Hey Kid, Your Literacy is Showing!

"Hey, Mrs. J, you know what this reminds me of?  This story reminds me of how the society saw the Socs and the Greasers in The Outsiders. You know how even though the Socs did the same things as the Greasers, people thought they were better kids because they were richer?"

"You're right, dude. Do you realize that you just made a text-to-text connection? And when did you read the Outsiders?"  Delighted inside, I thought: Be careful, kid...your literacy is showing.  

"Oh, uh, Mrs. P. is reading it to us.  I don't really listen though."  And just like that, the bubble is popped.  He realized that he had exposed a glimpse of the metacognitive processes of his brain, thus deviating from his social group's manifesto-Passive Disengagement.  

Scenes like this play out almost regularly in my eighth-grade intervention class which is filled with what the system dubs "struggling readers", "low-achievers" and "reluctant learners."  What the system didn't bargain for was a subculture of students who've now joined together in this new identity and have little-to-no interest in ever getting out of it. 

As a reading interventionist, I've worked directly with these students in some form or fashion for the past five years not counting my years as a regular ELA classroom teacher. I've learned some surprisingly common characteristics about intervention students which drive my teaching practices.  

1.  They are diverse. They are not all poor.  They are not all male.  They are not all LEP.  They are not all from broken homes.  They are not all non-Caucasian.  Sure, I have kids that represent many of these stereotypes, but I also have the popular, well-dressed white girls whose parents are pillars of the community.  You never know.   

They are also just as diverse in their skill level.  Some have excellent comprehension skills but cannot read between the lines.  Some can read long passages with beautifully fluent articulation, but can't tell you a thing they just read.  Some cannot decode or retain first grade sight words.  Some come to us as 13-year-olds with virtually no formal education.  

Diversity should be celebrated, but it can be a teacher's greatest challenge. Interventions should be just as differentiated as a regular classroom.  They need choices; they need physical state changes; they need to thoughtfully challenged.   They need the most talented teachers in the school who know how to create a lesson that is engaging, relevant and rigorous.  

2.  There's more going on than a skills gap.   If workbooks and test prep were the answer, then just about anyone could teach my students.  But by the time low-achieving readers reach middle school, their reading gaps are compounded by their own negative self-image.  They don't identify themselves as readers or writers, and school is something that has to be endured rather than enjoyed.  

Our collective answer has been to attack the gaps, i.e. to address the cognitive deficits in isolation.  However, even with intensive, data-driven interventions, these students are falling further behind their typically-performing peers.  The causes for their deficits are complex and varied.  It very well may have started with a language barrier, an unstable home life, or a sketchy educational background, but many students overcome these obstacles and catch up.  The question we need to be asking is how do we address their cognitive gaps while still accounting for the needs of the whole student?  

3.  They want to belong.  Thankfully, so many of my students over the years have had something "else" in which they excel:  football, art, band, drama, soccer, choir, basketball, etc.  Maybe they're very involved in an a youth group or have a very close-knit family or cultural community.  Regardless, we can build on the confidence and security they feel within this group and try to extend into the world of academics.  The ones that keep me up at night are the ones who don't identify any worthwhile affiliations or strengths because I know that it's just a matter of time until some predatory group will find them and take them into their fold.  

On any given day, at least half of an interventionist's job is working in the affective domain, not the cognitive.  Like Aibileen reminding Mae Mobley in The Help, we tell them "You is kind"--You are a good kid, a great group mate, a team player...; "You is smart"--You have skills! No one but you noticed that! Look how far you've come. "You is important"--We miss you when you're absent.  You are a great leader.  No one can take your place.  

They may say they don't care, but they do.  They may not care about books or about school, but they care about their relationships, even the ones with teachers.  They will get frustrated. They will fight you.  It's not personal.  When this happens, I start fresh the next day with a smile and a fist bump.  

4.  They are exhausted.  Imagine spending eight hours in a job whose tasks required you to have the knowledge and skill level of a bachelor's degree, but you only have a high school diploma.  You struggle for eight-hours a day, 5 days a week, but because you were found "below expectations" on your yearly review,  your employer requires you to give up 45 minutes of your lunch hour to be re-trained. Oh, and those few precious weeks of summer vacation you're looking forward to?  Yup, you're gonna probably going to lose some of those, too.  

That's pretty much what happens to these kids.  They fall behind in regular classes, so we give them more classes or we keep them after school or in the summer.  They are forced to spend most of their day doing something they hate and that they're convinced they're not good at doing.  The one class that they love, that keeps them motivated?  Well, we likely pull them out for more intervention.  

We have no idea what they have to do when they get home, what adult responsibilities they have to take on.  We don't always know when kids have so much autonomy that they are staying up, or out!, all night doing whatever they want.  And then, let's start school before dawn for the bulk of the year.  Is it any wonder why they've physically checked out?

5.  They don't hate intervention.  What they hate is what intervention costs them, namely their free time, their favorite elective class, and perhaps, their pride.  They hate the stigma.  They hate that they need it.  I'll never forget the time that I was doing pull-out interventions for a group of 7th-graders.  One kid had ignored his pass directing him to come to my classroom and went right on to P.E.  I marched right down to the gym and fetched him from the basketball court.  To his friend's inquiry of where he was going, he shouted, "She's pulling me for some f***ing reason!"   

Of course this kid was way out-of-line and I calmly escorted him to the A.P.'s office where he received an appropriate consequence. The other "of course" is that he didn't go to the pull-out either.  What a waste of all our time!   I'm not going to excuse what he did, but I  understand the sentiment.  Playing basketball in gym might have been the only positive experience he awaited in the long school day, and we were taking that away from him.  Not only that, but he left behind a gym full of boys who were getting to keep their basketball time.  

Imagine how well that intervention would have gone if he would have made it to class with the same dismal attitude.  I cannot remember what skill we were supposed to have been addressing, but I can tell you that HE would have learned none of it.  

So what?  Well, if you're bothering to read this in your own free time, I've probably not unleashed any ground-breaking revelations for you.  But I think it's time to change the conversations we're having about interventions and the students for whom they are designed.  What we're doing is not working, for the most part, but not for lack of effort.  

What have you learned about intervention students that you could have added to this list?