Now that winter break is over, teachers all across the country are returning to their classrooms, painfully aware that time is running out for their students to improve their reading skills. With state performance tests are just around the corner, the pressure to help their students quickly is upon them. I was recently talking with a teacher who confided in me that she really didn’t know how to help the struggling readers in her class improve their reading skills. “Why do some students ‘get it’ so easily and some don’t?” she asked.

To help our struggling readers grow, we first have to understand what good readers do. It is clear that successful and unsuccessful readers differ dramatically in what they do while reading. Good readers recognize that reading is about making meaning and connections. They access what they already know about a topic and make connections from what they already know to the new information. They analyze, hypothesize and make internal predictions about what the text will say as they read. They visualize and create mental images of the new information and how it relates to what they already know. But most importantly, good readers know that the outcome of text is meaning. When they lose comprehension, bells go off in their heads and they stop and use “fix-up” strategies such as slowing the pace and re-reading or reading aloud until meaning has been restored.

Poor readers, on the other hand, often come to text to simply pass their eyes back and forth, passively turning pages. When they come to the end, they announce, “I’m done!” while they have not connected to the meaning behind the text in any way. To help our struggling readers, we have to raise their awareness that without meaning, they have not read the text. We must help them focus on acquiring meaning, on making connections to what they already know, visualizing these connections and above all, having a repertoire of strategies to use when meaning is lost. A tall order to be sure but one that can definitely be implemented in classrooms everywhere. To coin a old saying, “today is the first day of the rest of your student’s lives.” Help them become thinking readers.