There is a simple 2-minute task you can have your students do each day, that, if repeated for 21 days researchers have found brings the following results:

“Your intelligence rises, your creativity rises, your energy levels rise. In fact, what we've found is that every single business outcome improves. Your brain is 31 percent more productive... You're 37 percent better at sales. Doctors are 19 percent faster, more accurate at coming up with the correct diagnosis. Our brains work even more successfully as we're able to work harder, faster and more intelligently.”

– Psychologist, Shawn Achor (FYI: a few words that revealed the secret were omitted to build curiosity)

What is that brings about these drastic improvements?

Here’s Shawn Achor with the answer:


So, what’s the thing that can drastically boost the success of your struggling readers: positivity.

When you get a student in a positive mindset, their brain releases dopamine, which does two things for them:

1. They are happier.
2. All of the learning centers of their brain are turned on.

Both of these effects are beneficial for helping struggling readers. These students feel defeated, self-conscious, and demotivated. Getting them to feel happy and positive is crucial for their success. And the second point, positivity turns on all of the learning centers in your brain, is going to help them understand new material at a faster rate, helping boost their self-esteem and maintain a postive attitude. If you can help your struggling readers get in a positive mindset before your instruction, their cognitive abilities can be boosted by an average of 31%.

It’s amazing how much something so unrelated to ability affects your students’ abilities. In fact, according to Achor, ability is rarely the cause of success, “75% of job successes are predicted by your optimism levels, your social support and your ability to see stress as a challenge instead of a threat.”

This provides so much power and insight as to how to help the struggling readers in your classroom succeed.

The best thing about Achor's research is that it is so easy to implement. Here are six simple suggestions from Achor that will help your students retrain their brains to view the world in a more positive light:

• Spend two minutes a day to write down three new things you are grateful for - for 21 days in a row.
• Journal about one positive experience you’ve had every 24 hours.
• Exercise.
• Meditate to allow your brain to focus on one thing at a time.
• Perform random acts of kindness.
• Write one positive email to someone you know every time you open up your inbox.

So, take two minutes at the start of each class to have your students write down three things they are grateful for, and see how it affects their success at learning to read. (I’d love to hear how it goes!)

And, if you really want to help your students: work on increasing your own level of positivity. It will make you 31% more effective at reaching your students. Your brain will be more creative and adept at solving your students’ problems. Plus, on top of all of that: you will be happier.

Conjure up in your mind that you are a Harvard student. You are sitting in class listening to your professor’s lecture… What kind of professor are you imagining? One that is boring? One that is engaging? Whatever you are imagining, I am sure it is an image of competence. You probably have full confidence in your hypothetical Harvard professor’s ability to accurately teach you a new concept. However, one Harvard professor, Eric Mazur, learned that what he thought was an effective teaching strategy was not.

Mazur was sure that by explaining to his class that atoms move away from each other in response to heat, they would easily understand what would happen if you had a metal plate with a hole in it and you microwaved it, the hole would… shrink? Get bigger? He expected all of his students to get the right answer. However, most of them did not.

So, what went wrong? That statement seems clear enough. The correct answer seems pretty intuitive… the hole would get bigger. It’s not that Mazur wasn’t clear and it’s not that he didn’t have a thorough understanding of what he was teaching, he most assuredly did. His problem therein lied in the mode of his instruction. 

Lecturing, ineffective? No… couldn’t be! Don’t you sit in a lecture anxiously engaged from start to finish hanging on every word and detail, not wanting it to ever end. Maybe in some cases that is true, but on the whole, thoughts of listening to a lecture evokes the same common feelings in most people: long, boring, and drone. Feelings such as these:

Shocked to discover that many of his students missed the correct answer to what he thought was a simple question, Mazur took his question to a group of his fellow Harvard professors’ and asked them the same question. Did they respond with a higher rate of correct answers? Unfortunately for the art of lecturing… they did not.

So what could Mazur do instead? How could he help people understand a simple concept, if explaining it in what he thought were simple terms didn’t work?

Mazur, determined to find a way to effectively teach what would happen to that hole in the metal plate if microwaved, came up with a new way to illustrate the concept. He explained that atoms move away from each other in response to heat, then he told the students to imagine a group of people standing in a circle (representative of a large plate) he then said that these people want to move further away from each other in response to heat (as the atoms would do in response to heat)… then he told the group to talk amongst themselves and decide what they think would happen to the hole in the metal plate in response to heat.

This time, his class had no problem understanding the correct answer: the hole would get bigger; just as people would move further away from the center of the circle if they were trying to get away from each other.   

Of course, he could’ve made his example even more effective if he had actually had the students get in the circle and act out the visual. Multisensory instruction or “bundling modalities” has proven itself to be a very effective type of instruction. By connecting multiple senses to one concept, stronger connections are made in the brain.

View our free webinar that discusses the importance of bundling modalities: "Why Johnny Can't Remember What He Read," by Jay Kelly, MA >

What have you found helps your students better understand your instruction?

Since I first learned how to write the alphabet I’ve had a fetish with improving my handwriting. I did not have a notebook, folder, or scratch paper throughout my entire schooling that was not covered with writing in every which way. I was determined to find the perfect way of presenting myself on paper. There was nothing that bothered me more than to feel like one of my peers had a better style of handwriting than me. I will never forget Paige Miller* and how she always seemed to be one step ahead of me on the handwriting front. As soon as I would be satisfied with my style, I would see her latest handwriting innovation and was forced to go back to the drawing board. I had to feel like my handwriting was at least on par with hers.

After years of playing around with different ways of writing my “a’s,” “i’s,” “g’s,” and “y’s” (because those were the letters that were the most fun to experiment with) I finally hit gold. I have now had a consistent style that has held my satisfaction for over 6 years now. It was a long pursuit, but alas, I found the right fit for me (or I just stopped being petty). But, did this fetish in some way reflect what kind of student I was? Is handwriting an important part of English instruction? Or, is it just a silly pursuit for competitive girls (or boys) that care about aesthetics?

Currently there are school districts eliminating handwriting from their curriculum in order to salvage extra class time for other subjects and, with the prevalence of keyboards - they feel handwriting has become irrelevant. However, some are wondering if students will lose out on some sort of intellectual or physical development in response.

Dr. Laura Dinehart of Florida International University School of Education has found that a 4-year-old’s fine motor writing skills are more predictive of later academic achievement than early number skills or early language skills. Dinehart’s team was able to discover this by examining the scores of 1,000 second graders and comparing it to their pre-kindergarten writing skills.

Not only were students with better penmanship in pre-k found to have higher scores in both reading and math later on, but they also had higher grades in general and higher scores on standardized tests. Students with strong handwriting marks in pre-k were found to have an overall “B” average in second grade compared to an overall “C” average for the students that did poorly on writing tasks in pre-K.

The only problem with the study: researchers don’t know why. 

Schools are dropping handwriting from their curriculum and researchers are finding how predictive this skill is to future success, but no one knows why that is. Is handwriting’s benefit in today’s tech-savvy, keyboard oriented society simply that of being diagnostic of future achievement? Do teachers unknowingly perceive children with strong writing ability as being “brighter” students thus encouraging them more and creating a self-fulfilling prophesy for these students? What is it about good penmanship that leads to future success?

Dr. Dinehart did point out in her report that studies have found that children who physically write letters recognize them more readily than students who type them on the keyboard, possibly meaning that handwriting instruction leads to better reading skills. However, more research still needs to be done.

But, although the link is yet to be discovered, there is a link. Schools may be jumping off the handwriting bandwagon too early. As Dr. Dinehart said: “What we do know is that kids with greater experiences in early childhood do better later on, and writing can’t be discounted from that.”

What have you noticed in your classroom? Is there a link between good penmanship and strong performance?

*Name has been changed.

Reading Horizons’ Curriculum Director, Heidi Hyte, travels the world promoting phonics instruction.

In the last year she has conducted trainings and needs assessments for NYC Public Schools and Public libraries. Additionally Heidi went to Doha, Qatar and Dubai plus she went back a second time to check in with the Rising Star school for children from leprosy colonies located in Chennai, India. Reading Horizons has donated $122,000 in reading software and resources to this wonderful organization.

I think you'll enjoy this documentary produced by Doug Jardine on the Rising Star Outreach mission and its school. We are proud to be associated with so many worthy programs and leaders throughout the world who are empowering others through literacy.

Most of us will not get the opportunity to travel the world to teach children to read but we can all do something. Read to a child today, volunteer at a school, or make a donation to your local school library.

What are your plans to change the world in 2012?

With more than 9,800 retail outlets nationwide, Dollar General, in a joint effort with the National Center for Family Literacy (NCFL) and ProLiteracy, has created a National Literacy Directory website to help families and individuals get help with reading and writing.

As of August 2011, the organization had awarded more than $3 million in grants to 700 schools and other literacy centers.

Grants are available for Summer Reading programs, youth literacy efforts, and Back to School literacy initiatives. Dollar General grant programs are available to qualifying non-profit organizations in the 35 states where Dollar General stores are located.

Additionally, Dollar General is interested in providing funding to assist school libraries and meeting centers as they implement or expand new technology, materials, and software to support literacy programs.

Since more than 30 million adults and millions of children struggle with just the basics of reading, Dollar General is also seeking volunteers.

Dollar General's commitment to literacy is an integral part of the company's culture. In fact, Dollar General's co-founder, J. L. Turner, was functionally illiterate when he started the company.

Dollar General believes learning to read, receiving your GED, or learning the English language is an investment that opens doorways for personal, professional, and economic growth. That is why our commitment to literacy remains strong. It is the one gift that no one can take away—the one gift that lasts a lifetime.

We think so too. Help a school get free reading software by playing Lemons for Literacy at home or in the classroom.