Spotlight: Education - What does a Reading Specialist Do?

This is not our interview subject - it's just a student at Christ's College Cambridge enjoying a book.

I'm going to keep this intro short because the interview itself is so rich and informative.  Read on to learn all about the responsibilities of a high school reading specialist - they're much broader than I had imagined.  And our subject also opens up about other high school related issues including pregnancy and peer pressure.  Enjoy!

ES: Why don’t you start out telling me a little bit about your title/position/where you work.

AS: Sure.  My title is Reading Specialist and I work at a public high school in the town where I live in New England.  So I work with individual students, I co-teach classes and I consult with other teachers in the school on literacy best practices.  I spend about half my time working directly with students and the rest of the time doing assessments, interpreting assessments. 

There’s a lot of state testing that we do that I coordinate and then interpret for teachers – things for No Child Left Behind, for state standards, and more and more education is moving towards these things called the Common Core State Standards, which are these common standards that theoretically, eventually, all 50 states will adopt so that there’s a common core of educational knowledge that all American public school students will ultimately have. 

Right now there are 43 states who have adopted the Common Core, and it includes a common basis of curriculum and also standardized testing.  So I’m sort of the building “go-to person” when it comes to that testing and interpreting that testing.

ES: When it comes to literacy?

AS: More and more, assessments are being given to all students.  It used to be that the only kids who would get tested were kids in special ed. or kids who had learning problems, but now pretty much the full student body is getting it, or sometimes it’s just one full grade level, so that you have a wider pool of data and you can compare from there.  

Because if you think about it logically, there are students who might be reading on grade level, but if they take an honors class, they might find the reading very challenging because the reading assigned in an honors class is likely to be above grade level.  So there are kids who are coming up as reading issues who are not below-grade-level readers, but their reading ability in the classes that they’ve chosen isn’t always a match.

ES: So do you do additional work with them to get them up to that level?  What’s your role?

AS: Well, for example, I’m in an honors American History class for sophomores to provide support because at our school, if a student has a B or better average in the regular level, they can move up to Honors the next year, and a lot of kids do but it’s not always easy or doable.  So, in that particular Honors class, out of 18 kids, 10 kids had moved up from the regular level and they’re finding the adjustment to Honors a big adjustment.  So I’m there in that class three days a week working with the teacher to figure out strategies to allow the whole class to have a positive experience.

ES: I understand teaching the mechanics of reading on an elementary level, but what additional skills can you give someone on a high school level to help them?  I always thought after you reach a certain level of reading ability, you can practice more to get faster at it, but how could someone actually teach someone to be a better reader?

AS: Well, some of it is the “faster or slower” stuff – the fancy term is “fluency” – so you want to develop fluency from a grade level standpoint, and for most high schoolers, that’s 250 words/minute.  Most college-educated adults read about 400 words/minute, and a speed reader would read about 800-900 words/minute.

For a lot of kids, especially kids who don’t do a lot of reading for pleasure, and also who don’t do sustained reading, meaning reading that’s more than three pages of text at a time, their reading pace is relatively slow.  They get very discouraged by long assignments and they often don’t complete them.  So helping them build up that fluency so they can read more is more effective.

For a good reader, like you probably, if you read something and don’t understand it, you’re likely to re-read it – to go back and try to figure out what the confusion was, or where your understanding started to fall apart.  Some people will do that kind of naturally, but for a lot of kids, especially kids who aren’t great readers, they need that explicit instruction of: when understanding starts to fall apart, what do I do?  What are the strategies that can help me understand what I read?

And also we have to say explicitly to kids, reading is supposed to have meaning.  It’s supposed to have sense.  It’s not just, can you figure out how these letters make words?  These words are supposed to make sense and make language, and if you don’t understand, then you have to stop, and what are some strategies you can use to help you make sense of it. 

And also we teach the more advanced readers, when do I skim?  When do I read for detail?  When do I go back and reread?  What are the strategies?  Because many times, as an experienced adult reader, we know: Oh, I don’t have to read every single word of this.  Or, this is something where I need to read every single word.  How do you use guide words in a text?  What does it mean when a word is bolded in a text?  Well, it usually means it’s a vocabulary term and I should pay particular attention to it.

For a lot of kids, they just need some explicit vocabulary instruction.  As they get up to high school level stuff, they can’t keep up vocabulary-wise.  When I was in school, we started a foreign language in third grade and it was mandatory all the way through.  For most kids in public school, they may or may not have exposure to a second language in elementary, and in high school it’s often optional, so they don’t have those root words and cognates to help them along with unfamiliar vocabulary that people who are either bilingual through their family, or have studied a foreign language, would have.

ES: Right, particularly a Germanic or Romance language, because my husband studied Japanese in high school and that doesn’t really do anything for him when it comes to English etymology or spelling.

AS: Right, not so helpful!  The other thing is, for a lot of kids, they reach a point in about fourth or fifth grade where they can read pretty much anything, and for a lot of them it takes sort of until high school to realize that that level of functional literacy is not going to be enough for academic success.  They can open a newspaper and read everything but they’re not going to understand it.

ES: Right, they’re not going to know what the words mean.  Like, if I were to read a foreign newspaper in French or German, which I actually studied but am not fluent in, I’d be able to pronounce all the words but I’d only have a rudimentary understanding of what the articles were saying.

AS: Even if you’d studied some – I had French from third through twelfth grade – I can make some sense out of a French newspaper…  Not entire sense, but some.

ES: I guess maybe it’s that when you are getting up to that fourth grade functional level, you’re used to gaining skills at this pace, and then when there are no more skills to gain and it’s just vocabulary, it’s like, well, now you’re redefining what it means to learn how to do this thing.  It’s just different.

AS: A lot of people say that in elementary school you learn how to read, and then after that you learn how to be a reader.  I think that’s sort of a good way to understand it because pretty much everyone at the high school level, with the exception of some severe special education needs, everyone reads.  But they’re not always equipped to be academically successful with the reading skills that they have.

ES: How did you decide to be a high school specialist vs. elementary school?

AS: I was an elementary reading specialist for a few years, but I became more interested in working with older kids because I sort of felt like, the kids who are going to present to a reading specialist in high school are going to be a more diverse and more interesting group in terms of their needs.  Most of the work as an elementary reading specialist is with kindergarten/first/second graders who are not picking up those beginning skills of reading, and for most of those kids, the reasons are sort of the same and the “cure” is sort of the same. 

This just seemed like it would be something sort of more interesting.  Also, the nice thing about being in a high school is that I have a lot of exposure to the subject areas, so I’m in science classrooms, I’m in history classrooms, I’m in English classrooms, and that makes it a lot more interesting than just being in the reading resource room with a whole bunch of phonics material.

Also, I have two little kids at home, so I think it would be hard to work with elementary school kids and then come home to elementary school kids.  The high school kids are fun, they’re interesting.  I love working at a high school.  There’s always something going on.  It’s different every day.

ES: It’s hard for me to imagine because I always think that I hate teenagers, but I guess if you’re doing something that they really get something out of and they relate to you well, or have a good relationship with you, then it’s really rewarding.

AS: It is really rewarding.  I really like working with adolescents.  Even when I was in high school, I think I thought I might like to work with high schoolers.  It’s a really interesting time in people’s lives and it’s also a time where everything feels really, really, really important.  Everything is fraught with emotion and fraught with meaning, and then when you look back on it as an adult…  I’m still friends with some people from high school, but the romantic relationships I had in high school seemed like it was everything at the time… 

It’s so nice to be a voice in someone’s life, to say, “these things that seem so deeply important to you now – yes, they’re shaping your life, but three years from now, five years from now, ten years from now, it’s going to be very different.”

I had a good high school experience I think, but I certainly wasn’t the prom queen – not that my private high school had that.  But I think, to be able to talk to kids and tell them [it’s okay to say to yourself], “these are not the best years of my life.”  And people will say, “Oh, I just loved high school.  It was the best time of my life.”  But for kids for whom it’s not, I want them to know that it’s a period of your life, and maybe you’ll look back on it fondly, but it’s also okay to say, “I can’t wait to be out of here.” 

You are going to grow up and you’re going to move on and this is a time in your life to get skills, but it may or may not be the best time of your life.

ES: It’s weird, because they’re on the cusp of “adulthood” at 17 years old, but they’re really still kids.

AS: It’s also hard because they’re physically so different – there are kids who could pass for 25, and there are kids who look 12, and they’re all in tenth grade.

ES: Shifting gears – I know this is out of the blue…  I don’t know if this is more in college, but do you come across digital textbooks more now?

AS: Yes!  Right now, we have a bunch of school-owned ipads, and mostly we use them for special ed. students, kids on IEPs [Individualized Educational Plans].  We basically bought them because we have three kids in our district who are visually impaired, and for a while, we were buying them large print textbooks, which was costing us thousands of dollars a year because none of them were taking the same courses.  So every year we were buying full sets of large print textbooks for thousands and thousands of dollars for these three kids. 

And we realized, if we bought ipads and got the digital textbooks, the kids can increase the font size to anything that they want.  And it worked so well for them that we bought about 100 of them all together which belong to the special ed. department. 

The ultimate goal is that the incoming freshmen next year will each get an ipad for them to use while they’re at school, and when they’re seniors and graduating, they can buy it at a discount and take it to college with them or just give it back.  And they would get their textbooks on there.  We’d get some hard copy textbooks too for kids who wanted them, but for a lot of kids we’d move to digital textbooks.  So much of what we read in the English department is old enough to be in the public domain – Pride and Prejudice, Frankenstein – all that stuff is free.

ES: Right, so you don’t have to buy the paper book – you just get the free digital copy…

AS: And we’ve found that the kids are often kind of disrespectful of their textbooks, but they’re extremely protective and careful of their ipads.

ES: What would happen if they were to damage their ipad?

AS: They’re on the hook.  With the textbooks, it’s the same thing – if they damage or lose their textbooks…  These belong to the district, and each one is numbered, and we write  down in the Fall who has which number, and if they don’t come back or come back damaged, the kids owe money. 

Now, it’s sort of an empty threat, because it’s a public school, so what are we going to do – expel them?  Theoretically we won’t let them graduate, or hold their diploma, but the fact of the matter is, what do you say to a low-income family where the kid owes a hundred bucks for textbooks but has done everything else to graduate – you’re not really going to hold that kid’s diploma.  All that kid needs to do is write a letter to the local paper saying “my parents are out of work, I finished high school but I lost my textbook in ninth grade and now they won’t let me graduate.” 

Of course we’re going to let them graduate, but we say [we won’t]…  But with the ipads, they are on the hook, they sign a contract saying they’re responsible for them, and they don’t get another.  Whereas with a paper textbook, we have enough extras that they do get another.

ES: So can they take the ipad home with them?

AS: Yes, they can take it home.  We’re basically saying, if you can manage to keep this through when you’re a senior, you can have it for $50.

ES: So your school weighed the economics of buying enough textbooks for all the kids over four years vs. giving them the textbooks on the ipad, and the ipad actually costs less?

AS: Yeah, it seems like it’s going to be cheaper.  The other thing that is nice – well, for example, the ninth grade English department bought all these ninth grade textbooks – they ended up being like $120 per book for 100 students. 

The next year, the Common Core State Standards came in, and the textbooks are not aligned with the Common Core State Standards.  So now we have thousands of dollars’ worth of textbooks that not aligned with the standards that the state says all textbooks have to be aligned with.  Whereas, if we had digital copies and had paid $10 or $15 or whatever for the license, it’s annoying, but it’s not such a big deal.

ES: It seems counterintuitive – it sounds indulgent to just give each kid an ipad, but I guess it sounds like it makes sense.

AS: I really think that by the time my second grader is in college, I think that’s what it’s going to be.  It’s a different skill.  How do I read on a digital device vs. in a book?

ES: I was going to get to that – how about the mechanics of reading, taking notes, underlining, highlighting – can you still do all that with digital?

AS: I think that technology’s really coming along.  Next year they’re going to buy this digital chemistry textbook that has a highlighting feature built into it.  You can use a finger gesture on the ipad to highlight, and a two-tap will bring up a post-it note that you can type on, and if you go back to that page, it’s there.  But some of them don’t have those features built into them yet, and it’s harder.

In some ways it motivates kids to read more because of the novelty of doing it there.  Being able to change the text size – even good readers will sometimes want to change the text size because it’s easier to read that way.  That’s been a positive. 

Some of the books have some really interesting features that they wouldn’t be able to have otherwise, and for a lot of my students who don’t have a rich background knowledge base, to have those things in the textbook is great.  There’ll be a vocabulary term that they don’t know, and if they click on it, it’ll show a little picture of what that thing is. 

Or, with a tenth grade book we may or may not buy, it had a whole thing where if you clicked on the author, it gave you a whole biography and for some of them, even little clips of interviews with the author.  So for a lot of kids, having that enrichment stuff there, especially kids who don’t have that coming from home, is nice to have. 

What we’re going to need to figure out is that we didn’t buy the 3G ones.  The books are on there, but you have to be able to connect to the internet to pick up on some of the features.  So for kids who go home and don’t have Wi-Fi at home, then they’re missing out on it.

ES: But you’d think that in school you probably have Wi-Fi.

AS: Right, in school we do and for a lot of kids, we’ve moved to like, how much homework is an appropriate amount of homework and how much homework is just for the sake of saying, “Oh my goodness, I was up until midnight doing all my homework!”  We’re trying to say we’re not going to give busywork as homework – we’re only going to give something that will prepare them for the next day of class or enhance the next day of class.  So for students who are efficient, and most students have at least one study hall a day, they should be able to manage a lot of that stuff that might need the internet while they’re still at school.

ES: But I know for me, I’m the ultimate procrastinator, so having a Wi-Fi enabled ipad in study hall would have meant I’d never get anything done.

AS: Our school network is very limited – the kids can’t get Facebook, we can’t get Amazon – it’s very tightly blocked.  Of course, everyone has a 3G phone, so having the things blocked is of minimal use, but…

ES: Well, at least they’re not going to be sitting there watching movies.  This makes me realize what a different time it is now.

AS: I think that’s the other thing that I like about working with teenagers – I can be prepared.

ES: I think that would take away some of the fear for me too.

AS: I think a lot of teenagers put on a defensive shell around them.  They want to seem tough, or cool, but really they’re just big kids.  They aren’t that much more mature than the eight- and ten-year-olds I know, but they’re trying. 

The place I live and work is a pretty small town.  It’s not that diverse, but it’s socio-economically diverse.  It’s interesting to see what a public school is like, and see the range of kids who are there, and see who is interacting with one another, and see how much different socio-economic groups will interact and won’t interact, and how that shapes the decisions that kids make.  Because that was very different than my high school experience, which was essentially wealthy kids and some kids who were there on scholarships who mostly stayed with each other.

ES: There was a recent article about that in the New York Times.

AS: Yes!  They’re doing some really interesting articles about high school education.  In my town, pretty much everyone looks the same.  It’s mostly white kids.  But the kids have these signifiers of social class and they know who is like them and who is not like them, and you see a social divide there.  And you see an academic divide, which is certainly a concern, because we do see more kids from a lower socio-economic background in the remedial classes.

ES: Why do you think that is?

AS: Part of it is that wealthier families, if they see their kid struggling with reading in elementary school, they jump on it.  Because they recognize that it’s an important component of academic success, so it’s addressed sooner.

I have some students who are dealing with things at home and academics can’t be a priority.  Like if they don’t have enough food, or they’re worried they’re not going to be able to pay their rent, obviously those things are more of a concern than homework.  So they’re not fully available for learning because they’re thinking about other stuff.

Some of my students are pregnant, which is clearly taking up a lot of their attention. 

ES: Is that divided socio-economically as well – who’s pregnant, who’s not?

AS: Yes.  Definitely.  It’s interesting, it was my birthday at the beginning of the month and a lot of the kids were like, “oh, how old are you?”  “36.”  “You’re 36?!  You’re older than my mom.”  And yes, it is certainly possible that I could have a high school age child, but I don’t.  And for a lot of these girls who do become pregnant at 16 or 17, often their moms were pregnant at 16 or 17, and so it’s not necessarily that mom is happy about it, but it’s sort of not a shocker.

ES: The cycle repeats itself.

AS: There are definitely a lot of extended families here who are going to step up to take care of a baby.  I don’t know any girl who’s had a baby and who has chosen adoption.  Every single girl I know who’s had a baby has parented it.  There are some good supports in our area but it definitely is a detriment to focusing on schoolwork.

ES: Does your student body seem politically involved at all?  I know they can’t vote yet…

AS: They are.  Part of it is being in New England where it’s a big thing, but they are.  Barack Obama was in Portsmouth, NH at the beginning of the month and all the tenth graders study American History, so all the tenth graders went down just to see the political process in action.  I think they are interested in the election.  Last year there was a little bit of interest; this year with the election coming up, there’s a lot of interest.

ES: Because I was going to ask if it was clear that some of them were pro-life, with the pregnancy issue…

AS: I don’t think that they would necessarily say that they were pro-life in the sense that I think most of them would say, “people should be allowed to have abortions.  But I’m not going to have an abortion.” 

And I think a lot of them think, if I was born when my mom was 17, and I have an abortion, then it means my mom should have aborted me.  And to say they’re not going to go through with the pregnancy is to say, “I reject what you did mom, and what you did was have me.” 

ES: It’s really complicated.

AS: It’s really complicated.  But there’s a lot of support in the area.  And let me just say, watching these girls have babies, they are the biological age to have babies.  They look amazing, they barely gain any weight, they are full of energy and happy and bopping, none of their babies have any problems, they deliver their babies with no problems. 

They only get three weeks of maternity leave and they’re back at school three weeks later thinner than they ever were.  And they have these beautiful accessories, who are their babies.  And they probably got pregnant from one mistake.

ES: They don’t bring their babies to school, do they?

AS: They’re not supposed to bring their babies to school.  They’re not allowed to have their babies in class.  But there’s a daycare center that’s right near our school where pretty much all of them enroll their babies unless a mom or a grandma is around.  They’re not supposed to bring their babies to school but every now and then, there’s a baby and of course it’s cute and it gets attention. 

It’s hard because I want to be supportive of them, but I don’t want to be fawning over their baby because there’s a balance between, you know, you’re working really hard and it’s amazing that you’re even managing to come to school, and that you are managing to do whatever you need to do with your newborn because that’s really hard.  I had more than three weeks of maternity leave and came back like a zombie, not exactly ready to do my work.

It’s also interesting because the wealthier girls who would never have a baby still are all like, “Oh, she’s so cute, can we have a shower for her?”  But we never do – it’s against school policy.  No baby showers in school.

ES: I guess you don’t want to glamorize it too much.

AS: Right.  And it’s already glamorized because everyone watches “16 and Pregnant” and all those shows on TV.

ES: So how big is your school?

AS: We have about 160 kids in a grade.  750 kids or so.

ES: That’s a nice, small size.  Did you always want to do this?  How did you get into this career field?

AS: Well, after college, or even in college, I knew that I wanted to work with adolescents and in education, but not really anything in particular.  I wasn’t really sure.

After college, I got a job working at A Better Chance, which is an organization that helps minority students get into private school and then provides support for them.  So I worked there for a couple

years and then decided to go to graduate school. 

One of my friends had just finished the Language and Literacy program at Harvard Ed. School and had had a fabulous experience, and it’s also a one year Masters, so I thought, that sounds doable.  I’ve always been interested in Literacy. 

So I did that and then got a job as an elementary literacy specialist, which I liked, but definitely thought long-term that I wanted to work with adolescents.

Then we moved up to New England and I got a job at a non-profit one on one organization for kids with learning disabilities, one on one instruction for some kids in private tutoring and some school district contracts for districts with like two kids who needed reading support – they weren’t going to hire a reading specialist. 

So I worked there for six years, and I was consulting with the high school I work at now for a couple of those years.  Then the principal said, “I think we need you here full-time.”  And I said, “I would love to work here full-time.”

ES: That must have been nice to hear. 

[Conversation ensues about college, meandering into the subject of peer pressure.  We both agreed that although difficult in the moment, if you take a stand because you don’t want to participate in a certain risky behavior everyone else seems to be encouraging, that ultimately gains you respect even though you might get labeled negatively at the time.]

AS: It’s interesting because the 9^th graders are very socially conformist – they’re just trying to figure out what high school is about.  But by 10^th grade, you sort of start to see kids who are like, I do or don’t wear this, or do this, or act in this way.  And people are fine with it.  And by the time people are seniors, people are doing all their own stuff.

For example, we don’t have any openly gay 9^th graders, but we have eight openly gay seniors.  And it’s not just that that class has eight gay people and the freshman class has none.  So it takes time for them – by the time they’re seniors, they’ll feel more comfortable.

ES: I’m sure over time, you’ll see that every year, your senior class has a few gay people.

AS: Right – they can see, by the time I’m a senior, I’ll be able to come out.  I teach at a pretty nice school, so I’m lucky.

ES: Yeah, it sounds like it.  Sometimes I think it would be nice to be involved with something on a college campus because you’re around that youthful energy, and I guess it’s the same thing with high school – you are around that energy and you stay on top of trends.  You’re aware of what’s going on.

AS: You see what they’re thinking.

ES: And that they actually are thinking.

AS: It also makes me feel like I not only live in this town, but I’m a part of the community.

ES: Does your town feel like a true small town with a town center?

AS: It’s not a teeny tiny little town, but if I go to the grocery store, I will see someone I know.  It might be a neighbor, another teacher, a kid I teach.  If I go on an errand, I will see somebody.

ES: I guess especially because you float around to lots of different classes, you meet a lot more kids than you would otherwise.

AS: Right, and in a school with only 750ish kids, I recognize every face.  I may not know the name, but if I see a teenager walking around, I can immediately know whether that kid goes to my high school.

ES: How is it determined what you do day to day?

AS: There are three classes that I co-teach regularly: two sections of remedial ninth graders, who are ninth graders who come in reading below grade level but aren’t getting additional special ed. support. 

So I have two sections of those, and that’s in addition to their full ninth grade curriculum, so instead of getting a study hall, they get this remedial class with me, which some people are happy about and some people would rather have a study hall.  So two periods a day, I teach that class. 

Then I also co-teach a low-level tenth grade English class but they’re all kids who did not pass or barely passed ninth grade English.  Some passed it by like one point.  A 70 is passing.  All my kids got between 67-71 in ninth grade English.  They end up in my structured 10^th grade English class.

ES: What do you find is the issue with a lot of these kids?  Does it really vary or do you see patterns?

AS: Most of the kids who are in that class read at like a 5^th or 6^th grade level.  If you hand them a ninth grade level book, they might turn the pages but they’re not going to comprehend very much of it.  Then if you give them a reading quiz or tell them to write an essay, they can’t really do it because they don’t really have an understanding of what they read. 

We do a mix of lower level books and then a lot of structured support with them for things that are on a higher level, and we also buy differentiated books, which are books that are rewritten to be at a lower reading level. 

So right now we’re about to start Huck Finn in a differentiated book that is rewritten at a sixth grade level.  So, lower level vocabulary, shorter chapters, but it still has the story line and some of the original language because all tenth graders read Huck Finn, so they’ll be able to communicate with classmates and have that structural knowledge of, you know, what is Huck Finn?

That’s three out of seven periods in a day, and then I’m usually out in other classes for the other periods based on teacher or principal requests.  We have this person – her official title is “Director of Curriculum and Instruction”, but she’ll send me an email saying, “there are 14 kids in this history class and 8 of them have F’s – can you go in and see if you can figure out what’s going on?”

ES: So how do you diagnose that?

AS: Well, part of it, because we do a lot of standardized testing, I have reading levels and a lot of data on every single student in the school.  So I can go into the class and see what the reading level of all the kids is and then see what the reading level of the assigned materials are, and kind of follow along with the teacher’s lecture and see what’s going on and what’s happening. 

For example, we have a history teacher who’s a genius but he just stands there and talks – he doesn’t give any handouts, he doesn’t write on the board, he just stands there and talks.

For kids who are struggling with literacy and just have to sit there and take notes from listening to him, it’s really really hard, especially because if they take notes and they have spelling errors in their notes which they will, because reading and writing and spelling are all one and the same… 

I had a student who was taking notes and she wrote down a whole bunch of stuff based on what she heard, and when she went back to the textbook and tried to look in the index to find those things so she could go back and figure out what her notes meant, everything was spelled wrong and she couldn’t find anything in the index. 

So, talking to him and saying, “This is a lower level class than you usually teach and they’re going to need visual clues – maybe a typed outline of your lecture, so they have those keywords they can anchor onto, or write an outline on the board, or pause to write some of these names and terms so they have some sort of something to grasp onto – but these particular kids are not learning through this kind of lecture.

ES: That seems so obvious, but I guess it’s not.

AS: Right, but for most high school teachers, they’re content area experts.  But they’re not necessarily experts in how kids learn.  Or how can they help kids who are not good readers?  They’re experts in American History, or Economics, or Chemistry, or Math or whatever it is.  They’re more content area specialists than learning specialists. 

And I think what’s been really nice for me is that most teachers have been very welcoming and like, yeah, I don’t know anything about that.  I know how to teach people what the Civil War was and why it started and what Reconstruction was– I don’t know how to teach them how to learn it.  So it’s nice to have that collaborative relationship.  Because I know that stuff, but I don’t know it enough to teach it – I know the learning strategies.

ES: It must be really fun to get to sit in on those classes and have those refresher courses.  Sometimes I think about how overloaded kids are, not in the sense that we usually talk about it these days with all the afterschool activities, but just going to school.  They’re learning all day. 

If I go to one lecture, I talk about it for a month.  They’re going to class after class, every day, where they’re being taught new information and skills.  It’s a lot for their brains to process.

AS: It’s a lot.  And also, my school day starts at 7:40am.  Let’s say these kids wake up at 6/6:30, they get to school at 7:15, and they’re in class until 2:40.  Then many of them go to sports practice, or a game, or Yearbook, or their job, so they don’t get home until 6. 

They’re on the go for eleven hours, and that is part of the reason we wanted to be really purposeful about homework, because they do need some downtime to take what they’ve learned and internalize it.

ES: They’re learning new things for years and years, and then suddenly you graduate and it’s over.

AS: Right.  And for most of these kids, truly new things.  High school economics – most of them have no background in economics.  It’s all new.  It’s not like me sitting there being like, “Oh, I never thought about it that way but I actually have thought about these concepts before.”  It’s all new.

ES: Right, like, “Supply and Demand” – they probably haven’t heard of that before.

AS: And for a lot of kids, not only have they not heard of Supply and Demand, for my low literacy kids, they don’t even necessarily know what “Supply” means.  Every little thing is a step up for those kids.  Their vocabularies are low.  They don’t have that background knowledge, they haven’t read other novels. 

They just don’t have the connections, and when you can make a connection to something, it’s so much easier to learn it.

ES: I wonder what a reading specialist thirty years ago would have said were the main issues kids were having vs. now.  Now we talk about how our culture is going down the tubes, and kids are so used to instant gratification, and soundbites, and their attention spans are so short because they’re constantly switching from one thing to another.  Any media that they consume is so brief and empty.

AS: I think the reading specialists of the past were definitely more special education based, and that has been the real shift – saying, yes, there are kids who are in special education and need help reading, but literacy impacts every subject area, it’s in every domain of life and every student across the curriculum needs to be a better reader, and it’s not just your English class you need to be a better reader for.  There’s reading in math, there’s reading in science.

Even for those students who are saying, “I’m not taking those college prep classes.  I don’t want to go to college.  I’m going to go to some kind of vocational program or I’m going to take over the family business.  I’m taking over the farm or my dad’s construction business,” there’s reading in that too. 

That recognition that everything is reading, and that being a good reader is going to be conducive to success in a lot of areas is definitely a big shift in the field of education.

ES: And it sounds like an understanding of not just learning disabilities, but that if you have low literacy, you can isolate that and improve it vs. saying “you’re just a remedial student and we’re going to put you in this different track.”

AS:  I think that what’s also interesting is that there are so many things they can improve on.  In the remedial classes, we track their fluency and vocabulary development and comprehension and every single week, they’re getting feedback on their progress and it’s very motivating for them to see, oh, like these are actual concrete skills that I can work on. 

It’s not exactly like math, where you can say, “this week we’re going to learn addition” and then they learn it, and they can see they’ve learned something.  But they can see things progressing across these certain measures. 

Even for kids who are below, we do their testing and to say, “Look, we did your testing and you came out as a seventh grade fourth month reader” – it’s validating for them to hear.  Like, I genuinely am behind.

ES: It’s like getting diagnosed with an illness: at least I know there’s genuinely something wrong with me and now I can figure out what to do about it.  I’m not just imagining it.  It’s not just that I’m not trying hard enough or something like that.

AS: Right.  Like, yes, things are hard, and this is why.  That’s another reason I really like working with adolescents because they really can understand that and sort of buy into that, “if I do this and take part of this, I can improve, and then see that improvement and feel good about it.”

I had a student last year, a ninth grader, who started the year at a fifth grade level and worked super-hard and came up two grade levels of reading in one year of school.  So he ended the year still behind, seventh grade level, but he was so proud that he had worked for one year and gained two years’ worth of skills, which is huge.

And having that data, and saying not just, “look, you’re doing better,” but “look, here are your actual numbers of how you’re doing better and you have made two years of progress in one year.”

ES: So what are they testing?  Reading comprehension or vocabulary or what measures do you use on a week to week basis and year over year?

AS: The state tests are comprehension – well, they say they’re comprehension, but they’re obviously vocabulary too because if you don’t know the vocabulary words that are in the story, then you’re not going to comprehend it.  So, primarily comprehension because it’s the easiest to assess – you give us something to read, you ask us questions.  If they answer something right, they comprehended it. 

We also do fluency, so how fast they can read.  It’s a big thing people are pushing, first to make kids more efficient as readers.  Because if they’re real slow, they just don’t get things done; they give up.  “There’s no way I’ll ever be able to finish it, so why even start?”

But also, for a lot of kids who are real slow, it becomes a memory issue.  By the time they’re done reading something, it’s been so long since they started it they have no idea what happened at the beginning.  So we want to help them with their fluency.

ES: Also, with that, if you’re focusing so much on the effort of just reading the words mechanically, sometimes you don’t internalize any of it.  If I’m reading out loud, I don’t focus on the meaning of the words. 

I remember in middle school or high school, if I had to read something out loud and the teacher would ask a question about what I had just read, I would have to read it back really quickly silently to myself in order to know what I just read out loud.  If I’m reading words out loud, I’m focusing on pronouncing them and putting the accent in the right place, not on what the words are.

AS: I know I didn’t take pretty much any science once I didn’t have to take it anymore, but the one science class I took in college, I remember that textbook being impossible, like it was in a foreign language.  Just because I was so unfamiliar with that kind of text, there wasn’t any vocabulary that I knew, there wasn’t any plot or chronological order to carry me along, so it was really challenging. 

And that’s the sort of thing I talk to teachers about, saying, you know, someone may be a fabulous reader in English, they might be able to read any novel you give them, but that does not mean they’re going to be successful reading the chemistry textbook.  Or for someone who loves science, even if they don’t do well in Language Arts classes, and his English teacher says “man, is he a slow reader,” he might do very well with that textbook because he has content knowledge and interest that would carry him along.

ES: It’s great that they have you to help with all of this.  It’s even more like that when you get to college – well, then you’re just kind of on your own – but the professors are not great at teaching necessarily, they’re great researchers in their area.

AS: Right, because they’re content area experts.

That’s the nice thing about my job – I have three structured classes a day, and then the other periods are free to meet with students, meet with teachers, meet with parents…  I have colleagues who are at different schools teaching classes five out of seven classes a day and have minimal time for consultation.  I like the teaching, but I feel like the consultation stuff is almost more valuable.  I’m glad I have time to do both.

ES: Sounds like it’s a great balance.  Thanks so much for teaching us so much about reading.  And for anyone still reading at this point, congratulations on your superior fluency and literacy skills!