Guest Post by Reading Horizons Curriculum Specialist & Reading Specialist, Stacy Hurst

This is my first year as a full time employee for Reading Horizons. In truth, I love my new job but I do have a confession to make. I miss the energy-charged feeling that accompanies the end of the school year as teachers and students anticipate the change of pace that summer vacation provides. However, I also clearly remember the elevated concern that most teachers feel about the effect that the summer months will have on the progress of students they have worked so hard with throughout the school year.

Research validates their concerns showing that struggling readers in particular lose ground during the summer months compared to their non-struggling peers. This widening gap not only diminishes the instructional time invested by the previous years’ teacher, it adds to the instructional load of next years’ teacher. Many schools have implemented summer reading programs in the hope of narrowing the gap. Teachers at my previous school (Go Miners!) volunteered three hours weekly so students could have access to books on their level throughout the summer. We even included a story time so preschool students would be likely to check out books as well preparing them for literate futures. Overall, we didn’t see the effects we would have liked to see with the summer reading program. Now I know why.

Recently, I found this 2009 article from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. The study is fascinating and I recommend that you take the time to read it. Building on the evidence that access to books on a student’s level was not enough to bridge the gap, researchers designed an alternate program for 3rd through 5th grade students. It begins with teachers preparing students before the end of the school year (while they are still on contract time- bonus!). It continues with students receiving post cards throughout the summer reminding them of comprehension and fluency strategies that were introduced during the school year. Accountability included the students returning a different postcard (follow the previous link for a PDF) via ‘snail mail’ with a record of their performance. Results very much favored students who participated at this level of instruction compared with students involved at lower levels of instruction and accountability.

The study definitely spurred thoughts on how to improve summer reading programs aimed at struggling readers. My thoughts, however, were turned to ways that technology could improve upon this research. It seems that INSTRUCTION is necessary in addition to application of reading skills. Most school districts lack funding for such instruction and many teachers do not have the time to contribute to such instruction as they are typically involved in professional (and personal) development activities during summer months.

How can the needs of struggling readers be met effectively over the summer months? I suggest that the answer to that question involves technological resources (such as apps, online software, email, virtual classrooms, etc…) as well as teacher expertise. Classroom teachers would be able to monitor student progress and communicate, via email, with their students offering encouragement, accountability, and suggestions for improvement. This approach, combined with access to leveled books, sounds promising to me as an educator. I will definitely be discussing this with my teacher friends as they prepare for the end of this school year. What are some effective summer reading programs that you have seen? Feel free to share!

As much as you wish every student had a solid understanding of phonology and were able to transfer this understanding to written texts by the time they reach high school – this is not always the case. In fact, as was pointed out in a recent webinar hosted by Reading Horizons, often graduate students struggle with what are supposed to be basic and beginning level reading skills. Here is an enlightening comment from the webinar:

“You folks are so on target with this.  I cannot tell you how many of my graduate students don't make these connections and apply the skills of encoding and decoding to real texts!”

High school students (and apparently graduate students) still need phonics instruction in later grades, but there’s a problem: you aren't given any time for it. High school aged students are expected to already know these skills and you are expected to be focusing on vocabulary and comprehension instruction – not phonics instruction! What to do...  

Here are Reading Horizons Teacher Trainers, Shantell Berrett and Jay Kelly with the answers (taken from the webinar: “Helping Students Transfer & Retain Decoding Skills”):

How can you help high school aged students get the phonics instruction they need and help them transfer these skills when you have no time for it?

SHANTELL: There are two ways you can help older students transfer and retain decoding skills despite the limited classroom time you have to address these issues.

1. Since you are given time for vocabulary instruction, use the methods discussed in this presentation as you teach vocabulary. Do a quick overview of phonics and decoding skills at the beginning of the school year, and then have students point them out in their vocabulary terms throughout the school year. The first step when you introduce any new vocabulary word to your class you should have your students address the phonology and orthography structure of that word.
2. From the beginning of the year (even before you provide students with an overview of phonics and decoding skills), you can use Reading Horizons dictation process to introduce each new vocabulary term. Because this adds a multisensory aspect to your instruction this process helps students transfer and retain decoding skills.

JAY: If you do this, it doesn’t take hardly any additional time – AND – your students will learn those new words faster and better.

What about adapting these strategies for ESL students?

SHANTELL: Our curriculum director and ESL expert, Heidi Hyte, tells me the same thing I ask her any question about adapting instruction for ESL students: “they need the exact same type of instruction as students with learning disabilities – BECAUSE – they need to handle the framework of the language the exact same way.” Every student regardless of LD’s or if they are an ESL student, or if they have no language difficulties –all do better when the process is simple and clear and one step at a time.

Listen to the full one hour webinar for free: “Helping Students Transfer & Retain Decoding Skills” >

One of the most difficult things about teaching the English language to beginning readers, struggling readers, and ESL students is that there are exceptions to many of the rules that you teach. It's difficult to teach exceptions because the very nature of exceptions is confusing. And when students don't understand something, they start feeling the one emotion you never want them to feel in class: confused.

How can you teach something as confusing as exceptions - and not confuse your students while doing so? We brought in the experts.

In a recent webinar hosted by Reading Horizons, teacher trainers Shantell Berrett and Jay Kelly discussed the best way for teachers to teach exceptions to their students. Here was their general stance on teaching exceptions:

“If we teach students exceptions at the same time we teach a skill or a rule, and the rule is 90% of the time and the exception is 10% of the time – if I teach the exception the same time as the rule - students don’t hear 90/10 they don’t even hear 50/50. It goes in one hear and gains speed and goes out the other. Our lesson becomes ineffective every time we try to teach exceptions at the same time we teach the relevant rule or skill. NEVER EVER EVER DO THAT. The time to teach exceptions or inconsistent words is when students have demonstrated proficiency with the relevant skills. Once they are proficient at the skill, then you can layer in exceptions.” – Jay Kelly

In conjunction with that statement, the following questions were made by the webinar audience:  

Since you said to not teach or mention exceptions to phonetic rules or decoding skills until AFTER a student shows proficiency to that concept, what should you do when a student points out an exception before you have taught it?

SHANTELL: You can’t ignore those exceptions when your student brings them up. Because if you act like it’s a secret or that it’s not important than you will confuse your students or make them obsess over what the secret is. So what you want to say is: you are right, that is an exception to the skill we are learning about right now. Let’s put it up on the board and underline it because that’s what we do with exceptions and later on when we have more time to talk about it more in depth and after we have learned a few more skills we will come back to that and I’ll teach you why that is an exception. BUT… for now we are just going to put it up on our word wall. The more weight you give to exceptions, the more weight the students will give to it. Acknowledge, write it down, tell them you will address it later - don’t go into it and explain it right then.

JAY: The only thing I would add is that you should celebrate it when your students do notice exceptions. That is a good thing when they notice it. It shows pattern recognition and that students are paying attention. Tell them they are smart for recognizing exceptions.

How should you teach exceptions?

SHANTELL: Ideally, you want to match the instruction with their level of decoding skill understanding and ability. For example, in Reading Horizons methodology, we bring in a set of sight words after teaching our second letter set – BECAUSE – some basic sight words are needed for students to be able to read even basic sentences. SO… initially, you will have to address a lot of the exceptions using a whole language approach. However, as you get to the part of your instruction where you do teach the skills for some of those basic sight words, bring up those sight words during your instruction of the skills they fit and prove those words using those skills. Handle each exception from a linguistic approach as much as you can.

Also, it is good to create a visualization of exception words so students can have a visual recall of those words to help them remember those words by. For example, when teaching the word “and” you could have students draw a picture of milk and cookies… then when they hear the word "and" they have a visual in their mind that represents and’s meaning: to combine, multiple, more than one, plus, etc…

JAY: Concerning exceptions, it is a very, very, very rare word that is a complete and utter exception. Only 4% are complete exceptions. There are going to be components of most irregular and exception words that aren’t exceptions, so you want to address how those words do fit those skills when you teach those skills. Don’t teach exceptions with a skill, but when you teach a skill that is true to a component of an exception word… point that out.     

Listen to the full one hour webinar for free: “Helping Students Transfer & Retain Decoding Skills” >

“I just did a major research study here in Massachusetts that verified this - that in general, most kids with disabilities do better in inclusive settings, particularly if they get the supports that they need, significantly better.

So the move towards integration or inclusion or mainstreaming - clearly has some support in the data."

- Thomas Hehir, former director of the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Special Education Programs and current professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education

This quote is from a recent NPR interview about mainstreaming special needs students. Here is the complete interview:

As pointed out by Thomas Hehir, mainstreaming is beneficial for special needs students. Of course, like any practice, it is only beneficial if it is done effectively. Thus, here is what Thomas Hehir’s research has found to be the best practices for inclusion classrooms:

1. Use resources to help improve the instruction of all students.

“In the book that I just finished on inclusive schools, there are several things that emerge from these schools that I think other schools can do. Number one, they look at their resources as in a sense all being devoted to improving the instructional program for all kids. They don't look at the special ed budget or the bilingual budget. There is a budget for the schools, and the schools use those resources effectively.” – Thomas Lehir

2. Value students with disabilities, value the inclusion of children with disabilities.

“Secondly, the principals of those schools and the teachers of those schools value disability, [and] value the inclusion of children with disabilities.” – Thomas Hehir

It is difficult for any initiative to be effective if the participants are not on board. Mainstreaming special needs students is not going to be beneficial if the principals and teachers don’t value special needs students – this will only create a negative environment for these students.

3. Train teachers to deal with the special needs population.

Here are some parts of the interview touching on the training that most teachers receive to work with the special needs population:

CLAUDIO SANCHEZ (NPR’s education correspondent): Most teachers are poorly trained to deal with this population, if they're trained at all, and special ed teachers are very hard to find. They're in short supply.

Now, it's important to mention here that the range of disabilities or learning disabilities, physical - is enormous. And we're talking about kids with ADHD, autism, developmental, emotional, behavioral disorders, dyslexia, deaf and blind kids. I mean, it covers everything.

MARY (caller): I just want to say I'm a first year teacher at one of the largest public high schools in San Antonio, and during my first year, I somehow managed to receive all of the special education students in the ninth grade because they thought it would be a good idea to stack them.

Out of 175 students, I have 70 special education students, and they range in disability. But some of them have been coming from middle schools where they have back units, which are behavior units, and essentially they're put in a room with seven other students, and they're sort of left to do their, you know, screaming or their - whatever their behavior issue is categorized as.

And then all of a sudden, in high school they get thrown into a classroom with 30 other students, and they're expected to behave, so...

JENNIFER LUDDEN (host): How's it going?

MARY: It's been - it has been a very steep learning curve. I mean, like I said, it's still my - it's my first year. So in addition to all the normal first-year-teacher learning, I also have an incredible amount of special needs students, and...

LUDDEN: And were - did you, Mary, did you get any training for the special needs kids specifically?

MARY: No, I did not. I just had to be certified, which meant I had to take a test.

LUDDEN: Oh, OK. So what would you have liked to have seen done differently there?

MARY: Well, I know for a fact that I needed more training. I did not know - I mean, I've learned a lot this year, but walking in day one, I didn't know how to deal with a student who was going to stand up in class and cuss at me for 10 minutes straight. I didn't know how to deal with a student who was really struggling with basic literacy and how to reach them.

I didn't know how to deal with a lot of the situations I've seen. And I have a huge amount of emotionally disturbed students, and I needed more training. I needed so much more training, and I feel like I've really in some ways failed these students this year.

Teaching is such an interesting profession. Teachers are put into classrooms where they inevitably have to deal with issues that would challenge even experienced psychiatrists and other behavioral specialists. It’s amazing what teachers are expected to deal with. Of course not every teacher can get extensive training, but some would be nice.

Teachers need to know how to deal with the behavioral and emotional challenges they are faced with every day in their classrooms. Whether that training comes from the parents of the children in their classrooms, school counselors, school psychologists, or outside consultants – they need to know what to do in difficult situations.

4. Have teachers work together to solve problems created by inclusion.

“So even if she had the best training, I would also want to see her having more support as it related to kids who had challenges in her classrooms. Again, one of the things that's of - the schools that I've done research in that are highly effective, teachers don't teach alone in these schools. They have other teachers that they work with, that they can problem-solve with, that they can figure out what to do with these kids.” – Thomas Hehir

Two heads are always better than one. Setting up collaboration between teachers can allow them to solve problems they have never faced. Teacher collaboration also allows teachers to share what has worked for them in similar situations.

5. Assign special needs students to experienced teachers.

“In most places there isn't, and I would also say in Mary's case that I think we're very fortunate to have someone with her attitudes going into the education profession. But it is - this is not a good practice that she described of assigning a lot of kids with disabilities to a brand new teacher.” – Thomas Hehir

Since teachers rarely receive formal training for working with special needs students, undoubtedly, it is a better to assign these students to experienced teachers that have dealt with the issues that these students can bring to the classroom. Brand new teachers should not be assigned more than a few special needs students as they are being acclimated to the profession.

6. Do not segregate students in prior grades.

“And also her description of these kids being segregated up until they went into high school is also very problematic. How are these going to learn the behaviors they need to have in school but I would also say in life if they're placed in a segregated classroom with only kids like them?” – Thomas Hehir

If special needs students are going to attend mainstream classrooms, they need to do so at every grade level. You cannot expect them to suddenly adjust because they are in a higher grade.

~

It is important to note, that not only do these best practices and the mainstreaming of special needs students benefit the special needs students, it benefits every student:

“But one of the things that we found in this study was that - and this is from the teacher interviews, and this is very deeply felt by the teachers. When they have figured out how to effectively educate kids who have various types of academic and behavioral challenges in typical classrooms, they feel that their classrooms are better for all kids.” – Thomas Hehir

I strongly agree. As I read the interview my mind was flooded with memories and experiences I had throughout my education with special needs students. In the moment I may have been frustrated that class didn’t move as quickly as I would have preferred because of questions or disruptions from special needs students, but I am so grateful to have learned patience and tolerance for those students.

I’m grateful that I had the opportunity to see their gifts as well. To see their humor, to see the simple things that made them happy, to see their intelligence, their innocence - those are memories I’ll never forget. The strength of those memories makes me realize how much I truly did learn from them. Lessons that were far more valuable than any fact or skill I learned in school.    

“If we are always reading aloud something that is more difficult than children can read themselves then when they come to that book later, or books like that, they will be able to read them – which is why even a fifth grade teacher, even a tenth grade teacher, should still be reading to children aloud. There is always something that is too intractable for kids to read on their own.” – Mem Fox

In a recent Reading Horizons webinar, Author Sarah Collinge, discussed the importance of reading aloud to students of all reading levels and the impact this simple practice can have on increasing students’ reading levels. Regardless of how many times I learn that little things can make a difference, the impact of many simple practices never ceases to amaze me.

As the above quote points out: reading aloud is beneficial for students of all ages. During the webinar, Sarah discussed how this simple classroom practice builds students reading levels by exposing students to texts above their current reading level, creating collaboration, and modeling fluent reading.

Exposure to Challenging Texts

As stated in the Common Core State Standards:

Children’s listening comprehension outpaces reading comprehension until the middle school years (CCSS, Appendix A, p. 27)

Because students have a higher level of listening comprehension than reading comprehension, reading aloud to students at a level slightly above their current level exposes them to texts that challenge their current reading ability. AND, because they have an adult guiding their conversations and answering questions, they can comprehend texts they would not comprehend on their own. 

Creating Collaboration

Sarah pointedly explained that classroom discussion is essential for making a classroom read aloud effective. If the teacher is not guiding discussion and providing the vocabulary and context necessary for students to understand texts that are above their independent reading level, reading aloud to students will not build their reading level.

Children benefit from structured conversations with an adult in response to written texts. (CCSS, Appendix A, p. 27)

To build collaboration surrounding classroom reading alouds, Sarah realized that students needed a guide to create the type of discussions that would benefit her students and help them better comprehend difficult texts. When she left them to themselves to discuss the text, she found they naturally pointed out obvious points. So, she thought about what type of discussions she wanted her students to have about the texts they were reading. She decided she wanted students to recognize when they had a thought or idea that was evoked by something they read, and then for them to be able to provide textual support for that idea. To help facilitate this type of discussion amongst her students she used an activity called “Turn and Talk.”

Turn and Talk required that after a passage was read aloud, she would say “Turn and Talk” and the students would discuss the passage that had just been read using the following discussion “stem:”

First student: “When the book said ________ I was thinking ________ because ________.

Partner: “I agree with you because ___________.” OR “I disagree with you because __________.”

After applying this strategy Sarah was amazed by the increased engagement level of her students with the text. She felt that using these discussion stems helped students think critically about the text and match the level of rigor required by the Common Core State Standards.

More “stems” are presented in Sarah’s book: “Raising the Standards through Chapter Books: The C.I.A Approach” >

Modeling Fluent Reading

Having a teacher read aloud to students helps increase their reading level, because it models fluent reading for students. By following along and seeing how the teacher emphasizes different words, pauses at commas and periods, and pronounces difficult words, students can increase their own reading fluency.

To learn more tips for increasing student comprehension, view Sarah’s entire presentation: “Motivating Readers: Collaboration, Challenge, Competence, and Choice” >