Questions Teachers Ask about Struggling Readers and Writers

 I love, love, love this article! I am able to relate to many of the questions asked in this article. To begin, one of the very first questions was directed towards students that read 2 years or below in reading and how we should combat that issue in the classroom. The authors of the article suggested that incorporating student interest and background knowledge is an excellent way to get those below grade level invested in reading. Suggestions also included:

Using high interest books
Using peer groups, such as literature circles
Doing shared reading
Having small grouped instruction
Writing for authentic purposes

It was also suggested that for guided reading, you can have 4-5 groups with 4-6 kids in each group. Make sure that you are meeting 3-5xs a week. During this time, you can also have a chart/grid with notes on what was discussed in each guided reading group.

It was also suggested that to give feedback, use journals/logs. You can stagger this by taking how 5 per week and use verbal feedback. You can also use peer conferences and rubrics. Feedback is an incredibly important feature in the classroom. This feedback should allow students to see where their strengths and weaknesses are and help them to do better in their areas of study.

As stated in many of my previous posts, it's also important to use read alouds and teach explicit strategies that good readers use. When reading aloud,  expose kids to good, motivating books with your read alouds. Also, strategies that good readers use include summarizing, finding the main idea, visualizing, asking questions, making connections, etc.

In order to motivate students, kids should be reading with 90% accuracy. We must take time to teach at student's instructional level. This time can be used duing small group instruction a few times per week. This kind of instruction helps facillitate fluency. We also need to make sure time is given to practice reading at grade level.

One of the last questions dealt with how we should teach and prepare students for on level testing. I struggle with this daily because many of my students with special needs are not at grade level, but are required by the state to take the test AT their grade level. The suggestion from this article said that as teachers, we should integrate daily test preparation into our lessons. This doesn't necessarily mean teaching to the test, but instead, we should be exposing students to the various formats used in testing. Meaning using multiple choice and teaching students the process of elimination, using open response or open ended questions, or using a scoring rubric.


To read more about this topic, the article that I read is available here:
http://www.learner.org/workshops/teachreading35/pdf/Qs_struggling_readers.pdf