For most students, instruction in how to read ends sometime in elementary school. But some kids still struggle with foundational reading skills well beyond that point.
Nearly half of upper elementary teachers, and almost 1 in 5 middle school teachers, say they teach phonics or other word-reading skills three or more times a week, according to a nationally representative study. Meeting these needs can be challenging for middle and high school teachers, who aren’t usually trained in how to teach reading, and whose days are oriented around teaching content.
“At the middle school level, it changes,” said Jenny Flieder, a reading interventionist at Roosevelt Creative Corridor Business Academy in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. “You move from all of that diagnostic, all of that skill building, to reading comprehension and literary analysis.
“No teacher sits around and figures out why that kid can’t read on grade level. They don’t. It’s not the fault of the teacher—the system isn’t set up like that,” Flieder said.
Instead, she said, students “just start coping,” turning to audiobooks or relying on their classmates for help.
On March 13, Education Week hosted a panel of middle and high school educators who are focused on supporting students who struggle:
- Julie Burtscher Brown, a literacy facilitator in the Mountain Views Supervisory Union in Woodstock, Vt.;
- Rachel Manandhar, an education specialist and literacy interventionist at Berkeley High School in Berkeley, Calif.; and
- Sue McCormack, a high school English teacher at Cheektowaga Central High School in Cheektowaga, N.Y.
They discussed how to find the students who need support, what works to catch them up, and how to make time for this instruction during the school day. Read on for four highlights from the conversation, and insights from other upper elementary and middle school educators who spoke with Education Week.
1. How teachers identify students who need more help
In middle and high school, most assessments of students’ reading ability examine general comprehension—they don’t tease out specific skills.
“Those are hard to pull out of a [state test], or an iReady test,” said Flieder, referring to a popular reading exam given every few months. “You have to figure out what’s going on with them.”
These kinds of broader tests of reading comprehension ability can flag students who need help, and then teachers can drill down deeper, said Manandhar.
“Is it a word-level issue? Is it a syllable-level issue? Is it more of an automaticity, confidence, speed issue? And then from there, where are we at with the vocabulary and comprehension?”
Manandhar sees “the whole nine years” with her students, including decoding difficulties. “I think that people don’t expect to see the world-level challenge at the high school level,” she said.
In older students, especially, these word-reading difficulties are often greatest with multisyllabic academic language—the content-area words that students need to be able to read to understand advanced social studies or science text, for example. Inability to decode these words means students can’t unlock the meaning of text, compounding comprehension difficulties.
“They get to the end of a sentence, and they can’t tell you what it’s about,” Manandhar said.
2. What materials and methods teachers use
Interventions for older struggling readers aren’t as plentiful as those for young children, but they do exist. McCormack, the New York teacher, uses a researcher-created program called Read STOP Write, a semi-scripted approach which she said involves regular choral reading and study of root words.
McCormack said she was nervous about following a script at first, but found that her students “really did like the routine.”
In Woodstock, Vt., teachers at Woodstock Union High School use materials from Wilson Language Training for students who have the greatest foundational skills gaps. But Burtscher Brown, the founding teacher of the school’s structured-literacy program and now a literacy facilitator in the district, said there are many tools that could work well in different contexts; no one program is perfect.
In general, it’s important to have some curriculum to use as a starting point, said Jodi Kosek, an instructional content specialist for K-5 English/language arts and social studies in the Youngstown schools in Ohio.
“The cognitive load, because of the lesson design, comes off of the teacher a little bit,” said Kosek, whose district uses phonics resources from 95 Percent Group for upper elementary grades students with foundational skills gaps.
This support for teachers is especially important in upper elementary, middle, and high schools. “In older grades, the phonics piece isn’t in their wheelhouse,” said Kosek. Teachers at these grade levels are trained as content specialists, she said—not reading specialists.
3. Finding time for reading intervention in upper grades
It’s common for elementary schools to set aside dedicated time for reading and math intervention—but not as common in higher grades. Getting these instructional minutes is crucial, though, teachers say.
In Youngstown, the district implemented an hour-long intervention block through grade 8, Kosek said.
And in the Woodstock district, administrators created credit-bearing high school classes for reading intervention, said Burtscher Brown. If students can get credit for Advanced Placement English Literature, they should get credit for structured literacy courses, she said: “Students are coming to structured literacy to learn to read and write well, and they should receive credit for their work as well.”
But setting aside a full class period isn’t always possible in high schools.
“We have so many competing interests at the high school level when it comes to graduation credits required, students’ next steps for transition, the classwork that needs to be completed in order to pass classes and make progress,” said Manandhar.
At Cheektowaga Central High School, McCormack integrated intensive reading instruction into her regular ELA class period. Adding time for this extra teaching has slowed the pace at which she can progress through course content, but growing students’ skills has helped them engage more in the works they do read.
“Am I teaching Romeo and Juliet in March instead of February? Yeah,” McCormack said. “But I’m also finding that, oh, my students are OK. … They’re starting to take a little risk with Shakespeare. Which, with 9th grade, is a struggle.”
4. Building students’ confidence
Helping students take risks, feel confident, and manage their emotions around reading is the most important part of the equation, said Manandhar.
“For so many of our high school students, as we all know, they’re aware they’re struggling,” she said.
Manandhar is transparent with students—and their parents—about where their struggles lie, and helps them identify the strategies they use to compensate. She’s also tried to create a physical space inside the school for literacy instruction where students feel comfortable, but also know that they will be held to high expectations. “It’s warm and fuzzy—and we need skills,” she said.
Making the room where literacy intervention takes place feel welcoming is a key—and often overlooked—piece of the puzzle, said Flieder, the Cedar Rapids reading interventionist.
The room that she worked in had been used as a special education room in the past. “I had a hard time getting the kids to come here, for WordFlight, because they thought that they were in a special ed. class,” she said, referencing the reading intervention that the school uses.
She and her co-educator Myra Hall tried to make the room inviting, decorating it with bright colors and soft, cozy seating options. The principal helped them make the reading program feel exciting, organizing celebration days around it.
“No matter how glorious a program or a class or anything is, if you can’t get the kids to engage in it, it is nothing,” Flieder said.
