My Thoughts on Helping Struggling Readers


Helping Struggling Readers

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As I read through the six key strategies for struggling readers that Daniels and Zemelman compiled, I discovered that some will be easier to implement than others. In my teaching middle grades number systems class, we have talked several times about the things we will struggle with personally in teaching math. I have learned in my three short weeks in this program that it is important to predict what will be difficult for us as individual teachers in order to grow in those areas before we have a classroom of our own. Regarding strategies for helping struggling readers, I think modeling thoughtful reasoning and promoting self-monitoring will be the most difficult to implement. Modeling thoughtful reasoning will be challenging for me because sometimes, it is hard for a teacher to be humble enough to show their students that even the “expert” can struggle through a math problem or a math reading. In addition, it will be difficult for students because talking out loud through a text to discover what they do not understand is something they are not used to. I think promoting self-monitoring will be difficult, as well. I did not know how to do this effectively until college so I know that most likely, this will be a brand-new idea to my middle school students. Once they learn how to self-monitor, it will be easy to implement as a teacher, but teaching students the importance of self-monitoring will take time. I think my biggest question regarding this is how do we encourage students to see the benefit of stopping and thinking if they only want to be done with a word problem or math assignment and move on to the next?
Word Count: 283

Comments

  1. GeorgannaSeptember 4, 2019 at 9:20 AM

    I completely agree that the first thing we need to do as teachers is self-reflect and identify what we need to work on ourselves to make sure we don't make learning more difficult for our students than it has to be. If we can’t identify and solve our own issues, how do we expect to be able to help our students? Also, love the gif choice… 10/10. (wc: 67)

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