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.

What do you find to be the most difficult thing about teaching beginning and struggling readers? We recently asked this exact question open-endedly to educators as they registered for our latest webinar. Of all the varying responses, there was one that stood out as the most common response (being mentioned in about 30% of all responses): keeping struggling readers motivated. 

As I was researching this dilemma, I ran across these charts from the Reading Rockets website:

So how can you go from practices that demotivate students to practices that promote motivation? It’s great to have a picture of what you want your students to feel, but how to do you make them feel that way? Here are some ideas on how you can remove the following demotivating practices from your instruction:

Non-relevance: if your students don’t see how reading material or reading in general will help them in their life, they aren’t going to be motivated to improve their skills. If they aren’t provided or exposed to material that appeals to them, they aren’t going to want to read. Not only will texts that aren’t interesting or relevant to them demotivate struggling readers, it will also demotivate strong readers.

Ask your students what interests them. Learn what they care about and show them how reading can open up information about the things that do interest them. If they don’t see how what they are learning or suppose to read connects to the other things they are learning or are interested in… they are going to feel like reading is irrelevant. 

Excessive control: researchers have found that one of the core ideals that motivate each of us is that of autonomy. We want to feel like we are in control of our lives. We want to feel like we can choose how we spend our time. The more we feel this freedom, the more motivated we are. Forcing students to read materials they don’t care about is not going to motivate them. The more your students get to choose what they read, the more motivated they will be to read.

Difficult lessons: it is critically important that your lessons are not perceived as being too difficult. If students feel incapable their defenses will go up and they will resist anything that they believe will make them feel like a failure. In order to avoid making your lessons seem too difficult it is important to use effective strategies when teaching and to assure your students understanding by constantly asking them and observing what they are and aren’t understanding.

Listen to our free webinar, “Why Johnny Can’t Remember What He Read,” to learn teaching strategies and questioning strategies that ensure student understanding. View now! > 

Frequent individual work: it is important to use both group work and individual work. Although group work is motivating for some students, your more introverted students may prefer to work alone. Switching approaches or allowing choice to work alone or in groups, allows students to work in the way that most motivates them.

Disconnected units: if your teaching doesn’t have a natural flow to it your students will get frustrated or confused and lose their motivation. When teaching reading skills it is important that they systematically build upon each other in a natural sequence. It is also important to connect new concepts to past concepts so students see how they connect. You may be using a strong sequence, but your students may still be confused because you have not explicitly explained how the concepts you are teaching relate to other skills you have taught your students.

To learn how to teach reading in a systematic, skill building method, sign up for Reading Horizons free 30-day online training! >

What have you found helps motivate your struggling readers?

We know you want to be as effective as possible with your efforts to remediate the reading problems of the struggling readers you work with. That is why we’ve made all of these tools available for free to all educators.

Learn strategies for teaching systematic, explicit, multisensory phonics-based instruction to beginning readers, struggling readers, and ESL students:

Reading Horizons 30-Day Online Workshop >

It’s difficult to help remediate your students reading problems if you don’t know which areas are causing them the most difficulty. It is crucial to assess each struggling reader’s strengths and weaknesses in order to provide him/her with the proper remediation:

30-Day Access to Phonemic Awareness Assessments >

Learn from the most experienced teachers and trainers when it comes to remedial reading. Any of the webinars in this ongoing series can be viewed for free anytime:

Branch Out Webinars for Reading Teachers >

Download free lesson plans, worksheets, and teaching tools:

Free Printable Lesson Materials >

This free e-book takes a look at the most common learning disabilities and how each affects reading:

E-Book: Teaching Reading to Students with Learning Disabilities 101 >

This free e-book looks at what research has found to be the most effective strategies for teaching struggling readers:

E-Book: Using Research to Reach Struggling Readers >

Need funding for materials? Here is a list of available grants and the tools that give you the best chances for earning the grant money your school can use to better serve your students’ needs:

Grant Help >

As the New Year comes around we often think of ways to improve and make more of our lives. On the blog Study Hacks, the author constantly looks at the strategies and research findings surrounding those known for excellence – whether in school or in their professional careers. Recently the author posted an article highlighting the strategies used by a man who’s known for his excellence in piano playing.

Here are the strategies this pianist found for improving the excellence of his craft and how they can be applied to your efforts in helping struggling readers:

Strategies for Becoming Excellent… in reading and life!

Strategy #1: Avoid Flow. Do What Does Not Come Easy

“The mistake most weak pianists make is playing, not practicing. If you walk into a music hall at a local university, you’ll hear people ‘playing’ by running through their pieces. This is a huge mistake. Strong pianists drill the most difficult parts of their music, rarely, if ever playing through their pieces in entirety.”

Application to struggling readers: This makes perfect sense. If struggling readers keep relying on their coping mechanisms and avoid the parts of reading that are difficult for them they will never move closer to excellence in reading. Make sure to spend extra time on the parts of reading that are difficult for the struggling readers you work with. 

Strategy #2: To Master a Skill, Master Something Harder

“Strong pianists find clever ways to ‘complicate’ the difficult parts of their music. If we have problem playing something with clarity, we complicate by playing the passage with alternating accent patterns. If we have problems with speed, we confound the rhythms.”

Application to struggling readers: If for no other reason, this is important for struggling readers because it can boost their often fragile confidence. For many, one of the best motivators and empowering experiences is accomplishing something that was difficult for them. If you can help a struggling reader master something that they think is more difficult then reading then their confidence that they can also learn to read will greatly increase.

Strategy #3: Systematically Eliminate Weakness

“Strong pianists know our weaknesses and use them to create strength. I have sharp ears, but I am not as in touch with the physical component of piano playing. So, I practice on a mute keyboard.”

Application to struggling readers: Research has long proven that struggling readers have the most success when they are taught with systematic, explicit, and multi-sensory phonics-based reading instruction.

Learn strategies for teaching this type of reading instruction with Reading Horizons free 30-day Online Workshop! >

Strategy #4: Create Beauty, Don’t Avoid Ugliness

“Weak pianists make music a reactive task, not a creative task. They start, and react to their performance, fixing problems as they go along. Strong pianists, on the other hand, have an image of what a perfect performance should be like that includes all of the relevant senses. Before we sit down, we know what the piece needs to feel, sound, and even look like in excruciating detail. In performance, weak pianists try to reactively move away from mistakes, while strong pianists move towards a perfect mental image.”

Application to struggling readers: Researchers have often found that children are more likely to be strong readers if their parents create a culture of reading in their home. Struggling readers need to see others modeling not only what good reading looks like, but also that it’s a desirable and helpful skill. On top of that, struggling readers need to be encouraged to believe that they can become as good as others at reading. If they don’t believe that they can obtain the level of those that model good reading, they will easily be discouraged.

Share your strategies for helping struggling readers become more excellent in reading!

We often hear researchers talk about the importance of explicit instruction. But what does that really mean? “Explicit” refers to anything that is fully and clearly expressed or demonstrated; leaving nothing merely implied.

In Reading Horizons latest webinar, Teacher Trainer and Dyslexia Specialist, Shantell Berrett, discussed why explicit instruction is key for struggling students, beneficial for every student, and why it should be applied to all teaching to increase the effectiveness of student learning.

Here are some of the main ideas from her presentation:

1.    Be Clear

• Only give one instruction at a time
• Use visual examples
• Enforce a feedback loop asking students if they understood instructions or material

2.    Be Concise

• Teach only necessary information to avoid confusing your students
• Instruct no more than 5 minutes without student involvement to keep students engaged and focused
• Don’t teach things that are similar yet different within a close proximity of time

3.    Be Connected

• Assume nothing - don’t expect students to know things that are obvious to us
• Draw explicit lines by pointing out connections to prior knowledge
• Connect new information to prior knowledge

This statement from the presentation was particularly interesting:

For students to remember 90% of what they are taught they need to either use or teach that information immediately after instruction.

To view the recording click here! >