When My Students Can’t
Read, What Should I Do?
A Summary of Important Strategies from
•When Kids Can’t Read , What Teachers Can Do by Beers
• Writing Next, by Graham and Perin
• Reading Next, by Biancarosa and Snow
PowerPoint by Mary Ulrich
Part I and Part II
• Part I: Reading Strategies to Improve
Adolescent Literacy
• Part II: Writing Strategies to Improve
Adolescent Writing
Part I
Reading Strategies to Improve Adolescent
Literacy
The Optimal Mix
• Medical personnel need to tailor treatment
to an individual patient’s needs.
Sometimes, more than one type of
treatment is necessary.
• To continue the metaphor, teachers need
to tailor intervention strategies to an
individual student’s needs. Often, more
than one strategy is needed.
Fifteen Key Elements to Improve
Adolescent Literacy Achievement
• INSTRUCTINOAL IMPROVEMENTS
-Direct, explicit comprehension instruction
-Effective instructional principles embedded in content
-Motivation and self-directed learning
-Text-based collaborative learning
-Strategic Tutoring
-Diverse texts
-Intensive writing
-A technology component
-Ongoing formative assessment of students
• INFRASTRUCTURE IMPROVEMENTS
-Extended time for literacy
-Professional development
-Ongoing summative assessment of students and programs
-Teacher teams
-Leadership
-A comprehensive and coordinated literacy program
Connecting When Kids Can’t Read,
What Teachers Should Do to
Reading Next
• USING Kylene Beers’ Reading Strategies
from When Kids Can’t Read, What
Teachers Can Do
1. Assess dependent readers’ needs – see pages 24-26 in Beers’ book
listed above
2. Create an instructional plan of what you will do when your student
can’t… - see page 28
Connecting When Kids Can’t Read,
What Teachers Should Do to
Reading Next (continued)
3. Learn what skillful readers do – see pages 34-35 – know purpose for
reading, use a variety of comprehension strategies, make a range of
inferences, use their prior knowledge, monitor their understanding,
question the author’s purpose and point of view, are aware of text
features, evaluate their engagement and enjoyment with a text,
know the meaning of many words, recognize most words
automatically, read fluently, vary reading rate, and “hear” the text
ads they read.
4. Teach comprehension strategies explicitly and directly – clarifying,
comparing and contrasting, connecting to prior experiences,
inferencing, predicting, questioning the text, recognizing the
author’s purpose, seeing causal relationships, summarizing,
visualizing. Teach explicitly and directly by “thinking aloud” as you
model a strategy.
INFERENCES
Types of Inferences Skilled Readers
Make
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Recognize the antecedents for pronouns
Figure out the meaning of unknown words from context
Figure out the grammatical function of an unknown word
Understand intonation of characters’ words
Identify characters’ beliefs, personalities, and motivations
Understand characters’ relationships to one another
Provide details about the setting
Provide explanations for events or ideas that are presented in the text
Offer details for events or ideas that are presented in the text
Understand author’s view of the world
Recognize the author’s biases
Relate what is happening in the text to their own knowledge of the world
Offer conclusions from facts presented in the text
See page 64 in Beers for comments teachers can make to help students make inferences
A Strategy: Making Inferences
• Use “It Says-I Say-And So” (p 165, Beers)
to make inferences from Two Minute
Mysteries
Some thoughts to think about:
• Best instructional improvements are informed by
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ongoing assessments of the strengths and needs
of the students.
However, these types of assessments, often
informal and occurring on a daily basis, are not
often suited to the way we must report
progress, as in letter grades and percentages.
Teacher teams need to establish coordinated
instruction in reading during collaborative
meetings to make sure that students don’t slip
through the cracks.
Outcomes to Measure
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Word-level reading
Fluency
Reading level
Reading comprehension
Writing
Motivation
Content achievement
State assessments
Student response
Fidelity of model adoption/implementation
Optimal Mix
• Research and professional opinion support all fifteen elements from
Reading Next; however, the optimal mix of these elements has not
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been determined.
Three elements are more foundational than the others:
PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
ONGOING FORMATIVE ASSESSMENT OF STUDENTS, AND
ONGOING SUMMATIVE ASSESSMENT OF STUDENTS AND
PROGRAMS
These elements are not all inclusive due to the complex nature of
improving adolescent reading, but are the required foundation on
which the other elements should be built.
Reading Literacy Conclusion
• With carefully selected programs that
allow teachers to use unique mixes of the
fifteen elements and a requirement to use
common evaluation guidelines and
procedures, we, the teachers, can
enhance adolescent literacy achievement
right now. Let’s do it!
Part II
• Writing Strategies to Improve Adolescent
Writing
Eleven Elements to Improve
Writing Achievement
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Writing Strategies
Summarization
Collaborative Writing
Specific Product Goals
Word Processing
Sentence Combining
Prewriting
Inquiry Activities
Process Writing Approach
Study of Models
Writing for Content Leanring
Some Thoughts About the Eleven
Elements:
• In a the best world, teachers would
incorporate all eleven elements into their
everyday writing program.
• Reality says that’s not possible, so another
approach is to use the elements to build a
unique writing program to support
individual students’ needs. This will likely
produce the biggest return.
The Optimal Mix?
• Researchers do not know what combination is
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best or how much of each element to use which
will maximize writing instruction for low
achieving writers in particular. Nor do they know
which combination of elements works best for
which types of writers.
The eleven elements are part of a literature
review which aims to provide specific practices
that have shown to be effective across a number
of contexts.
An Example of the Writing
Strategies Element
• Writing Strategies:
An example is self-regulated strategy development (SRSD) – used to
help students learn specific strategies for planning, drafting, and
revising text.
There are six stages:
1. Develop background knowledge
2. Describe the strategy
3. Model it – teacher shoe s how to use the strategy
4. Memorize it - the student memorizes the steps of the strategy,
possible through a mnemonic
5. Support it – teacher supports/scaffolds student mastery of the
strategy
6. Independent Use – students use strategy with less support
To Get to the Independent Use
Stage:
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Teach students self regulation skills (goal setting, selfmonitoring, self-instruction, self-reinforcement). They
help students to manage writing strategies, the writing
process, and their behavior.
• TWO MNEMONICS for students are:
1. PLAN (Pay attention to the prompt, Listen to the main
idea, Add supporting details, Number your ideas)
2. WRITE – (Work from your plan to develop your thesis
statement, Include transition words for each
paragraph, Try to use different kinds of sentences, and
Exciting, interesting, $10,000 words)
An Example of the Collaborative
Writing Element:
• This is peer writing as a team. A higher
achieving student is assigned to be the
Helper (tutor) and a lower achieving
student is assigned to be the Writer
(tutee). The teacher’s job is to monitor,
prompt, praise, and address concerns.
An Example of Setting Specific
Product Goals Strategy:
• This method provides students with objectives to
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focus on specific aspects of their writing. An
example might be a position paper in which a
student write a persuasive letter designed to
get the audience to agree with him/her.
In addition to the main goal, a teacher provides
sub-goals – include a statement of belief,
provide examples or supporting information.
An Example of the Sentence
Combining Element:
• This strategy helps students to create more complex and
sophisticated sentences through activities in which students
combine sentences.
• Some specific goals:
Combine a high writer with a low writer and have them produce the
following:
1. Combine smaller sentences into a compound sentence using and,
but, and because
2. Embed and adjective or adverb from one sentence into another
3. Us adverbial or adjectival clauses from one sentence into another
4. Make multiple embeddings involving adjectives, adverbs, adverbial
clauses, and adjectival clauses.
An Example of Inquiry Activity
Element:
• Students examine an object and write
about it.
– Think of a seashell. Students examine a
seashell by looking at it, touching it with their
eyes closed, listening to it, etc. Students list
details, becoming more and more precise and
fine-tuning their descriptions, comparing the
object to others, eliciting similes and
metaphors.
An Examples of the Study of
Models Element:
• Present students with models of excellent
writing and examine them. The models
may be written from opposing viewpoints.
Using those models the teacher gives the
students a writing assignment the next
day in which they take an opposing
viewpoint from another classmate.
An Example of the Writing to Learn
Element:
• This element includes the element of
summarization and is effective in content
area classes. An example is to have
students write about the parts of a flower
and their purposes. Students come to a
deeper understanding of the subject.
Learning to Write and Writing to
Learn
• Learning to write is a skill that draws on
sub-skills and processes: handwriting,
spelling, vocabulary, punctuation,
capitalizations, word usage, grammar, use
of writing strategies.
• Writing to learn is a tool for learning
subject matter. It deepens and extends
students’ knowledge.
Learning to write leads to writing to learn
which leads to, at the most advanced
stage, using writing as a personal tool for
transforming one’s own experiences and
knowledge.
THE GOAL IN WRITING IS KNOWLEDGE
TRANFORMATION
Here’s Your Challenge!
• The large number of students who struggle with reading
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and writing literacy has not changed noticeably in
decades.
What has changed is our society, which is now driven by
ever-increasing knowledge and ever-accelerating
demands for reading and writing skills.
The disparity between modern life demands and
inadequate literacy achievement in eight million
struggling readers and writers demands that we help
these students by reforming our strategies and
techniques for improving reading and writing literacy.