70% of students in 8th grade are not reading proficiently at grade level. There are numerous causes for this staggering and absurd reality, and there are plenty of changes that must be put in place in the earlier years of education to lower this number. However, secondary interventionists are tasked with supporting students in that 70%, and there are a number of challenges that occur in intervention in the older grades. Typically I think complaining or listing all of the issues with something without any kind of solution is not the healthiest, or most helpful practice. However, if you have come to this specific post looking for an easy checklist of problem-fixers, you are going to be disappointed. The lack of easy solutions in this post is not due to a lack of desire, research, or effort; rather it is the reality that messy problems most often do not have perfect, step by step solutions. My purpose for this post is to 1. validate teachers who are feeling perplexed, burned out, confused, uncertain, and defeated 2. encourage them to keep doing the hard work with possibly a few new tidbits of understanding 3. inform anyone outside of the world of middle school reading intervention why there isn’t a quick, simple ‘five step plan and you’re on your way answer’ for many of the challenges in this arena. 

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1. What is reading intervention? What does primary reading intervention look like?

 

Reading intervention is the practice of identifying and attempting to close the gaps students may have in their own reading abilities and the grade level content they are expected to access and master in the general education classroom. Every state, district, and school runs their intervention programs a bit differently, so I will outline what my experience has been in the elementary intervention world. 

 

Step 1-Assess all Kindergarten-Third Grade students using benchmark materials that assess phonemic awareness, nonsense word fluency, and oral reading fluency with grade level passages

Step 2- Determine who is not meeting benchmark and administer additional assessments to those students to identity more specifically where the gaps are (i.e. what phonemic awareness and phonics skills are lacking/struggling)

Step 3-Group like students

Step 4-Teach between 6-10 groups a day of about 3-7 students who are working on the same phonemic awareness or phonics skill

Step 5-Use evidence based practices like explicit instruction, modeling, multimodal practice, immediate feedback, etc. 

Step 6-reassess and regroup about once a month 

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     2. How is middle school reading intervention different than primary?

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Figuring out the gaps

1. There are many more students in a middle school than in an elementary school, and usually there are less reading specialists positions, so assessing every student 1:1 like I did in elementary school is not usually feasible or really even helpful. Therefore, we have to decide on another way to screen students so that we can identify who may need extra support. The fastest and most accessible way to do this is through an online diagnostic test. Students take a diagnostic test three times a year online that gives them a number of vocabulary, word study, and comprehension questions, then it calculates a score or “grade level” the student scored at. This has many benefits and is somewhat accurate. However, I have found that these diagnostics aren’t always reliable because some students have test anxiety, some get bored and decide to complete it too quickly, some students lose focus, or some do not understand the importance of the information so they may not take it seriously. 

2. In order to figure out who really does need reading support vs. who solely scored low on the diagnostic, I take a few days (with a sub in my classes), and administer three additional assessments to students: grade level oral reading fluency, multisyllabic nonsense word phonics screener, and the MAZE comprehension assessment. Using benchmark scores, I determine the students who would benefit from reading support. 

 

Grouping students 

1. Scheduling → I teach five periods a day, so that limits the amount of groups in that way, but sometimes even if students should be grouped together for specific skills, other needs in their schedule may trump that (their elective class, class sizes, etc.)

2. Instructional focus / need in middle school intervention is incredibly broad. 

   1. I could write an entire post on this one area, but essentially, phonics gaps become more confusing as students get older because they have learned to memorize a LOT of words even if they don’t have a solid phonics background, so many of the patterns/practice words may seem too easy to them (more on this in the motivation/buy in section). They have been exposed to so many words and patterns by this point in their educational careers that they may have some patterns mapped in their brains that are actually further along in most scope + sequences than some of the patterns they do not have mapped. If you have no idea what I am talking about, I will give you an example: 

      1. In first grade, you review short vowel sounds (closed syllables), learn the silent-e pattern, and may begin to learn vowel teams. In first grade intervention, it is assumed that if a student does not know their short vowels, they likely do not have a strong grasp on silent-e or vowel teams either. However, in middle school, this is not the case. To keep with the analogy, students may know some of their short vowels, not silent-e, and some vowel teams. 

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Materials and Curriculum

1. A huge challenge in secondary and even intermediate intervention is finding the balance between materials that fit the students' needs and interests. Most phonemic awareness and phonics curricula, games, and activities that addresses intervention needs are designed for K-3rd grade students. Decodable texts, which are necessary to apply the skills being taught in intervention, contain plots, characters, and information, that older students often deem "childish". There are dozens of fantastic curricula and materials based on the Science of Reading research for elementary instruction: 95% Group, UFLI, Heggerty, Open Court, Florida Center for Reading Research, and more. As students get older, their interests and maturity grow, but their reading proficiency may not keep up. This presents a challenge for secondary reading interventionists to provide academically appropriate instruction while keeping material engaging and interesting. REWARDS and 95% group have materials designed for older students in intervention, but many teachers have opted to create their own materials for teaching multisyllabic word decoding, morphology, and texts. Chat GPT is a tool that can generate texts for students to apply their syllable knowledge or morphology knowledge. Click here for secondary science of reading materials and activities that I use in my classes: https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Multisyllabic-Phonics-Anchor-Charts-Word-Lists-and-Practice-Pages-11116160

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Comprehension Intervention

     1. Identifying gaps and grouping students based on comprehension skills is something I have not mastered or even gotten close to cracking. I’ll explain more about the complexity of comprehension below, but for the same reasons it is multifaceted to teach, it is also to identify and group. 

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         3. How do you build comprehension?

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The heart of the matter! We know based on research that if students struggle with decoding and/or fluency, comprehension will suffer. Middle school students need to be decoding at around a 98% accuracy rate on grade level texts to be easily accessing meaning. I have many students who are in the low 90s-97% range who need some brush ups on multisyllabic patterns and morphology. However, some students are decoding accurately yet still scoring years below grade level, so we know comprehension is what is lacking-but, what does that really mean?

 

As students get older and texts become more complex, students are expected to answer skill-based questions regarding the text: main idea, supporting details, plot, cause and effect, compare and contrast, word choice, synonyms and antonyms, author’s purpose, vocabulary in context, sequencing, characterization. Many of these questions demand a complex understanding of the text.  Whether or not we should be teaching these skills by grouping students and focusing on commonly missed questions types is up for debate. What we know we should do though, is vigorously model think alouds and these comprehension strategies for students even in the upper and secondary grades.

 

If you look up “comprehension strategies,” there are numerous resources for younger students to practice the 5-10 key strategies: predicting, visualizing, asking questions, making connections, summarizing, inferring, analyzing, evaluating, and monitoring understanding. All of these strategies are useful, effective, and are often modeled consistently in K-3 classrooms. The issue is that once students enter intermediate and secondary grades, the comprehension workload becomes increasingly independent even if students are not ready or equipped. 

 

Why can’t intermediate or secondary English teachers just read everything aloud and model these strategies with more difficult texts? 

1. It is true that older grade teachers can and should be spending a significant amount of time reading, modeling, and thinking aloud with complex texts. However, these texts take more time to read and model than texts in primary grades, and time is a barrier. In addition, secondary teachers are not trained adequately on the science of reading acquisition, so some teachers may be operating out of unawareness. Many secondary teachers may not realize that their students struggle with reading as much as teachers in elementary do because 1. Secondary teachers do not listen to their students read aloud very often 2. Secondary CCSS assume that students have mastered foundational reading standards even when they have not 3. Struggling on a comprehension assessment can be the result of a number of issues. Lastly, as texts become more difficult, writing and discussion also become more pressing in the older grades, so ELA teachers must decide how to prioritize their short class periods.

 

The impact of background knowledge, content knowledge, and vocabulary on comprehension are profound. The strategies discussed above help us access new information found in texts, but they don’t make up for a lack of content knowledge or vocabulary. There are a number of reasons students may lack in these areas, including a lack of resources at home/privilege or limited exposure to texts. Imagine two different scenarios. Scenario one: There is a child whose parents are both college educated, one works full time in business and the other as a nurse. Both are home by 5:00 PM during the week and off most weekends. At home, the family sits around the dinner table and discusses their days, current events, or other topics that come up. The kids participate in sports where they travel for tournaments, clubs/Girl/Boy Scouts where they go to museums, camps, and plays, and the family takes a few vacations a year. The parents read to the children daily when they were young, they consistently use academic language, and they help them with their homework every night if needed. The family watches movies and documentaries together, and the parents are both avid readers and learners. When the student reads books or articles at school about sports, the outdoors, history, business, or the medical field, there is personal experience to connect to. Their vocabularies are robust from listening to their parents and being read to for years. Scenario two: There is a child who lives in a single parent home. The parent works two jobs, working late into the evening at least four days a week. The child usually comes home from school to an empty house, so they make snacks or dinner and play video games for a few hours. The child plays on the school basketball team, but travel/club sports are too expensive and hard to get to alone. When the child was younger, he was often taken care of by relatives and a babysitter. The child has traveled out of the state once but has never been on an airplane. The weekends consist of sleeping in, playing video games, and occasionally playing basketball at the rec center down the street. The child was read to occasionally, but not consistently. When the child reads an article or a book about the medical field, or camping, or a foreign country, or business, there is little personal experience to connect to. When the student has homework or reading they don’t understand, they can call their friends or wait until the next day to ask their teacher. The disparity between these two students has nothing to do with intelligence or effort, but it has an effect on their access to information, knowledge, and connections to texts.

 

Students may also struggle with comprehension because they have had limited exposure to texts. Imagine being asked/forced to do something for twelve years on a daily basis that is difficult/that you do not enjoy doing. Many of our students feel this way about reading. When something is hard, and it is not getting easier, unless we have an incredibly motivating reason, most of us will avoid it or complete it by doing the bare minimum. This creates a vicious cycle, however, because without consuming and interacting with texts often, we are not going to improve our background knowledge and vocabulary at the rate that is needed for success. 

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These complex, systemic problems cannot be solved overnight or even in a one year intervention class. Improvement may look different for every student. Background knowledge, content knowledge, and vocabulary must be taught both explicitly and implicitly. There are many research supported strategies for activating background knowledge, teaching new content and expanding vocabulary, but it isn't as structured or scripted as teaching phonics or decoding. There also isn't as clear of an assessment that can demonstrate growth in those areas. Modeling is underestimated in its effect on comprehension. Click here for some comprehension anchor charts and activities to establish content knowledge, background knowledge, vocabulary, and strategies: 

1. Reading Strategies Poster

2. Background Knowledge Activity

3. Topic, Theme, Main Idea, Author's Purpose Anchor Charts

4. Prefixes Bingo

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    4. What role does motivation or buy in play?

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Students often feel unmotivated for reading intervention classes because they feel defeated by school being so hard for so many years. If school has consistently been difficult, there are likely negative feelings associated with school and teachers. Reading intervention in secondary schools usually takes the place of a nonacademic class like PE or an elective. This can be frustrating for students who already experience anxiety, anger, defeat, and boredom with academic classes. On the other end of the spectrum, some students do not realize that they may need reading intervention. In primary grades, many students who are receiving phonics intervention are reading at extremely low accuracy rates-some reading less than half of the words correctly. In middle school, however, students can qualify for intervention if reading below benchmark, which is 98% accuracy. In order for maximum comprehension to occur, 98% of words need to be read correctly. This may mean that students are reading a majority of words correctly but are stumbling over difficult, multisyllabic, or unknown words. Students may not recognize this as impeding their comprehension even though it is. Students may also decode accurately without engaging with the text in a meaningful and comprehensive way. If students do not know what strong readers do while reading, they may not realize their lack of engagement or critical thinking is problematic. 

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     5. What about executive functioning and behavior?

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This section could really be a post on its own, but this article wouldn’t be complete without mentioning this complex struggle. Unfortunately, academic struggles, social-emotional struggles, and home-environment struggles often coincide. It is difficult to pinpoint which of those is the initial perpetrator-sometimes there is a causation and sometimes not. When both academic and emotional struggles are occurring, it is often a negative cycle of both areas making the other worse until a strong positive change occurs in one of the areas. 

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There is research that shows the connection between students with reading difficulties and students with problem behaviors. Part of the problem is that many reading interventionists are experts in their field but not in addressing difficult behaviors and vice versa. Many times, there are not enough para educators to address all of the behavior needs in schools. 

Therefore, intervention teachers are tasked with supporting a high number of students with reading challenges along with chronic absences, anxiety, defiance disorders, poor executive functioning, trauma, behavior outbursts, a high number of suspensions, etc. Many of these behaviors will result in the student being removed from the classroom, which is often necessary, but as a result they are missing their much needed instructional time. 

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    6. This all sounds quite daunting. What do we do?

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There aren’t any perfect answers, but some of these strategies have made my classes run smoothly and effectively given the circumstances.

 

Step 1: Assess grade level fluency and accurately, syllable type knowledge, multisyllabic decoding, and comprehension. Standardized tests can be a first screener (definitely do not tell the whole story or provide necessary instructional details), Acadience/DIBELS for fluency and accuracy, PSI nonsense word multisyllabic assessment, San Diego Quick Assessment or the REWARDS pretest, MAZE comprehension test, QRI, or a series of grade level NewsELA or CommonLit passages and quizzes. 

 

Step 2: If you can group students into instructional needs classes, do it!! I can’t, but it would be much easier if this was a possibility. Even something as simple as all of the students who didn’t pass the fluency/syllable type/decoding tests in the same classes and the students who did but struggle with comprehension in the same classes would be helpful.

 

Step 2 If you cannot group: 10-15 minutes of WIN (what I need) time. My striving decoders work with me on syllable splitting, vowel sounds, suffixes, etc. Students who do not need decoding intervention choose a NewsELA article and apply comprehension strategies to it.

 

Step 3: Whole class vocabulary practice-we study 5 Latin or Greek root words every two weeks and practice using context clues, word chains, word sorts, morpheme matrices, Frayer models, bingo, scavenger hunts, passage reading, and sentence writing with these words.

 

Step 4: Whole class comprehension-the last 15 minutes or so of every class I read our class novel aloud to students as they follow along in their book or on the document camera. I model inflection, vocabulary in context, questioning, inferring, connecting, wondering, visualizing, characterizing, summarizing, and analyzing. We usually complete some type of graphic organizer every few chapters together as a class.

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     7. Other tips

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• Address why this class exists, eligibility for being in the class, feelings and stereotypes about the class, discuss how the brain is connected to reading, and show many examples of successful people who needed reading support.

• Lead with curiosity and kindness-many students sleep, forget their materials, are angry when they come in, come in late, etc. I try hard (and often fail) to ask questions rather than assume. 

• Agenda, learning goals, due dates, and materials needed on the board everyday

• Use whiteboards/markers/colored pencils-they like getting off their screens sometimes

• Progress monitor and show them their growth/email their parents about improvement-many of these students rarely receive any praise at school.

• Leniency on due dates-there are grades in my class, but I am looking for mastery over timeliness-some people may have different opinions on this.

• Routines 

• Be objective when students are misbehaving. Give 2 options, and if students refuse, send them to the office. I’ve had to work hard to stop trying to argue with students. 

• Get to know them (y’all already know this) Click here for a free Get to Know You sheet: https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/An-Open-Book-Get-To-Know-You-Sheet-10731185

• Email parents/document 

• Walk around the room all the time when they are working independently.

• Spend time building and activating background knowledge-don’t skip this!!

• Change it up with a game or kinesthetic activity 

• Model, model, and model more!!

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