Struggling Classroom Readers and Individualized Instruction

Article by Paolo Martin

Paolo Martin is one of our trusted Educational Architects here at Let's Go Learn, Inc. His diligent work with struggling readers is a tribute to his dedication to literacy. Paolo's extensive work with middle school students in a public school setting makes him a knowledgeable source on what is and is not happening in our middle school classrooms. We think this article is an honest look at what happens when students "slip-by" year after year until they are finally at a grade where their teachers feel reading instruction is no longer part of the curriculum. What happens when that student still can't read?

Case Study: Struggling Classroom Readers and Individualized Instruction

Introduction

Monique: Profile of a private, yet busy classroom student

Monique is an African-American female enrolled in the sixth grade at a middle school in the San Francisco Bay Area. From far away, Monique looked like an average middle school student diligently engaged in her work. Not unlike many students in her school, she was typically dressed in black jeans, black high-top basketball shoes, and a T-shirt of the same color. A plump, black Northface ski jacket she often wore seemed to envelope her being and provided a cushiony bubble around her. She generally did not initiate conversation with those in her vicinity. It seemed she was too caught up with the usually independent and routine classroom work.

Upon careful observation of Monique's activities in the classroom, I found that Monique was busy physically doing the activities of the classroom. For instance, in her reading period, I often observed Monique organizing her word study cards and writing her findings in her journal after which she would read silently for the rest of the period. When I asked her what things she didn't like to do in class, her response was, "I don't like to be still...[because] it takes too long." To keep busy, Monique heavily engaged with the procedures of the tasks assigned, often remaining detached from the concepts the activity attempted to teach.

Then, one day in early fall, I began the process of assessing Monique's reading abilities and strategies. I picked up Monique from her classroom and walked into the back room of the library where it's quiet and free of distractions. During the first part of the assessment, I asked her to read leveled lists of words. She easily mastered the first level with only one incorrect response. However, she quickly became frustrated on the next list of words at a level between second and first grade. She stumbled on the words "family," "ride," and "tomorrow," while she quickly uttered nonsense words to the string of letters she saw on the page.

After I completed the assessment, I noted that Monique was quite congenial and cooperative throughout their time together. However, I also noted that Monique admitted that she didn't like reading, "because of words...[she] can't spell or sound out." Although she said that she did not like reading, she did have a favorite book, Cat in the Hat, which she called, "a chapter book." When asked how she can tell if someone was a good reader, she mentioned that a good reader is one who reads fast and "doesn't stutter." She didn't consider herself a writer because she said, "I don't know how to spell hardly."

Assessment of Monique's reading skills indicates that she operates between four and five grade levels below her current grade level. She mastered a first grade level on the oral reading, a second grade level on the word meaning and between a first and a second grade level on the spelling tests of the assessment battery she was given. Analysis of her miscues on an oral reading passage indicates that she has limited decoding strategies as she reads unsteadily without monitoring the guesses she makes at words. Unfortunately, analysis of Monique's reading abilities suggests that she will have a hard time with the curriculum at Mason or any other middle school. Although this profile is only of one student in, the nature of Monique's reading ability is representative of the challenges that students with low reading skills face in today's middle schools.

Teachers certainly have their work cut out for them when it comes to addressing the needs of their struggling readers. Not only do they need to provide some access to the content of the subjects they teach, but they also need to address the literacy skills issues of their students. For some classrooms, there will be a pedagogical gap in the teacher's curriculum and the needs of their low readers. Some intervention must take place to bridge this gap for those students who, like Monique, possess desperately low literacy skills. Such intervention can include changes in teacher strategies, classroom materials used, or even the relationship a teacher has with his or her students. However, individualized instruction sometimes becomes necessary to accelerate the literacy achievement of struggling readers and writers.

The Importance of Individualizing Instruction

By the time they enter middle school, children typically have a complex array of background knowledge, and, therefore, instruction ideally should be individualized to address each youth's uniqueness. It is important that teachers capitalize on what information and experiences students do possess and make connections to them in the classroom. Literacy success in the classroom can be achieved by incorporating the student's personal experiences and resources into the classroom setting (Moll, 1997).

Teacher-Centeredness of Classroom Instruction

Unfortunately, the trend seems to be away from student-centered, individualized instruction. In his study of over 1000 classroom across the U.S., John Goodlad (1983) has found that, despite the demographics of the school or the community it serves, classroom instruction tends to be teacher centered. He mentions:

At all levels of schooling, a very few teaching procedures - explaining or lecturing, monitoring seatwork, and quizzing - accounted for most of those we observed overall in our sample of 1,016 classrooms...."teacher talk" was by far the dominant classroom activity.... students worked primarily alone in large-group settings." (p. 552)

This trend away from individualizing instruction is a trend away from making reading and other content area instruction rich and only exacerbates the problem for struggling compensatory education students. Gloria Ladson-Billings (1990) and Moll (1994) argue that for students to succeed, teachers have to individualize their instruction informed by an "understanding of a student's home and community." (Ladson-Billings, 1990, p. 20) In her classroom, Joan Cone (1994) saw a need to include independent reading in her literature program because she saw this as necessary for creating a classroom of readers. Without that effort of giving her students a choice, she ran a risk of "inviting" only a select group of students to see themselves as readers and thinkers and excluding a significant population of her students.

This absence in individualizing instruction seems to be a crucial explanation for why compensatory education students may not have access to the content taught in their English or Language Arts classes. According to a report on a reading intervention program at a middle school in the same district as Mason Middle School, teachers generally did not see themselves as reading teachers (McCallum, 1998). One teacher responded, "I'm not a reading teacher...that's not my job. I'll leave that to the specialists" (p. 4). In this same report, when a sixth grade Language Arts/History block teacher was interviewed about her compensatory education students in the classroom, she characterized these students as "...a group who have a history of failure, and it is difficult to get them motivated, as slow workers who are not used to seeing anything through.... those who come in high will leave high and those who come in low will leave low" (p. 38). This teacher saw little use in individualizing her instruction to meet the needs of her compensatory education students as she had low expectations of them. Frustrated by the large numbers with low reading skills, she saw herself as powerless to help her students, while she viewed most of them as beyond help.

Although the teacher's situation described above provides only one example of teachers' resistance to individualizing instruction to meet the literacy needs of their students, it supports the notion that there indeed exists a pedagogical gap in middle schools for students with low reading skills. While difficult life situations explain in part, the absence of ways educators address the skill needs of students on an individual basis forms another reason. The challenge to educators is to construct a curriculum that engages students in activities and events that encourage internalization of reading skills, strategies and concepts that speak to the individual profile of teach student.

When we understand how important it is that our struggling adolescents succeed in reading, we can understand why it is not only important to examine how, but why students like Monique need to become the proficient readers that they are able to be.

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