Excerpts from a Kyle Redford post. Courtesy of The Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity.
I’ll admit I used to wonder if my dyslexic students were doomed to always consider reading a chore. It was a logical concern; how could something so labored ever engender fondness? The challenge lay in figuring out how to make struggling readers understand that books were worth their extra effort.
Then I stumbled upon a simple observation that gave me an idea—and lots of hope.
It all started when I hired a colleague of mine, Meg, to work with my dyslexic son on his writing the summer before he entered high school. “I thought we were going to work on my writing?” my son inquired as politely as he could. Meg explained that before they started to work on his writing, she wanted him to think about what kinds of writers he liked to read. This would help him develop his own voice as a writer.
He was immediately stumped. Writers he liked? Favorite books? Reading books was something he had to do for school. It certainly was not something he did for pleasure. Meg anticipated his blank response and proceeded to pull a large pile of humor books out of her bag. “Read these before we meet again on Friday.”
I was shocked. Not only was the expectation of reading a stack of books out of whack for a student with dyslexia, but the books she pulled out of her bag were for elementary school students: Diary of a Wimpy Kid? What was she thinking? I could already anticipate my son’s surly and dismissive reaction once his tutor left us alone. After all, he was entering high school in two months and he needed to learn how to improve his writing skills, not waste his precious time revisiting children’s books.
After Meg left, my son quietly lugged the stack of books upstairs without complaint. I kept quiet. The next day he announced that he had finished the books. Meg came back a few days later. Again, she had more books and questions for my son. When she asked him what he thought of the books she had lent him, he offered very detailed and thoughtful responses.
Then Meg asked him if he knew any comedic writers that he would like to read over the summer. Yes, in fact he did: David Sedaris. His dad had read him some short stories from The New Yorker.
My son’s next assignment was to look through all of our back issues of The New Yorker and read as much David Sedaris as possible before the next week. I privately winced and waited for her to leave. Again, I was sure that my son would complain that Meg’s expectations were out of line.
Meg left, and once again he headed upstairs to do his summer homework. This time when I walked by his open door, he was busy reading on his bed surrounded by a mess of old magazines. I was witnessing a change so profound and rapid in my son that it made me wonder how I could co-opt this magic for the dyslexic and struggling readers in my own class.
My initial, albeit depressing, hunch was that my son hadn’t finished many books on his own before. With so much pressure to have the appropriate title in his hand during quiet reading time at school, he was probably engaged in a lot of posturing. I could easily imagine him worried that his peers and teachers might think his books immature. He had most likely been wasting a lot of time faking engagement with the wrong books.
If my hunch was correct, it was likely that he rarely got to the end of many stories. How does one ever develop a passion for reading if one never finishes a story? Stories are written to be read: beginning, middle, and end.
My first mission: I must get my students to read easier books.
I decided to try an experiment. It involved encouraging everyone in my class to “read down.” When I introduced my class library in the fall, I planned to sell my students very compelling but easy books.
It worked almost immediately. Of course, I never called them easy books when I introduced my favorites to the class. Instead, I just reset the expectations in the classroom by focusing on a different kind of book. The books I chose to talk about were fun enough to engage the most sophisticated readers in the room, but easy enough to finish quickly.
Students started to beg for quiet reading time. They asked to bring the class library books home. They shared our books with friends in other classrooms. They made waitlists for the most popular titles. They solicited additional suggestions of books by their new favorite authors. They talked about books with their friends. They started visiting bookstores and libraries.
What had initially started out as an experiment to get my struggling readers to enjoy books had turned my entire class into a culture of passionate readers. My assumptions and behaviors as a teacher also changed.
Later, I slipped the more difficult books back onto our shelves. All the students were making rapid progress with their reading, their reading appetites were growing, and literary curiosity in the classroom was exploding.
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