For those of us who have been around for a while, Digital Learning Day (or DLDay), happening February 17, has special significance. I fall into the “around for a while” category because I had both a TRS-80 and an Apple II. How cool is that? I also had long, blond hair, but let’s not dwell on the past.

The special significance of DLDay for us is that so many of our dreams are coming true. Blended learning is a great example. For many years, the technology aspect of education was a little standoffish. Because of limitations of hardware and software, it was challenging to use technology in the ways we thought were most effective.

How One Teacher is Working Her Magic to Help Struggling Students Reclaim Their Education, Part 2 of 2

As is my usual style, my little ideas quickly take on a life of their own and turn into BIG magic!

Since I was already pulling out all the stops for Lham, as described in last week’s blog post, I scoured my roster for others like him. These students were caught up in a political Groundhog Day from which they could not escape. There was a lot of identifying and re-identifying of the problems, without any real plan to remediate the issues.

How One Teacher is Working Her Magic to Help Struggling Students Reclaim Their Education, Part 1 of 2

Things are moving fast these days in this magical universe. It’s been raining pink glitter ever since I published my first blog post. I’ve been moving quickly from dream to idea to plan to action. Recently, I turned my attention to at-risk students on my roster.

A problem that has always perplexed me (and many of my colleagues) is when students fall through the cracks year after year. The names change, but the basic M.O. is the same: lacks foundational skills, a rap sheet of petty trouble, attends school just long enough to be suspended again, generally disengaged … but bright. That’s what continually stumps me; they are always so incredibly intelligent!

The holiday divinity and fudge are just about gone, and the heart-warming Christmas movies seem to have been replaced by weight-loss commercials. I’ve made more than my share of New Year’s resolutions, and rarely have I stuck to the calorie-counting, mile-running regimens that I have planned.

This year, rather than set some lofty goals that I will most likely fail to achieve, I plan to stop trying to find who or what is to blame for the problems with education today. Instead I want to purposefully do everything I can to effect positive changes for my students, get to know them better as individuals, and connect their learning to content that they find valuable and relevant to their own lives.

Rather than focusing on text reading this month, let’s turn our attention to one of the critical components of language necessary for comprehension: vocabulary.

Educators often point to the importance of expanding students’ vocabularies, but how is verbal learning acquired? A new line of research has confirmed, not surprisingly, that the way the teacher talks and how the teacher uses language directly affect student vocabulary growth.

Year after year, I struggled with students who claimed to hate reading. They didn’t like to read. They told me so, over and over again. I have a stock response: “You know, every time you say that an English teacher cries.”

Handing out reading assignment packets or calling for volunteers to read aloud was consistently met with gut-wrenching groans. I am an unusually peppy person, but I was deflating. Must I hear this every time? We hadn’t even started the reading yet.

I had to end this cycle of abuse on innocent texts. They weren’t to blame. The curriculum, teachers’ interests, accessibility, and availability were all factors in killing reading for our students. Alas, poor little packets of photocopied words take the bulk of the wrath for students being told over and over again “Reading is FUN!” as they gaze down, bracing themselves for one more double-sided, black-and-white chore.

A Better Approach for Struggling Readers

At the end of October, I attended and spoke at the annual International Dyslexia Association (IDA) meeting in Dallas. IDA remains the best interdisciplinary conference for all professionals, advocates, and families concerned with reading, writing, and language difficulties. IDA meetings, over the past three decades, are where I’ve obtained my real education.

How many more times do we have to hear from NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) that 30 to 40 percent of middle and high school students are struggling and/or can’t read?

It’s a catch-22. Because reading is difficult for them, older struggling readers don’t like to read, and therefore they don’t read. As a result and over time, vocabulary, sentence structure, comprehension, and academic language become less familiar, and these students begin to fall further and further behind.

In Carver, Massachusetts, 11^th grader Noah Pina explained to a group of educators, including myself, how an intervention program changed his life. Noah started the curriculum last year reading at approximately a fifth grade level and is now reading at a 10^th grade level!

Being a technology teacher, I am always looking for new projects for my students. I’m all over anything that can both engage them and teach them new content.

For this blog post, I’ve come up with my Top 5 favorite technology projects that my students have done. These projects aren’t tied to a specific content area and can be used across a wide range of grade levels. The examples here were done by high school students, but you can scale them back or forward to best fit your students’ needs and grade level.

By Louisa Moats, Ed.D.

Motivation, according to a recent textbook on adolescent literacy*, is “a feeling of interest or enthusiasm that makes a student want to complete a task or improve his or her skills.” Teachers of adolescent poor readers, however, often find that their students are willing to do anything BUT read and write. Getting students to believe that they can make meaningful progress—when all prior experience suggests they will not—and to work at something that has never been rewarding is a major challenge.