Here are 10 pieces of advice on teaching fluency to older students:
1. Set a goal for the number of minutes to be devoted to such practice weekly schoolwide. Then get each department to commit to taking on a set portion of these minutes. Fluency practice doesn’t work as well in math as the other subjects, so keep the numbers low there (higher than zero, but much lower than what kids are to experience in classes that have more continuous text to read). If students are reading above the 8th grade level, I wouldn’t bother with this – they can be exempted. Each teacher is then committed to providing some number of minutes each week in their classes; let the teacher figure out the best way to organize this… some might want to spend a part of each class on fluency work, while other teachers might want to segregate this to particular days of the week. Don’t undermine your effort by making it difficult for teachers to meet the instructional goals of their content area.
2. Explain to the students what is going on. Tell them fluency is important, tell them the books are getting harder and harder each year as they advance through school and that fluency practice is one way to increase their ability to handle such materials independently Tell them that they are going to be asked to read aloud at times, not to embarrass them but to give them the practice that will make them better readers. Stress that they will not be asked to read anything aloud to the group with everyone listening and that almost everyone will be practicing and helping each other to figure out the best way to read these texts. It is practice, not performance. They are to try to improve and the better they get at it, the less practice that will be needed.
3. Assign partners for paired reading work. It takes too long to have kids make these placements and that kind of thing is just another source of embarrassment. Change the partnerships daily, rotating pairings through the class. That way, everyone gets to benefit from the really helpful partners, and everyone shares the burden of the partners who aren’t very helpful. It also allows the teacher to avoid partnerships that he/she suspects will be problematic – like pairing up two boys who just had a fight in the lunchroom, or pairing up the particularly self-conscious boy with the prettiest girl in class, etc.
4. Have students take turns reading short portions of the text – like a paragraph at a time but have them read and reread the text until it sounds acceptable – acceptable means that they aren’t making a lot of word reading mistakes and that it sounds like language.
5. The teacher needs to be involved, too, coaching the coaches and intervening when someone is having trouble. I’ve seen teachers bail when this activity is taking place, but that’s when the teacher really needs to be involved. Often, when I’m in that role, by the time I get to the third kid I find some repeated vocabulary problem that allows me to stop everybody to explain that word, etc. so everyone can progress more quickly.
6. Remember this is teaching time. Offer kids supports that will help them to succeed. Some teachers like to read the introduction aloud to the students and provide some explanation to contextualize the content they’ll be reading about. Others pre-introduce some vocabulary they anticipate will be a barrier -- not just telling definitions but getting students to say the words. Another particularly helpful support is to parse the text, so kids know where the pauses go.
Some teachers will have students practicing a paragraph once or twice silently before reading it to a partner or having the kids take the first swing at figuring out where the pauses go. The point is to improve these students reading, not just to do repeated reading (that’s an activity rather than the point).
7. Add a comprehension step. For example, provide a question the students are supposed to answer about each paragraph.
8. If you have any special resources – a push in teacher, a parent volunteer, pre-student teachers from your local university, or some students from the Young Teachers Club – then you can pair your lowest readers with them. This isn’t a punishment; this simply increases the amount of time these students get to read – they don’t have to split the time with a partner – which can translate faster progress.
9. Make sure the student know they are working with grade level materials – and that if they can read that well, you will try to provide them with even more challenging texts. Struggling readers are often embarrassed that teachers try to protect them from embarrassment by putting them in books so easy that they are embarrassing. Often with secondary students, if you want them engaged, go harder not easier – kids are willing to work hard if they feel respected and they balk when embarrassed.
10. It helps if students can see progress. Letting them know how many words correct they were able to read initially in their history book or how their prosody rated in their science book. Another way to do this is to have the students record their initial performance s(no one has to hear but the student and, perhaps, the teacher). Later in the year, doing another recording and comparing these should help kids to see success.
