Middle and high school teachers say they don’t have enough time to support the struggling readers in their classes—and many say their school leadership isn’t paying attention to the problem.
The findings, from a survey of more than 500 teachers, reading interventionists, and other educators in grades 6-12, come from the Project for Adolescent Literacy, or PAL, an educator-led group to support older students who are not reading at grade level.
The results paint a portrait of a fragmented landscape of reading intervention in secondary schools: Teachers use a wide variety of materials to try to reach struggling students and a similarly diverse collection of methods to assess progress.
They want more training on how to grow these students’ reading skills and more time to put those practices into action—but more than half say their schools don’t have policies to support these goals.
“Many respondents indicated that they are sounding the alarms based on their experience day in and day out in the classroom, and yearning for administrator support,” said Rachel Manandhar, an education specialist and literacy interventionist at Berkeley High School in Berkeley, Calif., and a member of the PAL steering committee, in a recent webinar.
Teaching reading skills is usually the province of early elementary educators. By the time students get to middle or high school, the saying goes, they’re reading to learn—not learning to read.
But as the “science of reading” movement has brought to light the gaps in many schools’ early reading instruction and aimed to correct those, some upper grades teachers have said that their students are still missing foundational reading abilities.
The recent surge in state legislation on reading, aimed at aligning instruction with evidence-based best practice, almost exclusively targets grades K-5.
Still, in a separate report this year from the RAND Corporation, teachers of grades 3-8 reported that 44 percent of their students always or nearly always faced challenges reading the content in their classes. Almost 1 in 5 middle school teachers reported that they are teaching basic word-reading skills, such as phonics, three or more times a week.
Lack of resources can be a ‘nightmare’
The Project for Adolescent Literacy survey was disseminated through educator networks, via PAL and its host organization, Seek Common Ground. Respondents included teachers, interventionists, and other educators from 44 states, as well as Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa—countries that are also facing lively debates about the most effective methods for teaching reading in English. Respondents’ demographics were similar to the racial and gender breakdown of U.S. teachers.
Most respondents, 80 percent, said they have found teaching practices or strategies that work with struggling adolescent readers. Seventy-one percent said they teach with materials that will help these readers grow.
Exactly what those materials are, though, varied greatly. Respondents listed 124 different programs or curricula—explicit, systematic approaches to teaching reading foundations such as Orton-Gillingham, Wilson Reading System, and Voyager Sopris’ Rewards topped the list—and 60 different pedagogical approaches.
To measure students’ progress, educators most commonly used classroom-based assessments or anecdotal evidence: 46 percent of respondents mentioned these. Thirty-one percent said they used some form of normed assessment, such as NWEA’s Measure of Academic Progress, a test given periodically throughout the school year.
“The majority of measurements mentioned are teacher-designed,” said Kate Crist, a literacy consultant and member of PAL’s steering committee. “They’re very anecdotal, and they’re very specific to individual teachers and classrooms.”
In open-ended responses, educators explained the multifaceted challenge of working with older students who still struggle with foundational skills, such as decoding multisyllabic words.
They asked for professional learning that would explain how to differentiate in a classroom where students’ reading levels range from 3rd through 12th grade, and materials that could help students practice phonics skills that aren’t “juvenile-looking.”
“I’m using [speech to print] a lot and I was able to find a program that I’m able to go through that is working well,” wrote one teacher, in an open-ended response.
“And then alongside that, I’m creating a lot of my own things that are for everything else, because of course it’s not just about reading the word, it’s also about understanding the sentence structure, it’s about reading fluently, it’s about vocabulary. … I’m sort of doing [a] mix of things but I tried to create everything myself last year and it was just a nightmare. I just didn’t have the time for it.”
Time was the biggest barrier cited by educators in the survey.
“There are about 40 students per grade who need serious reading intervention,” wrote one respondent. “I wish more of my day could be dedicated to 1:1 and small group reading to practice these hard skills.”
Another respondent suggested that their school implement an extra class for struggling students to get additional practice. “Currently no such class is offered,” they wrote.
Almost half of respondents—46 percent—disagreed or strongly disagreed that their school leadership was paying attention to struggling adolescent readers.
“I am teaching my literacy intervention class on what would be my lunch break,” wrote one respondent. “I approached my admin. and asked them if I could teach this class and said I would do it on my lunch break. So that’s how much support I get from my admin.”
