For 10 of the 20 years I spent as a classroom teacher, I faced a mysterious problem. Some of my younger students would meet the literacy benchmarks I was trained to apply, and at the end of the year, I would send them on, believing I had done my job well. But later, when they were in upper elementary or middle school, things would fall apart. They would begin to struggle and sometimes even be referred for reading evaluations. Obviously, it was frustrating for them, and it became a mystery for me. What am I doing wrong? I wondered.
As it turns out, I was missing a few things. Most importantly, I needed training in Structured Literacy. This framework emphasizes explicit, step-by-step instruction in literacy skills like phonics, rather than trusting students will develop those skills spontaneously during exposure to the written word. Finding this framework was a watershed moment in my teaching practice. In the second half of my career in the classroom, I also worked with students who demonstrated an adequate ability to decode words (or sound them out using phonemes) and adequate fluency, but who had language comprehension below grade level.
Investigating the science of reading in search of a solution, I learned about morphology, a core component of Structured Literacy that can help students quickly uncover the meanings of words. Now, many years later, after mistakes and breakthroughs, I provide morphology training to teachers within the Boston Public Schools district, which serves about 50,000 students.
This work has offered me a grim insight: many older students today lack a solid literacy foundation, partly because their teachers do not have the tools they need to teach, especially in the early phase. This is one reason that a historic one-third of 8th graders now fall below the “basic” level on the NAEP. But what’s happening in some of our classrooms in Boston Public Schools has also shown me that we are not powerless to help these students. Morphology and phonics-based instruction can rebuild reading from the ground up, enabling older students to meet the demands of the complex texts they tackle in high school and postsecondary coursework.
Hidden deficits
When you look at a word like unamazed, you might unconsciously break it into the prefix un, signaling negation, the root word amaze, which you know already, and the suffix ed, which tells you the word is a descriptor. In this process, you are relying on morphology. You’re analyzing a word beyond the sounds of individual letters to help you grasp meaning at a glance.
But imagine you were an older student who never got explicit morphology instruction and had never seen unamazed before. Even if you could sound it out easily, how would you jump from pronunciation to understanding? Many older students face this challenge.
Many of them have mastered coping strategies to skirt comprehension deficits. They’re so good at this that the problem may go undetected. But these students’ struggles with reading resurface when they face unfamiliar vocabulary, academic language or complex challenges of word structure and meaning.
The Boston Public Schools approach
At Boston Public Schools, I train cohorts of 50 to 60 teachers in IMSE’s Orton-Gillingham Plus 30-hour Structured Literacy course. Watching these brilliant educators use the information they learn in training in ways I would not have predicted is inspiring. Often, as soon as they understand the problem and learn effective solutions, they quickly move toward modifying their instruction to help specific students. For example, a chemistry teacher in one of our high schools began blending morphology into daily activities to help students decipher technical terms like endothermic or nucleophile. Midyear to end-of-year assessments from this teacher’s classes show significant score increases, which they attribute to the morphological component of their lessons.
One key takeaway from the Boston Public Schools work is the importance of ongoing support. Structured Literacy isn’t something that can be mastered in a single workshop. The quantity and complexity of the information raise a need for continued coaching, mentorship and collaboration among educators. Moreover, different schools must adapt the implementation to fit their unique student populations. In Boston, that means paying particular attention to English learners, students in substantially separate classrooms and those who need individualized support plans.
The payoff of these efforts is worth it: students begin to see themselves as capable readers, many for the first time in their academic careers. Morphology and Structured Literacy affect older students profoundly. I’ve watched students who once guessed their way through texts begin to read with confidence and curiosity. Some students are even seeking reading help on their now because they’ve heard about the success of their peers.
It’s time we dismantle the myth that it’s too late to help struggling readers in high school. They are not broken. They are not hopeless. They have simply been hidden from the support they need.
Opinions expressed by SmartBrief contributors are their own.
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