When we think about teaching literacy, we often imagine young, elementary-age students as most in need. But what about middle school and high school students?
My student Esther wrote her practice college essay about her dream to work in health care. She was excited to read it to me, but my heart sank as she stumbled over a word in every line and inserted made-up words that weren’t in her text.
How did Esther slip through the cracks? How did she make it all the way to the end of the 11th grade without anyone flagging her reading gaps?
By the time Esther got to middle school, her classmates were reading to learn, while she was still struggling to learn to read.
Esther is not alone: According to a Boston Globe report last year, nearly 40 percent of students did not meet proficiency on the 10th-grade English language arts part of the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System exam held the previous spring.
While early literacy intervention is essential, it is equally important to continue remediation and teacher training in secondary education so students such as Esther have the literacy skills they need to succeed in high school and in the workplace.
The single best way to support our students’ reading ability is to ensure that every district has access to enough literacy coaches at all grade levels. While these positions are common in elementary schools, they are not prioritized in middle and high schools.
Literacy coaches can create professional development sessions with robust guidance for literacy interventions that teachers such as myself can implement. They can also help teachers brainstorm creative teaching strategies based on the data from assessments and consult on education proficiency plans for students who don’t pass the language part of the MCAS. With a coach, I could sit down and discuss Esther’s low comprehension scores and come up with solutions so she better understands what she reads and writes.
With this support, secondary school teachers could more consistently and efficiently build strategies to embed literacy into our content. In history and science classes, teachers could create lessons that engage students in vocabulary activities, focusing on prefixes, suffixes and root words to help them better understand the content they read. In English, while teachers offer independent reading with a book or text of their interest, they could pull small groups for literacy instruction.
A coach could help me adapt materials and various online tools to support my students’ reading in ways they can most appreciate. Why not analyze a popular song to examine figurative language and rhetorical strategies? In my classroom, the same students who never turned in their reading assignments were engaging in analytical discussions about Childish Gambino’s song “This is America,” because it was a text they knew and were interested in.
Strategies such as chunking texts (breaking it down into manageable chunks, that is) and lectures with guiding questions can help students know what to look out for while they’re learning, easing some of their processing load. When Esther was lost during a history unit, for instance, I provided her and several of her peers with skeletal notes to help ground them in the content and know what to look for in the slideshows and lectures.
I have no doubt Esther will cross the graduation stage in a year, due in large part to her own persistence and willingness to reach out for support. Though her resilience is admirable, I can’t imagine how much easier the education experience might have been if someone noticed this hardworking girl in elementary school; if she wasn’t expected to already “read to learn” by middle school; if her high school teachers had the systems, knowledge and resources in place to provide her with the literacy skills she so vitally required.
Esther isn’t the only one. Every student deserves to have literacy support, regardless of their grade and literacy level, so they can leave our schools full of confidence and with the tools needed to succeed.
Melissa Kintish is a high school special educator at the Community Charter School of Cambridge and a 2024-2025 Teach Plus Massachusetts policy fellow.
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And by “we” I presume you mean the parents who fail to read to their children and simply park them in front of devices.