One of education's most stubborn problems is how to reach the growing number of students who have not been successful in learning how to read under traditional skills-based or discovery learning reading programs. These students' problems only get worse with each year that we fail to meet their reading needs.
In the Montgomery County, Maryland, Public Schools System, we asked ourselves, “How can we help these students acquire the attitudes, habits, and tools that will help them become successful independent readers and learners?” We responded by developing a program called, “Students Achieving Independent Learning” (SAIL).
Dozens of teachers, trained in summer programs for low-achieving students, use SAIL year-round as their reading comprehension program with students of all abilities, and one elementary school has implemented SAIL in all classrooms in grades 1–6.
Real Reading
After 10 years of innovative curriculum development (Schuder 1986), we had made dramatic improvements in the curriculum and established a literate, thinking environment as the goal of instruction in grades K–8. But we were still having difficulty delivering meaning-centered reading instruction to our lowest-achieving students. In traditional classrooms, the poorest readers still spent most of their time on isolated, low-level skills in boring textbooks or working on ditto sheets. They rarely had opportunities to practice reading as their successful peers did. It was evident that low expectations were breeding low performance.
Rather than looking for deficits in our lowest-achieving students, in effect blaming them for our failure in program implementation, we set out to see what would happen if we radically changed the goals, curriculum focus, and delivery of instruction for them. Instead of only teaching them the “objectives” in the curriculum or “remediating” their skill deficits, we decided to explicitly teach these students how to read. After all, if students are already a year or more behind in “skills,” insisting that they “master” all the skills in sequence merely guarantees that, short of a miracle, they will never catch up.
Because our aim was to help students become successful independent readers and learners as soon as possible, we developed a strategies-based program that emphasized the whole reading process. We taught students to use a simple but comprehensive repertoire of reading strategies derived from pioneering theoretical work by Collins and Smith (1982). To deliver the instruction, we adopted the concept of cognitive apprenticeships (Collins et al. 1989) to guide teacher-student-text interactions. We also modified a model of explicit instruction that Pearson and Gallagher (1983) had found to result in large achievement gains across many studies.
SAIL became an implementation strategy for our meaning-based, integrated language arts curriculum. “Come SAIL with us,” we say to our lowest-achieving students and their teachers as we beckon toward the blue waters of real reading (Bergman 1992).
Teaching Reading as a Decision-Making Process
To promote understanding of the processes of reading and to create a model of reading instruction, we organized and taught the strategies by traditional stages of the reading process: (1) getting ready to read, (2) before reading, (3) while reading, (4) after reading. Within these stages, we grouped the strategies by the kinds of decisions readers need to make (for example, What should I do to see how well I met my purpose for reading?). For each decision point, we developed a prompt to stimulate conscious decision-making. We then presented the strategies to students as possible responses to these prompts. Our intent was to raise students' consciousness of the strategic responses that successful readers make and to provide our teachers and students with a simple conceptual framework for these strategies.
Getting Ready to Read
Setting personal goals. For unsuccessful students, school is often a dimly understood necessity imposed by adults. These students frequently have no clear motivation for reading. In the SAIL program, the teacher probes for personal commitment by asking each student. “Why do you want to learn to read?” or “Why do you want to become a better reader?” Students' responses vary widely. They say things like, “I want to read to my little brother,” “I want to get smart,” “I want to be an astronaut,” or “I want to be able to find the nearest McDonalds when I'm hungry.” All these responses are accepted and valued. They are places to begin—attempts to find the fit between curriculum and personal aspirations.
Understanding the reading process. Not only must students articulate a personal commitment to reading, but they must also understand what reading is about. When asked “What is reading?” or “What do you do when you read?” a typical response is, “I read the words.” Weak readers often think that mouthing words correctly or recognizing individual words is all that is required in reading.
To convince students that constructing meaning is the core activity of reading, we always have them read for gist when they first encounter a text. From time to time, we discuss the whole reading process, even with 1st graders. We start with their personal goals, relate their goals to reading for meaning, and talk about what they have to do to construct meaning when reading. These discussions reveal critical personal insights and common misconceptions. It takes time for weak readers to construct their understanding of reading, but it is time well spent.
Before Reading
Establishing a purpose for reading. Once students know that reading is a personally beneficial, meaning-making activity and have some functional understanding of reading processes, they are ready to set an authentic purpose for reading a specific text. To prod them, teachers may ask, “Why do you want to read this?” Students may say, “for fun,” “to get the idea (the gist of the story),” “to find... (specific facts),” or “to find out where Horton put the egg.” These are beginning students' purposes for reading. More skillful readers have complex, multiple purposes for reading that often change while reading.
Selecting an appropriate text. As a sign of their independence, we want students to self-select texts as early and as often as possible. We also want them to know what kinds of texts they are selecting and to recognize important structural features of texts someone else selects for them, so they can satisfy school-imposed and personal purposes for reading. For example, in the integrated language arts curriculum, students are taught story genre and structure. SAIL teaches students to recognize and use story structure and genre in satisfying their own reader needs, including the simple joys of reading, recognizing, understanding, and remembering. Story structure becomes a reader's tool rather than an abstract curriculum end in itself.
Deciding how to process the text. A striking characteristic of many unsuccessful readers is the inflexible, dogged manner in which they move through text, attending to nothing but surface structure. To break this dysfunctional, text-processing behavior, we change the goal from accurate oral reading to getting the gist. Simultaneously, we force students to process authentic, interesting text much more rapidly, chunking large units of text.
We start with good stories at or above grade level that students can read for gist within one reading period. The number of difficult words students encounter compels them, with much instructional support, to utilize background knowledge as well as textual clues to construct meaning.
Because we use authentic children's literature that promotes student discussion and higher-order thinking, many whole-language-trained teachers readily accept SAIL as the reading comprehension portion of their program. They are particularly enthusiastic about the results with those students who need more than literate classroom environments. These students need explicit instruction, and SAIL meets that need.
While Reading
Choosing and using a monitoring strategy. In traditional classrooms, teachers probe during or after reading to see whether students remember details or understand what is happening. Teachers may ask, for example, “What was Little Red Riding Hood carrying?” or “Who was in grandmother's bed?” In other words, the teachers do the monitoring and evaluating; thus weak readers become passive and dependent on teacher initiatives.
We teach SAIL students a beginning set of four monitoring strategies: predict-verify-decide, visualize-verify-decide, summarize-verify-decide, and think aloud. We teach the first three strategies in conjunction with the think-aloud strategy to give everyone some access to thinking and decision-making processes (Bereiter and Bird 1985).
What's different here is the context (the whole reading process) in which we embed the monitoring strategies and the emphasis on the verification and decision-making processes. For example, given a student prediction, a SAIL teacher will invariably ask, “What makes you think...is going to happen?” (Schuder et al. 1989). SAIL students know they will have to support their responses and quickly learn that the use of background knowledge and sound reasoning are as important as the text itself in constructing meaning.
After using a monitoring strategy to check their understanding, students then have to decide whether to continue reading in the same fashion or to make some strategic adjustment in response to the alarm sounded by the monitoring strategy. There is no way a student can remain passive in this instructional environment. SAIL is a direct assault on the passivity that is a primary trait of unsuccessful readers (Johnson and Winograd 1985).
Choosing and using a problem-solving strategy. When confronted with an unknown word, weak readers usually “sound it out,” ask the teacher, or slowly and laboriously reread. Rather than coming to a full stop when reading for gist, SAIL students frequently clear up difficulties and ambiguities as they read on. When they read a selection initially, we want them to focus on the meaning of the text, not the pronunciation of individual words.
But interesting text usually contains “hard” words. When stopping to consciously decode, students interrupt their comprehension processes. Because we want students to function independently, we teach them to select and use strategies to solve problems like hard words. The three strategies we initially teach are: guess; ignore the word and read on; or go back and reread. None of these responses requires teacher presence, nor do they unduly interrupt the reader's train of thought.
After Reading
Choosing and using an appropriate evaluation strategy. After reading, students traditionally answer a set of questions provided by the teacher, do an activity related to the selection (for example, draw a picture), take a text, or do an activity tangentially related to reading (such as a phonics exercise). After reading, SAIL students determine how well they have achieved their purpose for reading, what they will do if they haven't met their purpose, and what they learned—in terms of both product and process. When reading for gist, students ask, “What was the story/text about?”
Pausing after reading to consolidate their understanding is extremely important to weak readers. It is equally important to ask what they learned about reading processes after reading.
Classroom Use of the Strategies
Preparing to teach SAIL. Teaching reading as a decision-making process requires that teachers modify some traditional practices (Duffy and Roehler 1986, 1987; Pressley et al. 1989; Pressley, et al. 1992). Let's look at Ms. Schooner, a hypothetical but typical SAIL teacher, working with her students in a small reading group.
Ms. Schooner volunteered for SAIL training. This is her third year in the program. During her first year, she received five days of training and occasional modeling and coaching help from a trained reading teacher. In the second year, she had four days of training; and this year, her last year with support, she will train for three days.
Ms. Schooner consciously works at creating a positive classroom reading environment. She reads aloud daily. She assures that students read whole discourse every day. She has a “Drop Everything and Read” silent reading period to give students the opportunity to read or reread daily whether they meet with her or not.
Ms. Schooner talks with her students about the importance of reading in their lives. Early in the school year, each child identifies personal goals for reading, and the class puts up a “Why We Want To Be Better Readers” bulletin board. The students in Ms. Schooner's class understand that they are not “really reading” until what they read makes sense. They talk about what to do when they encounter material that they cannot read or do not understand.
When Ms. Schooner introduces a strategy to her students, she selects a story short enough to be completed in one session so students immediately experience getting the gist. She knows that students can read relatively difficult material if they are interested and have adequate support, so she selects a story on or above grade level with at least one clear and interesting conflict and resolution.
In preparing to teach, Ms. Schooner reads the story to herself to get the gist. She then rereads, looking for places to predict, visualize, or summarize and for places where background knowledge could be tapped. She decides which parts of the story she will model, using “think aloud,” and which parts she will coach, using prompts. Ms. Schooner, now thoroughly familiar with the text, is ready to focus her attention on individual student responses and teachable moments.
Teaching SAIL. Before beginning to read, Ms. Schooner discusses students' purposes for reading, why they selected the text, and the processing strategies they plan to use. When introducing a strategy, she identifies it as the focus of the lesson, mentioning other strategies with less fanfare, as appropriate. She addresses vocabulary and background knowledge during and after, not before, reading because she wants her students to be able to read when there is no teacher around to pre-teach.
Ms. Schooner takes the first turn, reading aloud to the students, and modeling the use of strategies as she reads. Then, as students take over the reading, she coaches by periodically interjecting a prompt (for example, “What are you thinking?”). She has taught her students that the information they use to support their responses can come from the text or from their background knowledge. Students learn that there are no “right” answers—that “errors” are opportunities for learning. Students talk about what they are reading as they read. Genuine literate discussions occur even in primary grade classrooms. Students frequently “pair and share.” They also keep learning logs in which they record their thoughts about content and process.
When they have finished reading, Ms. Schooner works with students on vocabulary and on decoding words that proved to be problems, always returning to the place in the story where these words were used.
Ms. Schooner often provides opportunities for students to reread. She knows that if weak readers always read new material, they struggle with each selection, never experiencing successful, fluent reading (Allington 1983). Students, especially the most hesitant readers, do choral reading frequently to get a feel for proficient oral reading.
Wind in their SAILs. Over time, Ms. Schooner does less and less modeling and coaching on any given strategy. She posts the prompts on charts and frequently points instead of voicing a prompt. More and more, students take responsibility for monitoring their own understanding. More and more, students use specific strategies and background knowledge independently as they read.
Seeing high-risk students select and use appropriate strategies while reading independently is tremendously satisfying for Ms. Schooner. Her students have set sail on a voyage to literacy that should last them a lifetime.
