Professional Learning for Busy Educators

In 2015, Minnesota’s Northfield Public Schools had a district-wide gut check. The pre-K-12 district serves 4000 kids, and that year a new state law requiring that all high school juniors take the ACT went into effect. The test results for Northfield were sobering: just under half the juniors failed to meet the ACT’s college-ready reading benchmark score of 22 out of a possible 36.

. . . by the time they finish high school, today’s students read 19% slower than their counterparts of 50 years ago.
“When we dug into the data, we noticed that a sizable percentage of kids were just missing the benchmark—they were one, two, three points below,” says Hope Langston, Northfield’s Director of Assessment Services. The main hurdle? In the reading section, students were struggling to grasp the content and answer the questions all within 35 minutes. “High school teachers told us many kids were having a harder time reading grade level content text,” says Langston. “They simply couldn’t read quickly enough to get through this level of material."

Northfield’s class of 2016, it turns out, reflects a distressing reality in the US: kids are much slower, less efficient readers than they used to be. A recent study sponsored by Reading Plus, an adaptive literacy intervention platform, found that by the time they finish high school, today’s students read 19% slower than their counterparts of 50 years ago.

"Once students learn how to sound out words, reading is easy. They can speak the words they see. But whether they understand them is a different question entirely. Reading comprehension is complicated. Teachers, though, can help students learn concrete skills to become better readers. One way is by teaching them how to think as they read.

Marianne Stewart teaches eighth grade English at Lexington Junior High near Anaheim, California. She recently asked her students to gather in groups to discuss books where characters face difficulties. Students could choose from 11 different books but in each group one student took on the role of "discussion director," whose task was to create questions for the group to discuss together. Stewart created prompts to help them come up with questions that require deep reading.

Marianne Stewart, English teacher at Lexington Junior High
This process of questioning while reading is one of a number of “cognitive strategies” Stewart teaches her students. The strategies focus on what research has shown to be the thought processes of good readers. Others include planning and goal-setting, tapping prior knowledge, making connections, visualizing and forming interpretations. By mastering these strategies explicitly, students learn that reading is an active process, not one in which they simply sound out words in their heads.

And it’s incredibly effective at improving their reading comprehension."

Annotating texts is not the most exciting tactic for reading comprehension. In my classroom experience, even the mention of the word annotate was met with looks of confusion or boredom. Traditional annotations have been students’ only interactions with the text. When students are asked to underline important parts of the texts, they will usually pick the first line that seems appealing or attempt to highlight the whole page of text with pretty-colored highlighters. Simply underlining the text will not meet the needs of our 21st-century learners.

Annotations are a critical strategy teachers can use to encourage students to interact with a text. They promote a deeper understanding of passages and encourage students to read with a purpose. Teachers can use annotations to emphasize crucial literacy skills like visualization, asking questions, and making inferences.