Guthrie (2008) explains in no uncertain terms what’s needed to help older striving readers:
In the end, if we truly want struggling readers to improve their reading skills, schools and teachers must take drastic measures. School districts must begin to put money into texts. By allocating funds for high-interest books and by adjusting curricula to allow for the teaching of such novels, they can take the first step in this important process. Individual teachers must recognize that it is more beneficial to have every student in a class reading a book—despite its content and reading level—than it is to teach Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar to half of a class while the other half becomes more certain that reading is not for them.. Karen Tankersley (2005) notes that by the time striving readers enter middle school, they have endured many years of frustration and failure. As a result, they are often “skilled evaders who try to either ‘hide out or act out’ so they can avoid reading in front of their peers.” They also typically suffer from a crushing lack of self-confidence with little motivation to engage in an activity that they associate with embarrassment and failure. Motivation is highest when students feel competent, have sufficient autonomy, set worthwhile goals, receive specific feedback, and are affirmed by others (Harvey and Ward, 2017). Conversely, learning theorists John Hattie and Gregory Yates (2013) maintain that when students suffer “public humiliation, devastating test results, conflicts with teachers or peers, and ability grouping with very little chance of promotion,” they are likely to feel deflated and disengage with the work at hand with self-destructive results (Johnson, 2011). As researcher John Guthrie (2008) reminds us, “Reading engagement and reading achievement interact in a spiral. Higher achievers read more, and the more engaged these students become, the higher they achieve. Likewise, lower achievers read less, and the less engaged decline in achievement.” It’s the Matthew Effect—the rich get richer and the poor get poorer (Stanovich, 1986). For this reason, it’s imperative to maintain the highest expectations for all students and provide the exemplary instruction and rich, wide-ranging content that fosters intellectual curiosity and enables all students to achieve high academic and personal success. To this end, reluctant readers often thrive with thematically related text sets or series books. Students benefit from reading across a set of books that are conceptually linked; text sets or series books about the same set of characters automatically create a network of shared meaning that serves as a safety net for those students most in need. They more easily learn the big ideas and shared vocabulary related to a specific unit of study, and that, in turn, enables them to more easily read, write, and talk about the books they are reading. Ultimately, dramatically increasing the volume of free voluntary reading by striving readers—providing the books and magazines that will catch their attention and lure them into reading, and providing the instructional scaffolding they need to move forward with confidence—is the best way to help them overcome their challenges (Howard, 2018; Klein, 2018; Richardson and Lewis, 2018; Harvey and Ward, 2017).
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CHAPTER 1: READERS
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