

[Brian Cox]

This article makes sense. I’ve been using these strategies to teach reading to grade seven and eight students for the past three years and have been blown away by a few things. First, how easy and practical it is to facilitate this style of teaching and learning. Second, how motivating, empowering and pleasing it is for the students. Thirdly, how it allows both parties to be confident that real growth and learning is taking place.

I sometimes joke with my grade eights and tell them I’m going to stop teaching reading the way I do, and go back to what they grew up with. They either being to revolt or they wine and plead to leave things the way they are.

We recently talked about what it was like and what it is like now. They spoke about chapter questions and forced reads. I asked them if they read the chapters on time and answered the questions as they should. Some did, but many said they dreaded the reading, the would skim to find the information asked in the questions. Some even said they just copied answers from friends. It was unanimous that the older approach was boring.

When I ask my students what they like so much about reader’s workshop they have much to say. They love being able to choose any novel to read. They enjoy the conversations we have about their books because we talk about real issues they are learning about and I can ask them personalized comprehension questions that they are eager to answer. We hold these mainly via email or on the deck for “Share Friday” with a cup of hot chocolate in hand. Even the reading conferences are a hit. We meet one-on-one. We talk. They read. We talk some more about comprehension, growth, and anything else that comes up.

If they are reluctant about anything it would be the book reviews. They see the point of doing them since it is something useful and something they will find in the real world. However, when the class has read 143 novels by mid-January, the book reviews can become a bit daunting. We’ve made adjustments; another perk to reader’s workshop.

[Steve Peha]

Brian's comment speaks to the enthusiasm for reading, and the volume of reading kids do, when choice lies at the heart of our teaching. If I had to pick one thing that could change the world of reading in school, it would be helping kids choose good books. No single practice has done more to help my teaching, or kids' reading.