South Junior High

South Junior High

Imagine walking into a room with a sign above the door that read, Come on in and look at your failure. Would it be easy for you? Would you purposely be late to class so no one saw you go into that room? At South Junior High School in Boise, Idaho, this very well may have been the mind set of fourteen students at the beginning of the 2003 school year.

Center Educational Specialists Becky Hagenah and Carolyn Kitson began group remediation at South that would last for an entire school year. Four times each week, for 47 minutes, the two would work to improve, or teach the students to read. Some found their classes to be helpful, but many were frustrated or embarrassed. The students, reserved in the beginning, forced their teachers to think outside the box. So, Becky and Carolyn found a way to tailor their program to fit the students’ individual needs.

“I used a driver’s ed manual to teach reading. It was a big motivator for the 15 year olds. I even went to the skateboard store to get a magazine. I looked a little out of place there!” Becky said, comically, referring to the fact that it was a stretch to find materials of high interest but with low readability.

Carolyn used the same method. “I found a song on the internet that a student was interested in, so I printed off the words to use as reading material.”

The two also went to the library every other week to get books on tape. Toward the end of the year, the students were not only reading along with the book on tape, but some turned it off and said they would rather just read the book themselves.

“That can’t be measured,” Becky said. “There is no test score for that. That’s a sign that we made a difference.”

Aside from the difficulty of finding reading material, Becky and Carolyn dealt with emotional and behavioral challenges as well.

“You just can’t read when you’re mad,” Carolyn said. “There’s a survival technique they use where when they’re in survival mode, and it’s tough to learn. But if you put kids in an environment where they can succeed, that behavior goes away.”

In the beginning, some students as mentioned before didn’t want to go into that room. It was a room where, had a stranger walked in, he or she may have thought the respect level was very low. The students came in late, but it was so no one would see them walk in there. The students often vented about something that had happened at home, but sometimes it was because they had no one else to talk to. They grew to trust this group of people. “There was a real sense of community and respect in the groups for their learning differences,” Carolyn said.

And at the end of the school year, Becky and Carolyn went around and verbally told the students their strengths. “They wanted to hear the positives and were anxiously waiting for it to be their turn,” Becky said.

Reading Fluency – rate and accuracy

Decoding /Phonics - written letters and sounds (B-Buh)

Sight Words - words are not decodable (list of 1,000 words)

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Last Updated 10/08/2008