Supporting Struggling Readers

Sally Lutz

If Florida high school students don’t pass the reading section of the Florida Comprehensive Achievement Test (FCAT), they don’t graduate. It’s that simple. But Sally Lutz, a 2005 Walden M.S. in Education alumna, knows that the reasons why students fail the reading portion of the test are not simple at all.

A reading specialist with Lemon Bay High School in Englewood, Fla., Lutz says the reasons students fail are complex—and not those that one might expect. “Not because they are dyslexic, learning-disabled, or poor students. Most are good students,” she says. “Some of the kids I teach are in honors classes in other subjects.”

Lutz says students fail the test, which measures literacy and comprehension, because somewhere along the line they learned to hate reading, and as a result failed to fully develop the skills necessary to read and comprehend efficiently.

Because Lutz is so effective at helping struggling readers pass the FCAT, she was recently recognized as Charlotte County Teacher of the Year. Perhaps surprisingly, Lutz, who won out of a field of 1,400 teachers, is only in her first year as a classroom teacher. She was a school speech-language pathologist for 17 years with the same district before she decided to make a career change three years ago.

She is also, however, the first teacher in Charlotte County to become certified in reading instruction. “The M.S. in Education with a specialization in reading I earned from Walden last year satisfied all the state’s criteria,” says Lutz, who is teaching 90 10th-grade students this year.

“At the onset of this school year, I polled my students to find out why they failed the FCAT,” Lutz recalls. “Their responses included: ‘I hate reading,’ ‘I didn’t care whether I passed or failed,’ ‘I didn't have enough time to finish,” “I fell asleep” and ‘It was boring.’”

One of the keys to turning struggling readers into successful ones, she says, is getting them motivated to give reading another chance.

According to Lutz, research shows there are four key features associated with motivation to read: access to books in the classroom, opportunities to self-select books, familiarity with books and social interaction with others about books.

She provides all of these and uses many techniques to draw her students, who work in groups, into the material. One is pre-reading “hooking” activities, such as the use of white boards. She gives the class a topic, and each group of students writes on their white board as many words related to the topic as they can in 10 seconds.

“Then they pass the board to the next group and get a different group’s board and add to their word list—without repeating,” says Lutz. After the boards have made their way to each group, students deliver a presentation based on the information on the board.

“A related worksheet, short reading passage, or story will follow,” says Lutz. “Because of the ‘hooking’ activity they just completed, students are more interested in what they will be reading.”

Other ways she makes reading enjoyable include book discussions among her students and members of the local business community, and having her students read to, and lead book discussions with, local elementary school classes.

To track her students’ progress, Lutz builds practice test-taking and ongoing assessment into her classes’ remedial curriculum.

Her students’ reading skills have improved dramatically on recent informal tests, she notes. Her classes officially re-took the reading portion of the FCAT in March, and she expects that when the results come in May, most students will have passed.

More important than that, however, Lutz has watched her students undergo a transformation as readers: from “negative, discouraged, and uninterested students to positive, motivated and enthusiastic ones,” she says. Today, when Lutz or her students are reading aloud in class, she says everyone else pays attention.

“It is so quiet, you could hear a pin drop,” she says. “Then students ask, ‘What are we going to read next?’”