Teaching the Kids in the Hall: Kurt- Huh. Who knew?!?!

Kurt was a grade eight student in my class, slightly taller than the other boys mainly due to the fact that he had been retained a grade earlier in his elementary career. At thirteen, he was reading at a 4th grade level and experiencing general learning difficulties as a result. Where this may have made another student disengaged and more challenging to teach, Kurt was one of the nicest kids I ever taught.

In the few years prior to teaching Kurt, I had been reading and learning about teaching reading comprehension. My first book, I Read It But I Don't Get It by Cris Tovani, opened my eyes to a whole world of teaching that I never knew was possible. I was very aware of the fact that the students coming up to me in grades 7 and 8 were not all reading at grade level (I had been dilligently collecting data to prove it, but doing little in response) but I had never really known I could do anything about it before reading her book. Was it really possible to teach an adolescent to read? Wasn't it too late? I had thought that my best bet for these kids was to give them some coping strategies for all of the mountains of text they were sure to face in high school. The idea that I might actually be able to teach them to read was intriguing.

With a sense of optimism and a spirit of adventure I decided to test this out. I had been dabbling with teaching some comprehension strategies at the same time I had been learning more about boys' literacy. In the year Kurt was in my class, I had decided to engage in an action-research project wherein I took all of the grade 7 and 8 boys for the literacy block, leaving the girls to my teaching partner. My plan was to engage them with great texts, hands-on learning activities and to teach them a few comprehension strategies. In the three months of this project, I really hoped to improve their attitudes about reading thereby motivating them to practice more so that they could become better readers.

...and so began the testing! I conducted pre- and post- attitudinal surveys as well as tests of word recognition, oral reading and comprehension (using the Brigance Inventory). All initial tests confirmed what I knew in my heart: I had a class of mainly struggling readers who did not enjoy reading and were not excited to read more.

And, I have to say, the teaching was a thing of beauty! I turned the first month into SURVIVOR! We read survival stories, played survival games and plotted our own death-defying survival plans to escape numerous situations of peril. I was never more excited about my teaching and the boys responded in kind. I was sure I was onto something! I taught visualizing using descriptive texts from Jack London and Gary Paulsen. (During this time, Kurt was able to receive a little extra support from a literacy tutor with whom I collaborated so that she was providing additional practice opportunities for the strategies I was teaching.) Incidentally, Kurt ate the survival stuff up! He was an outdoorsy-kid, who wrote to me in his journals of the fort that he was building out of scrap materials on his property.

For the second month I planned a unit on Civil Rights that spanned the Underground Railroad to Martin Luther King, Jr. and decided to teach questioning as a reading strategy. These boys were reading everything I had- biographies of Malcolm X, stories of slavery- and they were even initiating conversations about what they were reading with each other in the hall! This had to be working! The third month didn't have a theme, but the focus was on inferring and I saved all of my best tricks for that instruction: graphic organizers, engaging short texts, etc.

Judgment Day! The three months went by quickly and it was time to run the post- survey and tests. I started with the attitudinal surveys, confident that my efforts would yield improvements in attitudes about reading. Survey says: BUBKAS! Their results were completely flat- no change. With a heavy heart, I proceeded to the reading tests. One by one, I was realizing that the boys were actually showing improvement in the three areas of their reading. In fact, thirteen of the twenty-six boys improved two or more grade levels in reading comprehension! This couldn't be right, could it?

And Kurt? He had sky-rocketed from reading at a grade 4 level to reading just beyond the 7th grade level... in just three months! Fearing I had completely messed up the data, I had a colleague repeat the tests with a number of students. The results held. It was recess and I ran outside without a coat to find Kurt. I approached him on the yard, arms crossed, very seriously, and said, "I have to ask you something. Do you think that you are a better reader now than you were three months ago?" He replied, "uhhh, ya". To which I challenged, "Really?!? You think you can read harder books now than you could just three months ago?" "Ya," he laughed nervously. "WHY?" I asked bewildered, "What made the difference?" All of the brilliant lessons that I had planned on predicting, questioning and inferring ran through my mind, the carefully-selected and engaging texts, the rich class discussions, the one-on-one coaching conversations... which of these gold nuggets that I threw out there would be the one he claimed as the difference-maker? He replied: "Well, now when I get to the end of a paragraph and I don't know what it meant, I just go back and read it again."

Really, Kurt? REALLY!?!? That's it? I realized I said this out loud when he responded, "Yup." All I could say was: "Well... it worked. Good job!" This was one of the strategies that we had discussed incidentally in discussing monitoring comprehension that he had been practicing with his tutor; and apparently, it made the difference because in three months, before high school, Kurt had succeeded in closing his reading comprehension gap by jumping more than three grade levels in reading.

Looking back on this, it is my surprise that it worked that is most interesting to me. After all of the reading that I had done, why didn't I believe that it would work? Hadn't I planned a whole action-research project on the very premise that it would? But, faced with the dramatic improvements that the data revealed, I was more inclined to believe I had somehow messed up the testing! This experience really taught me that "seeing is believing"; and, that with the hope of helping their students, many teachers will try just about anything that seems logical even if they don't actually believe it will work. It wasn't until I saw the results of my own students with my own eyes, that I actually believed it was possible to teach an adolescent to read.

Perhaps, the only person more surprised that it worked than me- was Kurt!