EDU 1. For this week’s discussion, watch the youtube video regarding career technical education and the job hunt in America. Regardless of the grade you teach, identify three ways you can blend

Student Scenarios

Mike

When I met Mike, he was in ninth grade. He was shorter than most boys, didn’t play any organized sports but loved skateboarding, an when given the choice, sat at the back of the room, hunched down into his seat. He was retained in third grade and made barely passing grades throughout idle school. He was tested for resource classes in sixth grade and did not qualify since there was no significant difference between his achievement level and his IQ. He was a quiet young man who appeared to have mastered the art of being invisible. He rarely brought his books to class and used his notebook as a place to cram papers that he seldom looked at again. He resisted any reading aloud and generally refused to do so by just putting his head down on his desk or saying that he forgot his book. When he did read aloud just for me, it was slow, halting, and revealed an overreliance on sounding out words and little attention to comprehension.

Here is a transcript of his oral reading of the first four sentences of “The Gift of the Magi” by O. Henry, a story in his ninth-grade literature anthology. Mike’s words appear in italics above the actual words from the text:

On-one d-d-do-l-l-ar and, and eight-eighty-sev-eighty-seven c-e-nts.

One dollar and eighty- seven cents.

Th-that w-was all.

That was all.

And eight-six and six cents off it was in pen-pens pens saved

And sixty cents of it was in pennies. Pennies saved

one, one twi-two at a time. By b-b-bull, bulldozers, by the bulldozers the gro-groc-er and the

one and two at a time by bulldozing the grocer and the

veg-vegetar-veternarian man and the but-cher, butcher, man until one, one check, one check,

vegetable man and the butcher until one’s cheeks

got burned, burned up, with the si-slice, im-impo-impossible… of par-parts-pars-i-my.

Burned with the silent imputation of parsimony.

When asked what these four sentences were about, the responded:

I don’t know. [Pause] I guess, somebody, [pause] there was like a bulldozer, and somebody’s check, the check it got burned up, into parts. [Pause] I don’t know. [Long pause] You know I can’t read this stuff.

Mike needs help with both cognitive and emotional confidence. But specifically what cognitive help does he need? First, Mike does have problems with word recognition. He’s trying to sound out words a letter at a time and sometimes a syllable at a time. With multisyllabic words, he often makes up what the final syllables would be, perhaps to create a word he knows, or drops the final syllable entirely. He is reading through punctuation, not pausing at periods or, conversely, pausing where there is no end punctuation. He does know some sight words and does recognize some high-frequency words, but that gets lost in the slow reading rate and the misspoken words.

Second, there is some indication that while reading this text, he does try to make it make sense. That’s most apparent in the words he inserts while reading, words that are not a part of the original text. For example, where the text reads, “by bulldozing,” he decides the word is “bulldozer” and then inserts the article the, so he reads it, “by the bulldozer.” The insertion shows that he is attempting to make what he’s reading make sense at some level. Later, he reads, “one check got burned, burned up,” for “one’s cheeks burned.” Substituting “check” for “cheek,” he then inserts “got” and “up” to create the phrase “one check got burned up,” a phrase that makes good sense. When he had finished reading and I asked him to tell me what the passage was about, he continued to rely on that phrase and even tried to extend the meaning— “the check it got burned up, into parts”—by changing “parsimony” into “parts.” He then says, “I don’t know,” in an admission that the text really didn’t make sense to him. These slim indicators tell me that he does know that texts are supposed to make sense and he’s working—at least to some degree—to make that happen.

Finally, his comment, “You know I can’t read this stuff,” reminds me that Mike is no novice when it comes to facing difficult texts. He expects that he can’t do it, expects that I know he can’t do it, and doesn’t expect anything to change.

So, where do we start with a student like Mike? His most obvious problem was that decoding wasn’t automatic; therefore, he was a slow, disfluent reader. Helping him with word recognition was a priority. As his ability to quickly recognize words improved, his fluency and reading rate improved. As that happened, he had more cognitive energy to spend on comprehension. Then we began to see that Mike also had a very limited vocabulary. Spending time building that vocabulary became a priority. As his cognitive confidence began to improve, his emotional confidence began to grow.

Sharamee

Sharamee was a seventh grader who was facing retention for that grade. She was energetic, funny, and loved to talk. She was willingly read aloud and always volunteered for any sort of oral reading: reading directions, reading poems, reading the morning announcements, reading minutes from the student council meetings, reading selections from her literature book. Her oral reading was very fast, sometimes so fast that her words slurred together. When asked to slow down, she would vary her rate for a few words, then speed back up. Though a fast reader who could pronounce almost any word in almost any text, she did not have a lot of expression in her reading.

Though she enjoyed reading aloud, she rarely read silently. During sustained silent reading time, she would find many excuses to not read—everything from needing to go see the school nurse to saying she forgot her book. If she did get her book opened in front of her, it wasn’t long before she was writing nots or turning around to whisper to the person behind her. When asked why she didn’t like to read silently, she responded, “I just like to read aloud, you know, to say the words.” I asked her if, when she read silently, she heard the words in her mind. She said, “I don’t know. What do you mean hear them in my mind? If you want to hear it, you have to read it aloud.” If you aren’t sur what I mean by “hearing the words in your mind,” then reread this sentence and try not to hear the words. Can you, do it? Probably not. Most skilled readers “hear” the words of a text as easily (sometimes more easily) than they visualize a text. Many disabled readers, however, like Sharamee, claim they don’t hear anything when they read.

When her class read aloud the play “The Diary of Anne Frank,” Sharamee read the part of Anne. The teacher spent several days discussing the Holocaust, World War II, Hitler, and how some people helped Jews by hiding them. She talked at length about Anne and the diary she wrote. The class then spent several more days reading the play aloud. When they finished, I had the opportunity to interview Sharamee:

ME: What did you think about the play?

SHARAMEE: It was good.

ME: Yeah? What was good about it?

SHARAMEE: Uh, you know, just the play, it was good.

ME: What did you think about Anne?

SHARAMEE: About Anne?

ME: Yeah, you know, about what she went through?

SHARAMEE: I’m not sure. Like when?

ME: Do you remember what happened to Anne?

SHARAMEE: She got this diary. And there’s a play. And they hid, you know they hid, in the play. She has a sister.

ME: Remember how your teacher told you that Anne’s diary was published as a book, and how part of it was turned into the play you just read?

SHARAMEE: Uh-huh.

ME: Why do you think what she put in her diary was important enough to turn into a book or make into a play?

SHARAMEE: Because, uh, well it’s a play, you know, and she wrote this diary, because of the war, and then wrote a play. It was the war. She didn’t want there to be a war.

Later, I asked Sharamee if she was a good reader. “Oh, year, I’m real good,” she quickly replied.

“Why?” I asked.

“I just am. I can read real fast. The teachers always call on me to read.”

“So how well do you comprehend what you read?” I asked.

No reply.

“You know, when you’ve finished reading,” I explained, “do you understand what you were reading?”

“Well, sometimes that part’s a little hard. [Pause] But the reading part I do real good,” she said.

For Sharamee, reading was decoding. She came from an elementary setting that used a scripted phonics program. She learned many phonics rules and developed the ability to sound out words easily. What she didn’t learn to do, though, was know when a text was making sense, when it wasn’t, and what to do when the meaning was unclear. I didn’t need to spend any time working on word recognition skills; this child needed help with comprehension. She needed to learn to hear the text she was reading, to slow down and focus on the meaning of the text, to ask herself what was going on in the text.

Amy

Amy, an eighth grader, hated to read. On a reading interest survey she wrote, “Reading is my worst thing to do. I hate it.” When aske why, she repeatedly said, “It’s boring,” and “It’s a do-nothing” Amy made Cs and some Bs in her classes. She generally did her homework, though often didn’t complete it, but rarely entered into class discussions. When assigned a story or novel to read, she would read some of it and, once it was explained, would declare, “If it’s a really good story, I’ll read all of it.” When asked what would have to be in it to make it good, she said she didn’t know: “It just has to be good.” She also said that she never could find any good books to read and didn’t know what types of books interested her. When asked questions about a text, she could answer questions about characters’ names or the setting and could recall the correct order of events in the story; however, she had trouble answering anything other than literal-level questions. When asked what she did as soon as she realized the text was confusing her, she said “Do? I don’t know. I mean, what can you do? If you get confused, I guess you wait for the teacher.”

She saw herself as “an okay reader” but admitted, “I don’t try real hard with it because sometimes I just don’t get it and sometimes, it’s like, what’s to point? Most of it just seems boring and then some of it, sometimes it’s just too hard.”

Like Sharamee, Amy doesn’t need help with word recognition. Unlike Sharamee, she doesn’t need help with recalling information from a text. She does need help with making inferences, with reading beyond what the text offers at a literal level. Her repeated comments that reading is boring may be an indication that she has trouble visualizing the action. Her inability to define what makes a “good story” may show us she has little experience with a range of texts and needs help defining just what she likes to read.

As her teacher and I helped Amy with making inferences and visualizing, we also helped her clarify what types of stories she enjoyed. Three months later when asked what she liked to read, she quickly responded, “I really like books, like a love story, where someone has a problem, they make you sad but then you just love how they end.” She even could point out her favorite author: “I love Lurlene McDaniel. I’ve read five of her books since Christmas and they, they are the best.” Amy’s inability to find any type of book that interested her had kept her from reading during sustained silent books. As we developed her text confidence and worked on inferencing and visualizing, Amy began to enjoy reading and at the end of the year said that “reading can be okay, sometimes, with the right book.”

With each of these students, moving beyond “These kids can’t read” to defining what they could and couldn’t do helped focus instruction. Another factor that helped focus instruction was the constant awareness of what good readers do when they read.