I'm a High School Reading Resource Teacher. What Should I Do?

reading intervention
17 July, 2021
30 Comments

Teacher question:

I’ve been hired as a high school reading resource teacher. The school has a lot of commercially prepared intervention programs. Which ones would you use? Any other advice for me?

Shanahan response:

First things first.

I’d look at my data to find out how far behind my students are.

High school teachers often tell me that they have beginning readers in their classes, but when we look at the kids’ data, we find that just isn’t the case (most of the time).

Not that these students read well.

But most high school teachers aren’t equipped to distinguish a fourth-grade from a first-grade reader. Since both those students would struggle mightily with a high school textbook, the distinction doesn’t matter much to the classroom teacher.

For the resource teacher, however, it is a bigger deal. Those super low students would likely need explicit decoding instruction and they might even qualify for some more intensive special education assistance.

In my experience, super low readers do exist in high schools, but usually in fairly small numbers. Those aren’t the kids who will be your main clients. They do need very basic reading instruction with a heavy focus on decoding and should be placed in a special class for that.

Your caseload will more likely skew towards those with instructional reading levels ranging from 4^th-8^th grade (the lower achieving your school is, the larger the proportion of students that will be in the lower half of that range).

I don’t make recommendations of commercial programs (conflicts of interest) so can’t help you there. There are a couple of good guides out there (Deshler, 2007; C. Shanahan, 2005), though they are getting a bit long in the tooth. Also, I’d recommend that you evaluate those programs against the What Works Clearinghouse guidance.

Other advice?

I’d advise that you skip the intervention package.

I’m not against commercial programs in principle, but I don’t think they’ll provide your students with best support.

I was an elementary resource teacher and remember it vividly. The kids struggle with reading in their classes, so a teacher refers them for extra reading help. The resource teacher tests the kids and then teaches reading to them at their supposed reading levels. That may mean that a fifth-grade student works on second and third grade reading passages in the resource room. The resource teacher is happy with the youngster’s performance, but the teacher and student are frustrated because the classroom struggle goes on despite the reading help.

Being perfectly honest, I doubt that you’ll raise many students from a fourth-grade to a ninth-grade reading level this semester!

Studies suggest that reading interventions with high school and college students simply don’t have much of an impact on their learning (Bohr, et al, 1994; Kemple, et al, 2008).

What would I do?

I’d try to teach reading using the books those students need to read in their other classes.

To make this work, I’d have to coordinate with the content teachers.

Let’s say, for example, that you’ve decided to focus on teaching kids to read with their social studies texts this report card marking. I’d need to know which chapters and other texts the students were going to cover over the next 9 weeks. Getting specifics about the planned schedule is important because I’d want to address those texts prior to their introduction in the classroom.

Doing that puts would put these students on a more equal footing in their classes. It also might reduce some of the anxiety these students often feel about their classroom work.

What would I do with these texts?

The same things that I’d do if you were working from a commercial program.

I’d teach vocabulary explicitly, focusing on words from those social studies texts.

I’d teach oral reading fluency, using the texts students will be expected to read in class.

I’d teach reading comprehension with those materials, too – analyzing text structures, practicing summarization strategies, and discussing and writing about the content.

Students with that support from the resource teacher should be more likely to succeed in their content classes – since they’d get a double opportunity to learn the materials from those classes, and there is no reason to believe that this teaching wouldn’t improve their reading levels simultaneously.

Often interventions undermine kids’ self-confidence. Just assigning them to a remedial class may be enough to make them assume that the school thinks they’re stupid. Then, the resource teacher, trying to improve their reading levels, introduces a fifth-grade book (a “baby book” for a 14-year-old) and the students both feel insulted and dumb as dirt (Lupo, et al, 2019).

The approach that I’m recommending doesn’t have that problem. It would simultaneously build reading skills, improve content learning, and increase academic confidence. The use of classroom texts should provide these students both with respect and a double dose of the classroom text coverage.

Yep, in high school, I’d create a class or two for those kids who needed basic decoding instruction. But for the others, my focus would be on enabling them to take on the high school curriculum more successfully through their reading. My program evaluation would look at both the students’ pre- to post-reading levels AND their classroom grades.

Good luck. Have a productive year.

References

Bohr, L., Pascarella, E., Nora, A., Zusman, B., Jacobs, M., Desler, M., & Bulakowski, C. (1994). Cognitive effects of two-year and four-year colleges: A preliminary study. Community College Review, 22, 4-11.

Deshler, D.D. (2007). Informed choices for struggling adolescent readers: A research-based guide to instructional programs and practices. Newark, DE: International Literacy Association.

Kemple, J. J., Corrin, W., Nelson, E., Salinger, T., Herrmann, S., & Drummond, K. (2008). The enhanced reading opportunities study: Early impact and implementation findings (NCEE report no. 2008-4015). Washington, DC: Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance.

Lupo, S., Tortorelli, L., Invernizzi, M., Ryoo, J.H., & Strong, J.Z. (2019). An exploration of text difficulty and knowledge support on adolescents’ reading comprehension. Reading Research Quarterly, 54(4), 2019.

Shanahan, C. (2005). Adolescent literacy intervention programs and chart. Naperville, IL: Learning Point Associates. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED490970.pdf

Comments

See what others have to say about this topic.

Rachel Aug 14, 2021 06:13 PM

One thing I realized with using a commercially produced program, is that the more you are actively involved with the kids as they go through it, the more overall success you will see. These programs can claim to be self-directed for the students, but these kids often need help recognizing that small gains add up. I think using a program gives you a systematic and organized starting point so you can save you energy to take an active interest alongside your students to encourage their efforts and celebrate their accomplishments.

Nancy Duggan Jul 27, 2021 09:45 PM

Unless the student has severe intellectual impairment- the text of content areas needs to 100 percent accessible to HS struggling readers, with AT if necessary, that is the fact of ADA/504 law: equal access to all the challenging curriculum.
So the specialized reading and writing instruction-that is needed - in all the possibilities from PA to phonics or fluency etc.. - needs to be additional and when appropriate supporting that goal for ELA literature that is at grade level and across content areas.
The struggle for this special Ed teacher is that in many cases they have one period to review all the vocabulary and content of all the courses, scaffold writing and teach missing skills, rarely in HS do we see the scheduling and collaborative work needed to do all this.
Improving reading and writing takes time for direct instruction and collaboration to allow and support transfer of skill practiced across the curriculum as well as skill development in direct instruction, and support with AT to ensure full access to the content not modified reduced content.

Timothy Shanahan Aug 14, 2021 07:45 PM

Rachel--

Commercial programs can provide teachers with a strong framework and can save a lot of valuable teacher prep time... but they cannot teach... You need a teacher to support kids through these kinds of programs.

tim

Robin McConnell Jul 17, 2021 05:41 PM

I retired in 2020. My former principal offered me a remedial reading position four days a week at the middle school. Thank you for this article. It has given me great and useful information.

Mark Pennington Jul 17, 2021 05:42 PM

Tim,

It's not often that I disagree with the key point of your advice. However, this time I do. Having served as a high school and middle school reading specialist for the bulk of my educational career, I would concur that the doom and gloom research findings are spot on... if teachers follow the "band-aid" strategy of using grade-level textbooks (science, social studies, health, etc.) to teach reading.

What I've found is that assessment should determine instruction for older kids, just as with younger ones. The student composition of a high school intervention class is, indeed, diverse. You are probably right about reading grade-levels for most kids in remedial reading high school classes; however, the successful teacher will be one who differentiates instruction and that includes using text that will target specific skills indicated by the assessments--text that will challenge, but not overwhelm these vulnerable readers.

In any given year, I've found that some high school students will need explicit phonics practice; others have gaps in their phonemic awareness that must be addressed; still more have issues with multi-syllabic words; almost all have fluency issues. All have comprehension challenges because of the former deficits. Unless these needs are specifically addressed, struggling high school readers will be stuck at survival reading ability the rest of their lives. Realistically, these can't be addressed solely by teaching in the context of a textbook from a content class. There are no shortcuts in reading.

I whole-heartedly agree with you that high school teachers need to maintain student self-esteem. But we do have plenty of commercial options (take a look at mine!) that are specifically designed for older students.

Lastly, I agree with you (once again) that most high school students are "beginning readers" and that we can build on more mature oral language and reading skills. In my experience, for a lot of high school students, learning what they specifically need via targeted assessment and practice, it is not atypical to see post-tested multi-grade-level increases. They have some of the tools, but need the rest to get the job done. I believe we can make a difference in older, struggling readers.

Joan Sedita Jul 17, 2021 07:13 PM

As you point out, each student has his or her unique set of reasons why they they have difficulty with reading (and writing), and the intervention instruction therefore needs to vary based on those needs. In my experience with teaching, administering, and training secondary teachers about effective literacy instruction, I find that for students who have decoding issues (i.e., needing explicit, systematic instruction for phonics/spelling and advanced word study) a well-researched, published program is best. This is primarily because in order to teach phonics the teacher needs materials such as word lists, decodable text, phoneme-grapheme cards, etc. On the other hand, I agree with you that text already being read in content areas is what should be used to provide intervention instruction to address difficulty with vocabulary, and comprehension (including using writing to support reading comprehension). However, for this to work, intervention educators (and content teachers with whom they collaborate to help students apply skills in content settings) need professional development to learn how to provide this instruction. I think one of the reasons support educators ask for intervention programs is that they have not learned how to provide this kind of instruction, so they feel they need a published program that will show them what to do -- i.e., a teacher's guide that spells out each lesson and has workbooks for students to use. It's a lot harder to take a piece of social studies or science text and teach students how to annotate and read closely, take two-column notes, write a summary, use the context or word parts to figure out the meaning of an unfamiliar word, etc. But that's just what older students need. Also, collaborating with content teachers is another important piece to this. Too often students are taught strategies in a resource setting, but then they go down the hall to their content classes and never apply these strategies. When interventionists work with content teachers who are willing to help students apply the strategies during content instruction, there is a greater chance that the students will implement. The good news is that for over 25 years I have been training content teachers and interventionists to do just that, and I can tell you that it works!