Supporting Striving Readers at Every Age

I work as an alternative education teacher in DeForest High School. Our students range in age from 15 to 18. Over the last several years we have noticed more and more students are getting to high school without the necessary reading skills to be successful. When students cannot access the curriculum, it often leads to school avoidance, attendance issues, and missed credits, eventually bringing them into alternative education settings like mine.

While I have been teaching for 25 years and my original degree was in elementary and middle education, I was never taught the science behind reading nor was I given explicit instruction on how to teach students to read. I learned about Classmates Literacy Foundation and Slant System while visiting the Madison Reading Project last summer. I thought, because I teach older students, that this would not be useful to me. How wrong I was!

Slant gave me the knowledge, skills and foundation to help students decode and comprehend what they are reading. The structured lesson plans are extremely helpful and allow me to adjust to each of my students' individual needs. I feel like I have the necessary skills and resources to help them become successful readers. Already, this training has helped me work more effectively with our school Reading Specialist to reinforce skills she is teaching.

I am so grateful at having received a scholarship from Classmates Literacy Foundation.  I cannot recommend the Slant System strongly enough. All teachers, regardless of grade level, need to have these skills in their back pockets. This system gives us the ability to teach students the “code” to reading. It builds success block-by-block. I cannot express the difference having explicit instruction in this area has improved my teaching, and the positive impact I believe it will have on my current and future students.