Slowly but surely, I am making progress on my webinar for tutors working with struggling older readers.
After a crash course in using Zoom to record PowerPoints, numerous attempts, and much time spent finagling computer-camera angles in my office, I’ve actually managed to produce what I hope is a serviceable recording. (I was having a bad hair day in pt. 2, but I’m hoping that everyone can deal;)
There are two parts: a shorter (approx. 40 mins.) introduction part, in which I summarize some of the key issues and background information (the Simple View; the Matthew effect; the three-cueing system); and a longer recording (1:45), in which I present and demonstrate a series of short exercises based on the sequence developed by my colleague Richard McManus at the Fluency Factory in Cohasset, Mass.
Although I spend a lot of time going over the exercises, they can actually be done in about 30 mins. and can thus be split with regular test prep. I’ve also tried to actually integrate SAT/ACT-based materials into the exercises as much as possible.
I’m currently working on the materials packet (probably in the range of 70-75 pages) and will hopefully have the whole thing ready by the week of November 7th. I haven’t yet determined the overall price, but the packet will be included along with the webinar because it would be pretty ridiculous to explain all of the exercises without, you know, actually providing them. Initially, I was going to focus on the ACT since that’s the test where speed and processing issues tend to become most apparent, but because the SAT is the more popular test, I’ve integrated some material from that exam as well.
A few points:
First, the webinar focuses on decoding issues rather than “reading” in the traditional test-prep sense. I want to be super clear about this so that people aren’t surprised.
Now, I understand that when reading issues are discussed in the context of older students, the assumption is that the conversation needs to focus on comprehension rather than letter-sound correspondences, but often that’s a false dichotomy. If a student is having difficulty reading the literal words on the page, and doing so fast enough to connect them to actual language, their comprehension is going to suffer.
But here’s the thing: it doesn’t work the other way around. There is absolutely no way to address a decoding issue via discussion of a text. Strong readers are not able to decode words because they have a personal connection to them; they are able to decode because their brains have “mapped” numerous letter-sound patterns and stored them for automatic retrieval so that they can process text at the speed of sight.
If a student is chronically guessing, skipping, and misreading words, particularly if they’re also reading slowly, something in that process got interrupted or was never developed properly, and their overall reading will not improve significantly until it’s addressed. And if you’re working with a student who reads very slowly and has comprehension problems, it’s entirely possible they have a decoding problem that no one’s ever picked up on. This happens far more often than you might imagine. (On the other hand, if a student can decode quickly and with 100% accuracy but can’t understand what they read, the material in the webinar probably* doesn’t apply to them.)
Obviously, you need to continue to discuss vocabulary, meaning, summarizing, etc. But if you’re a tutor, you probably already know how to do that just fine and don’t need any help from me; it’s the other piece that people generally don’t know about. I certainly didn’t, and it would have made my life a heck of lot easier when I was tutoring. At the very least, it would have given me a framework for understanding a lot of the difficulties I was seeing and saved me from 10 years of trying to figure out what to do about them.
Next: Even if you’ve read my blog posts on these issues, I’m still going to recommend that you watch Part 1 because I think I’ve managed to really crystallize the issues and bring them into focus in a test-prep context. I spent many, many hours (weeks, actually) organizing and rewriting slides to make things as clear as possible, and the exercises I cover in Part 2 will really only make sense in that context.
Finally, I have received some requests for one-on-one consulting, but I’m going to ask that even if you’re interested in working with me privately, you view the full webinar first. If what you see piques your interest and you want to learn more, then feel free to get in touch.
*Richard McManus has a famous story about a student who appeared to be reading aloud perfectly but understood virtually nothing that she read. He was baffled until a colleague recognized that the girl couldn’t hear vowel sounds properly. They worked on the vowels, and her comprehension improved markedly. Sometimes decoding problems aren’t obvious.