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!

Henry Ward Beecher once said, a word is a “peg to hang ideas on.” A single word can conjure a host of meanings and associations. “Dyslexia” is such a word.

In the last couple of years, the well-known and respected researchers Julian Elliott and Elena Grigorenko have been arguing that it is time to do away with the “D word.” In The Dyslexia Debate (Cambridge University Press, 2014), they object to the word because many misunderstandings, false claims, and myths are associated with it.

Very few of us were ever taught what we needed to know about reading or language when we completed our degree programs or were licensed to teach.

As teachers, the professional development we received often seemed irrelevant. Even after graduate school, what I had been taught left me helpless in the face of students who struggled to read. The knowledge I eventually applied to various instructional programs, I acquired haphazardly from my doctoral courses, from conferences, and from other teachers … too late to help me with my first students.

Increasing Achievement Through Writing, Part 2

As I shared the reading and writing strategies discussed in Part 1 of this blog series, word spread about the success middle school students were having with them. Over time, I met with teachers from various subject areas and grade levels. They then used the strategies to help their students learn, remember, and apply content.

One team of intermediate-level teachers attended my workshops, learned the strategies, and used them with their third, fourth, and fifth grade students. They posted charts in their classrooms that listed the strategies that would be taught and used during the school year. After only a few months, these teachers changed the title of their charts from “Strategies You Will Learn” to “Strategies You Are Expected to Use.”

Increasing Achievement Through Writing, Part 1

A Brave Young Teacher

Several years ago I shared writing strategies with a large group of middle school teachers and administrators – well over a hundred educators from all grades and subject areas. Everyone participated enthusiastically all morning as I demonstrated note taking, summarizing, responding to text, breaking down definitions, and asking or answering questions.

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.

By Amy Blowers

What did we ever do before tablets, smart phones, and computers? How on earth did we ever teach students without PowerPoint^®, interactive whiteboard, and Google^™?

As an online learning teacher, I find it fascinating to think about teaching and student literacy before technology. I believe that, when it is used appropriately, technology can be the key to the kingdom of excellent student literacy.

I have taught high school English Language Arts for 15 years. When I started, I had a desktop computer, and the high school I worked for had one computer lab with 10 computers. The most engaging activity incorporated into teaching literacy at that time in my classroom was gaming. I had games for everything: vocabulary (Race to the Chalkboard Challenge), sentence building (Grammar Gladiators), and comprehension (Sherlock Search).

2012 VoyagerSopris Blog Contest Winner