I Read it, But I Don't Get it

Teaching students how to read. While most secondary teachers think that this is a responsibility solely in the hands of elementary school teachers this perception could not be more wrong. No, you shouldn’t need to teach most of your students the basic reading principals such as how to sound out words and such. However, every good reader knows that reading is so much more than just sounding out the numerous words on a page which increase in difficulty as the student progresses in their education. Reading for context and understanding should be the whole reason for any subject to assign any reading.

Students who “can not read well” can often “read” just fine in the traditional sense. They can read the words in a sentence and the sentences in a paragraph and so on until the story is complete. When it is all said and done the problem comes when they finish the text and have no idea what they just read. Understanding a text gets increasingly difficult as the student moves up in grade level, as it should, but students so often get left behind simply because they don’t know what tools they need to use in order to grasp the content that they are reading.

Secondary teachers, in all subject areas, should take responsibility in helping their students understand the content in every reading assignment given. Students should be taught how to find out what words mean, make connections to other things they have learned or already know, understand when they are confused and need to step back, ect. While these may seem like obvious strategies for some students there are still students who struggle to grasp content, not for lack of trying or not being smart, simply for the fact that they don’t know how to make meaning of the text they are reading. It is our job as educators to, not just provide the answers as an easy way out but rather, equip our students with the tools they need to become successful readers.