As the New Year comes around we often think of ways to improve and make more of our lives. On the blog Study Hacks, the author constantly looks at the strategies and research findings surrounding those known for excellence – whether in school or in their professional careers. Recently the author posted an article highlighting the strategies used by a man who’s known for his excellence in piano playing.

Here are the strategies this pianist found for improving the excellence of his craft and how they can be applied to your efforts in helping struggling readers:

Strategies for Becoming Excellent… in reading and life!

Strategy #1: Avoid Flow. Do What Does Not Come Easy

“The mistake most weak pianists make is playing, not practicing. If you walk into a music hall at a local university, you’ll hear people ‘playing’ by running through their pieces. This is a huge mistake. Strong pianists drill the most difficult parts of their music, rarely, if ever playing through their pieces in entirety.”

Application to struggling readers: This makes perfect sense. If struggling readers keep relying on their coping mechanisms and avoid the parts of reading that are difficult for them they will never move closer to excellence in reading. Make sure to spend extra time on the parts of reading that are difficult for the struggling readers you work with. 

Strategy #2: To Master a Skill, Master Something Harder

“Strong pianists find clever ways to ‘complicate’ the difficult parts of their music. If we have problem playing something with clarity, we complicate by playing the passage with alternating accent patterns. If we have problems with speed, we confound the rhythms.”

Application to struggling readers: Researchers have found that teaching struggling readers how to decode "nonsense words" helps them become stronger readers. Decoding meaningless words is much more difficult than decoding real words, because students have to use decoding strategies. They can't rely on memorization, context, or recognition when reading or pronouncing nonsense words. When students can accurately read and pronounce nonsense words, you know they have improved their decoding abilities, not just their ability to memorize.

Strategy #3: Systematically Eliminate Weakness

“Strong pianists know our weaknesses and use them to create strength. I have sharp ears, but I am not as in touch with the physical component of piano playing. So, I practice on a mute keyboard.”

Application to struggling readers: Research has long proven that struggling readers have the most success when they are taught with systematic, explicit, and multi-sensory phonics-based reading instruction.

Learn strategies for teaching this type of reading instruction with Reading Horizons free 30-day Online Workshop! >

Strategy #4: Create Beauty, Don’t Avoid Ugliness

“Weak pianists make music a reactive task, not a creative task. They start, and react to their performance, fixing problems as they go along. Strong pianists, on the other hand, have an image of what a perfect performance should be like that includes all of the relevant senses. Before we sit down, we know what the piece needs to feel, sound, and even look like in excruciating detail. In performance, weak pianists try to reactively move away from mistakes, while strong pianists move towards a perfect mental image.”

Application to struggling readers: Researchers have often found that children are more likely to be strong readers if their parents create a culture of reading in their home. Struggling readers need to see others modeling not only what good reading looks like, but also that it’s a desirable and helpful skill. On top of that, struggling readers need to be encouraged to believe that they can become as good as others at reading. If they don’t believe that they can obtain the level of those that model good reading, they will easily be discouraged.

Share your strategies for helping struggling readers become more excellent in reading!

It’s been pointed out time and time again that schools are struggling to get their students reading at grade level. This is of particular concern since it has been discovered that if a student isn’t reading at grade level by third grade they are 4x’s more likely not to graduate from high school.

But what can be done to solve this problem? There are several ideas that have been posited, one being that government support for for-profit schools could be the answer to accelerating the process that effective reforms are revealed.

In a recent article, the following positions were made in support of this opinion:

As Silicon Valley blogger Sarah Lacy noted, "I've spoken to many venture capitalists who say they'd love to use technology to change education, but few think they can make money at it."

Washington deems it acceptable to make a profit by reducing greenhouse emissions but not by reducing dropouts.

Ultimately, our public policy should urgently seek to better educate our children by any means necessary. We need to embrace a quality revolution that focuses solely on holding organizations accountable and responsible for improving student outcomes. Those that do should be rewarded and scaled so that we can ensure that students receive the education that they deserve using the entrepreneurial spirit and genius that have made America so great.

Another popular opinion is that the government needs not to support for-profit schools, but to support the educators they themselves hire.

Jon Steward, an unlikely voice for reform, recently said: “I’ve always found with education that individuals are the ones that make the enormous difference. And the more that you are able to empower a great teacher, a great principal, a great superintendent, that can make enormous differences. How do we empower the individuals to have the authority and responsibility to make those changes and not tie them to arbitrary objective realities or goals?”

Here’s a clip from his recent interview with Melody Barnes, one of the chief government officials in regards to education policy:

With few exceptions, every individual that goes into education wants to make a difference, whether in their work in public education or private education. In both of these markets the individuals working on the forefronts have their hands tied with regulations – whether it be standards to abide by or barriers to entry.

Why not capitalize on educators’ passion for helping students by granting them more freedom to do the job they elected to do? Do you think this would raise or lower the number of low-level readers in this country?