Struggling For Independent Reading

Students often struggle not only with reading, but with simply picking up a book. Beers’ chapter two, “Creating Independent Readers,” of her book When Kids Can’t Read relates directly to what I often do in my internship at Platt High School. At least three days out of the regular school week I work in the Read 180 classroom. Read 180 is a program for students whose reading skills are below (often times far below) what they should be at the high school level.

Beers wrote about the difference between dependent readers and independent readers. Independent readers have an arsenal of various strategies they can use in order to help them get through a text, such as: “recognize the author’s purpose, see biases, note an unreliable narrator, find the antecedents needed to navigate a maze of confusing characters, or make connections to [one’s] own life” (Beers 15). In contrast, dependent readers may be able to get through a text but their comprehension is only at surface level and their strategies include asking the teacher to help them or even tell them.

The most important distinction Beers makes about reading is that teaching dependent readers doesn’t mean teaching them how to immediately understand what they read, but “how to struggle with a text” (16). I see so many students in Read 180 who don’t have the patience to stick with one book and because they don’t have the skill set to know how to handle the book, they quickly give up. These students need to become readers by learning skills which will lead to comprehension.

The first thing most of the Read 180 students need is confidence. Many of the students tell me that just being in that class makes them feel dumb and always ask for me to close the door so no one will see them. Beers separates confidence into three separate sections: Cognitive confidence (comprehension), social and emotional confidence (willing participation), and text confidence (stamina and interest) (18). Without the belief they can succeed, the Read 180 students – and dependent readers everywhere – will fail to achieve that confidence and eventually become strong, independent readers. 

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Beers, G. Kylene. "Creating Independent Readers." When Kids Can't Read, What Teachers Can Do: A Guide for Teachers, 6-12. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003. 8-22. Print.