Last week I attended another virtual Teaching That Succeeds event. Hosted by Holly, Elana, and Kata, this free session focused on the decoding threshold: the point when older students disengage from difficult readings. The mini conference offered two concurrent sessions; I chose Steve Chiger’s “Tier 1 Approaches for Helping Secondary Readers Access Complex Texts.”
The Senior Director of 5-12 Humanities at Uncommon Schools, Chiger emphasized our responsibility to students — to chase the wonder of reading. We must make reading as available to our students as it is to us.
Fluency and Access
The Science of Reading prioritizes fluency, because it leads to increased comprehension. Chiger invited us to think of fluency as, “the text sounds like an audiobook in my head.” He urged us to include fluency practice in our classes even with older students. If a student struggles to recognize or pronounce words, they will have little brain power left to understand the text’s meaning. As texts grow in complexity, decoding takes more effort. Faced with a difficult text and no strategies for approaching it, students will find little joy in reading.
Chiger showed a classroom demonstration that involved the teacher reading aloud, students reading aloud as a class, and students reading aloud with partners. In the demo, these three types of reading used the same paragraphs, because fluency needs to be rehearsed. Teachers can even pull a small group of struggling readers while the rest of the class is reading with a partner or reading on their own. In a smaller group, a teacher can provide specific instruction on pronunciation and syllable recognition — inviting students to annotate the parts of words they know and put the pieces of language together.
We fail to prepare students for life after graduation if we only use texts that are easy to read and understand. Access to grade-level texts, and the fluency support he described, will help a student deal with complicated material in college and career. In the classroom, a teacher can invite students to make predictions about the text, ask questions about themes, and allow students to pause and respond to the text after reading brief passages. Teachers can also highlight a text’s unique elements, such as structural features, narrative patterns, or specific vocabulary. With these techniques, we are showing students the cognitive work that an adept reader is doing.
Into the High School Classroom
These practices can easily find a home in the high school classroom. No student is “too old” to benefit from direct and meaningful literacy protocols. Here are a few ways I apply these techniques with my students when we study Shakespeare’s plays.
- I teach them how to pronounce words they may have never encountered ((aye, yea, doth, forsooth, etc).
- I explain unique grammatical patterns of Early Modern English (Shakespeare’s English), such as the use of thee/thou/thy and the formation of verbs (doth, art, wilt, wouldst).
- I explain peculiarities of Shakespeare’s spelling (heav’n = heaven, ne’er = never, o’er = over).
- Students are given time in class to rehearse with a partner or get direct help from me before we perform the play as a class.
Questions for Reflection
Here are some questions you can ask yourself:
- What are my strengths as a reader, and how can I share these with students?
- What do I enjoy about reading, and how can I help students to feel this way?
- What makes reading hard for me, and how can I assist students when they feel this difficulty?
We all enjoy reading because we have achieved some level of confidence and mastery. We must target that moment when a frustrated student wants to walk away and give them the techniques to re-approach the text. These teaching practices acknowledge each student’s literacy challenges and help them find a way forward.
