What Really Matters with Struggling Readers

One of the most respected reading teachers, professors, and all-around educational gurus, Richard Allington recently wrote a powerful and thought-provoking article about reading, What Really Matters With Struggling Readers.  Allington discusses many structures and routines schools develop that often inhibit reading growth, and how schools can move forward by utilising their resources effectively to help support struggling readers. A s you read through the article, think about MIS and how we are or could improve our support for our struggling readers.

At the end of the article, Allington poses a few questions for discussion and thought:

One thing that every educator who reads this article might do is to respond to each of the following characteristics of research-based reading lessons for struggling readers: 

• Do we expect our struggling readers to read and write more every day than our achieving readers?
• Have we designed our reading lessons such that struggling readers spend at least two-thirds of every lesson engaged in the actual reading of texts?
• Do we ensure that the texts we provide struggling readers across the full school day are texts that they can read with at least 98% word recognition accuracy and 90% comprehension?
• Does every struggling reader leave the building each day with at least one book they can read and that they also want to read?
• Have we ensured that every intervention for our struggling readers is taught only by our most effective and most expert teachers?”

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