Science teachers, math teachers, history teachers: we are all reading teachers now

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I am in my fifth year teaching science to fifth and sixth graders, but, like every other teacher at the K-8 charter school where I work, I also teach reading.

Literacy is a critical skill for learning new content, and as an upper elementary science teacher, ideally my future middle school students will have made the vital transition from “learning to read” to “reading to learn.” But school closures during the pandemic dramatically reduced learning time, and literacy skills have been slow to recover.

Imagine (and if you're a science teacher, you won't have to) trying to finish a lesson on the water cycle with students struggling to pronounce key words like “condensation” and “precipitation.” These are longer, multisyllabic words that students can pronounce if they have a basic grasp of phonics, but become impossible if students lack this foundation. I'll never forget the frustration I felt when I planned to teach a lesson on food webs and had to spend the first half of class teaching struggling readers how to pronounce “interdependence” and “ecosystem.” I can only imagine how frustrating it was for my students!

In the days before the pandemic, it was normal to have a few struggling readers per class. Post-COVID, it has often felt like there are few readers who aren't struggling. It was clear that a new approach to literacy instruction was needed, one that would leverage all the teachers in our building and give us ways to catch up our older students on second grade skills without infantilizing the content.

Fortunately, the training offered by my school, Springfield Prep in Massachusetts, has given me tools to help students get back to reading proficiently. The school hired John Bennetts, who specializes in basic reading skills, to lead professional development sessions, train teachers and administrators, model lessons and work one-on-one with struggling students.

He began by sending a handful of teachers out of the room. One by one, we reread a passage in which a certain percentage of the words had been changed to nonsense words.

When I entered the room and read the passage aloud, I struggled to pronounce the unfamiliar words. And when John attacked me with quick comprehension questions, it became clear that he hadn't gotten any meaning from the text. All he remembered was trying not to look like an idiot and feel like a failure.

To find meaning in a passage, John told us, a person needs to be able to read 95 to 98% of the words. I read the passage at 85% proficiency and couldn't guess the topic. At 97%, the next volunteer was able to make some guesses and answer most of the comprehension questions correctly. Suddenly, what my students had been experiencing for the past two years made a lot of sense to me.

The message was clear: we needed to start teaching older students how to pronounce and read unfamiliar words. But how could I do this without making my fifth graders feel like they were in first grade? How could we incorporate these skills into our classes without falling further behind in our curriculum?

John taught us a word routine that day that gave us and our students a step-by-step process to follow when encountering unfamiliar words. I started using the routine in class the following week. “How many vowels do you see?” I would ask. Students could then calculate how many syllables the word contained by grouping adjacent vowels into one syllable and subtracting one syllable if there was a silent “e” at the end. This allows students to break the word into parts they can pronounce and then put them together to pronounce the whole word. After a few months of daily practice, my students no longer looked at me helplessly as often.

“Challenging” doesn’t even begin to describe the circumstances teachers faced when exiting remote learning. Our school's approach to reading instruction may not be perfect, but we are trying with everything we have to help our children get back on track. The resilience and creativity of educators, students, and school leaders across the country are making recovery possible. I am proud to be a science teacher who also teaches reading.

chalk beat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

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