Troubleshooting+the+Reading+Process

There are lots of ways of looking at helping struggling readers, but I am a techie, so I'm going to take a techie look at it. Reading is a complex process, but we do have good models of it and with a good model, it should be possible to figure out where problems are and then to solve them. So, I'm going to take a ten-part troubleshooting process and go through a reading model with it. Using something outside the field of reading may help us to see the field of reading differently and to understand our students differently, possibly increasing our ability to help them.

=Attitude:= The first step in the troubleshooting process is to have the attitude that this problem can be fixed. Which is to say, my student is capable of learning and I am capable of teaching. If you don't believe a student can learn, you won't teach that student. The research paper above suggests that the one-celled animal, the paramecium, can learn. If a one-celled organism with only a little nucleus for brain power can learn, then any multi-cellular organism with a multi-cell brain sitting in front of us is also capable of learning.

What is often at issue is what to teach. We don't know what to teach, and as a result, we don't teach the right thing, the student fails to learn and the teacher fails to teach. The purpose of troubleshooting is to narrow the problem down as much as possible so that any intervention has the strong possibility of being the right one or else of yielding critical information to allow you to choose the right intervention.

Past failures can give us a negative attitude about future possibilities. But since you are reading this approach to helping students read, how about if you assume that after you read this, you will be able to teach any student because you will know how to diagnose the problems and address them.

Another attitudinal issue to watch for is the state of your emotions. If you are angry or upset, that is not a time to interact with a student, particularly a student who is struggling. Emotions strongly influence the learning process and negative emotions influence it negatively. Struggling students do not need additional emotional burdens between themselves and learning. [|For a little attitudinal inspiration, read:] http://www.troubleshooters.com/tpromag/9710.htm This is troubleshooting related to computers, but there are many parallels between getting a computer system to work and getting a kid to be successful in reading. =Damage Control Plan:= Damage control??? How does this apply?

Today I read that a youngster wanted to check out a chapter book from the school library, but because he had dyslexia, his teacher wouldn't let him. This is the kind of damage I am talking about--the damage that comes about when a person in authority suggests that a student is incapable of learning or that a student is stupid. Doctors take the Hippocratic Oath: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/doctors/oath_modern.html Basically, they promise not to harm their patients. As teachers, we need to use damage control to avoid making a reading problem worse by causing a student to feel shame for something that is not his or her fault. Children of the Code cites the serious psychological fallout from shame: http://www.childrenofthecode.org/Tour/index.htm If we cannot help, let's still try to avoid hurting kids. It's easy to do accidentally, so damage control requires vigilance and a willingness to take responsibility for the problem.

=Get the Symptom Description:=

What is going on with the student? How do you know there are problems? How do those problems manifest themselves? The more specific you can be, the better chance you have of creating an appropriate intervention. This is where assessment comes in--real assessment, not just a reading test that tells you there is a problem somewhere. What happens when you use a running record--what types of mistakes does the student make?What happens when you ask the student to read something silently and then tell you about it?Are there physical issues apparent, such as the student holding the text very close to the eyes? Are there processing issues, such as the student mixing up the order of letters or numbers?Does the student know all the letters?Are there phonological problems?Are there issues with word recognition? Are there problems with vocabulary or unfamiliar grammatical structures?Can the student read the text out loud yet still not understand what it means?Does the student have the background knowledge necessary for understanding the text?Are there genre issues, such as not being familiar with a particular genre?Are there attitudinal issues such as learned helplessness?How does the student feel about reading?How does the student feel about the particular text(s) he or she is being asked to read?What is the family's attitude about reading? These are just some of the questions you can ask yourself about the student. As you can guess, the answers to each question will be critical to figuring out how to help the student.

http://worldowiki.wikispaces.com/Assessment+Without+TearsThis is a collection of assessment tools that you can use to figure out what is going on.

=Reproduce the Problem= In the techie world, an intermittent problem is the worst thing to try to solve. When you have a short in the electrical system of your car and it just sometimes does something weird, it is very hard to trace down the source of the problem.

The same is true with reading, to a certain extent. For example, if a student has trouble reading in one classroom setting, but the reading "problem" does not exist in another classroom setting, then you probably are not dealing with a reading problem per se. There are other things you should look into.

If at all possible, then, observe the student reading both out loud and silently and see what is going on. When students fail, they tend to get defensive (as all of us do) and they may be reluctant to demonstrate their reading problem. You might want to talk to the student about the troubleshooting process and how we are scientists trying to figure out where the trouble is so we can fix it. It may be that if you share the troubleshooting process with the student and take a more dispassionate stance that is based on finding the problem and figuring out how to deal with it instead of on how the student "ought" to have learned this or that, the student may be more willing to talk about what is hard and to give you more information on the nature of their struggles.

=Do the Appropriate Corrective Maintenance= This sounds like something that cannot be applied to reading--that it is something you do with computers like doing a virus scan to make sure a virus is not a problem or checking to see if the machine is plugged in appropriately and all switches are on. Yet, let's get a little more creative here. There are lots of things we assume kids have been taught. For example, there are two different types of the letter a. One is "a" and the other is "a."

We assume that kids get this difference more or less by osmosis, but some kids won't. So, we need to check for basic understandings, such as making sure the student knows the letters, knows sounds, knows the basics of sounding out words, and all the stuff we assume has been taught but somehow has not been learned by this particular student. This is not something to blame on the student--it is something that the student missed out on somewhere and if we just teach it without making a big deal out of it, then the student will learn it and hopefully a significant portion of the student's problem has been solved. Make sure the student can hear the differences in sounds between letters that sound close such as b and p or m and n--because sometimes people have never thought about those differences. Listen to the student's speech because either dialect or speech impediments can lead to misunderstandings, particularly when teaching materials are in academic English and the student's primary language is a dialect outside of academic English. Also listen carefully to what the student says to see if there are any schemas the student has that are misleading. An example in music was a student who thought that it wasn't the notehead that determined the pitch but the other end of the note (stem end). It's hard to know how the student developed this idea, but it needed to be cleared up. Clearing up a basic problem like that can clear up the whole reading issue sometimes.

It might be instructive to read what these folks say about computer maintenance, because it might joggle something in your mind to check on with a student. Remember that we take an awful lot for granted in thinking about what kids know and understand.http://www.troubleshooters.com/tpromag/9802.htm

=Narrow it down to the root cause= This is a key step in the troubleshooting process--it is important to eliminate possibilities as well as to keep assessing until you find what is going on.

It might help to think about some of the steps in reading, in terms of how the human brain works. We first look at a text--and if we have problems with our ability to see, that can stop the reading process right there.

Next we process what we see in multiple ways. So we need to be aware of these ways of processing and to pay attention to how that processing is happening. It's helpful to think of a person's senses as "channels." Different people have different affinities for channels. Some people use their eyes more than their ears and vice versa for other people. For some people, some channels are more scrambled than other channels. If the visual channel gets scrambled, you may want to give the student different types of reading aids--a piece of paper to put under the line being read or even a card with a rectangular hole in it so the student can visually isolate words. Larger type might help and also you might explore different colors of background vs. text on the computer to see if something like that is helpful.

Background information is critical for comprehension, so if a student is having a hard time comprehending something, try out a text that is about something the student is interested in or knows a lot about to see if background knowledge is an issue. Another root cause of reading problems can be learned helplessness. Students feel they are going to fail, so they don't even try. Or they wait for someone else to read the word so they won't have to. Or they act out so they don't have to read. In this situation, you need to work on motivation by using texts that don't look like texts. Websites about the student's personal interests can be really helpful because a lot of web sites have a manageable amount of text.

=Repair= Teach the thing that needs to be taught, help the student practice whatever needs to be practiced, readjust what needs to be readjusted. =Test= Assess again. Did you solve the problem? No? You know what to do... =Take Pride= The troubleshooters say: "The other steps fixed the problem. This step keeps YOU in shape. Troubleshooting is an intense mental effort, and must be done unemotionally. You can't keep that up for long without a break. So after each solution, take pride in your solution." When you acknowledge to yourself that you were successfully able to troubleshoot the reading process with a student, then pat yourself on the back for effective leadership in this instance.

One important thing that the troubleshooters say is that this process is unemotional. This is a systematic way of tracing down a problem. In this process there is no room for blame--there is no time or mental energy for unproductive thinking. If you take a systematic approach to the problem and teach the student how to do the same, and if you model a focus on the problem dispassionately with the intent of fixing it, you will save the student a lot of the shame that is so damagine. You will also be teaching the student an effective way to solve problems in the future, whether literacy-related or not.

=Prevent Future Occurrences of the Problem= To a certain extent you can't do this because each kid is unique and has a different set of schemas and a different way of understanding things such as literacy. On the other hand, if a student is struggling because of not understanding something fairly simple, it would be a good idea to teach that thing to all students directly in order to prevent future problems.

Resources http://www.troubleshooters.com/tuni.htm