Wednesday, February 6, 2013

Breaking Down Barriers in Reading With the Help of Technology

By Barret Graf
6th grade language arts teacher at Carver Middle School

She sits in the second row, and she is tiny.  When I ask students to sit up and get focused, her feet dangle under her desk like the pendulum of a clock. “Slinky,” as her friends call her because of her ever curly hair, has not missed a day of school all year, and she is never late. She has never told me this, in fact she rarely speaks to me at all, but I know she likes to be here. 

Yet as is typical of most students in this class, she is a struggling reader.  At the very thought of reading grade level text, I can see her eyes glazing over as if she is travelling to a far off place where she is safe from the fear of failure and embarrassment. A note to the wise; most everybody has a fear of failure, but at no point in life is this fear more pronounced than in middle school. 

Back to “Slinky”…“Slinky” has spent so much time not comprehending text that, instead of asking for help, she has slowly developed coping strategies to deal with this dilemma. She pretends to read. To answer written questions, she writes parts of the text.  During sustained silent reading, she tries not be noticed. 

Getting students like “Slinky” to embrace the possibility of academic success appears monumental. You see, on paper “Slinky” is a 6th grade student, but inside her own head she knows she is not. She knows that she can not do what successful 6th graders are doing. On the play yard, these are her close friends, but in the classroom they are miles apart.  This is the conundrum that struggling students face every school day. 

Enter blended learning (insert trumpets here). Blended learning gives all of our students the time they need to work on what is most pressing to their long term academic success. They need time to experience the intrinsically rewarding sensation of true success. 

Since the initial inception of blended learning at my school last year, my students, “Slinky” included, have shown dramatic improvement on both state test scores and the quality of class work.  “Slinky” has improved  2 grade levels in reading, since blended learning has addressed her areas of greatest need.  

The time period each day where “Slinky” is reading materials appropriate to her lexile level makes all the difference. She is learning more now than she has in a long time and slowly, but surely, her confidence as an academic and indeed as a powerful person is beginning to bloom.


Mr. Barret Graf has been a teacher for 14 years, the past eight of which have been spent as a 6th grade language arts teacher at Carver Middle School.  The Partnership for Los Angeles Schools recently awarded Mr. Graf a challenge grant to research blended learning models and produce a series of self-guided mini-lessons using Achieve3000.

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