It’s always flattering. But there’s a problem.

Writing a book review takes time and… can I be honest here? It can also be a little boring and a lot mundane.

But that was definitely not the case with Sarah Collinge’s book, Raising the Standards Through Chapter Books: The C.I.A. Approach. From the book’s first Introduction through the hands-on C.I.A. worksheets, I was hooked.

Collinge’s words will resonate with many primary, secondary, and even, post-secondary teachers. She writes, “[Students] are reading with the misconception that, at some point, the books will magically make sense to them. The question becomes this: How do I help students to develop the stamina to read longer texts?... It is about the many students in [the] classroom who, despite their interest, are unable to finish longer texts.”

I know that you are already to the question at the finish line. Are students really prepared to read more complex passages at the college level?  I think you know the answer to that question as well as I do.

Advocating an honest-to-goodness fix for troubled readers, Ms. Collinge’s reminds us that, “While intervention is important, it alone will not solve the problem. Students need to be able to read complex texts proficiently for success in high school, college and the workplace. Reading these complex texts requires higher skill levels and stamina.”

It is interesting to note that with the accelerating demands that colleges, careers, and everyday life places on the general population, “the text used with students K-12 have decreased in complexity over the last half century.”

That could explain why we’ve seen so many professional development articles, books, and blogs devoted to advancing reading comprehension. In my opinion, the problem lies in the fact that most of this information is simply an outline of "what to do" but they do not give the details of the actual “how to do it”- Collinge’s book changes all that. She shares interesting insights and tips like:
•    How-to Prioritize Tight Schedules
•    Instructional Read-aloud Frameworks
•    Involving Strong Readers and Struggling Readers in the Same Activities
•    Using Layered Strategies
•    How-to Make Complex Text More Comfortable and Predictable

Raising the Standards Through Chapter Books: The C.I.A. Approach is not about redefining reading skills or strategies across grade levels. Instead this book offers sound ideas that can help every teacher apply known strategies and skills in progressively more demanding texts. It’s fun for the teacher and students. It’s genius!

I highly recommend this book. For those students who are missing the building blocks essential to learning to read, I encourage you to check out how Temple University and others addressed this literacy problem >

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.

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?