Dixon High School students get familiar with the written word

In Kim McGreevey's earth science class at Dixon High School, all of the students are poring over their reading assignments and talking to the text.

"Make sure you ask it clarifying questions," says McGreevey in an encouraging voice.

They're not losing it. Instead, they're learning a thought process that helps them analyze what they're reading.

And they don't do it out loud. They jot down key words and clarifying questions all over the handout about various mineral properties, which has been photocopied from their science book. Then they look for answers in the text and write abstracts of 25 words or less to summarize what they find out.

In English classes, math classes, Chicano studies classes and even honors classes at the Sacramento Valley school, students can be seen chatting it up with text and developing a relationship with the written word. It's helping them become better readers and better students, say members of the Dixon Teachers Association.

"It makes you think about what you are reading about," says 10th-grader Jessica Rodriguez. "It helps you remember what you just read."

"I'm actually pulling parts out of things that stick out in the text and remembering those parts," says 10th-grader Thomas Carlton. "Before I did this, reading about science was much more difficult for me."

"Talking to the text" is a way to make sure students don't get frustrated by what they are reading or — just gloss over the material without comprehending it. Instead, students focus on a little bit of text at a time, ask themselves what it means, jot down questions for later and summarize what they know at that point. In the process they learn and retain information. Since students can't write in textbooks the way college students do, teachers reproduce textbook pages for them.

Teachers say it's necessary because so many students — even in high school — are reading below grade level and lack sufficient reading skills to master the material on their own. Some students who seem to read well may have little comprehension of what they have just read. Some seem to think reading is just looking at the words.

Some experts believe that television, music videos and video games have created a generation with poor reading skills. Teachers at Dixon say that many students lack books in their homes and are not encouraged to read outside of school. English language learners may find it difficult to process and retain information even if they are able to sound out the words phonetically.

Most of the DTA members at the site have been trained by the Reading Apprenticeship Program offered by WestEd's Strategic Literacy Initiative (SLI). The Oakland-based program is designed to help teachers incorporate reading or literacy strategies into core curriculum classes. It's a controversial aspect of high school reform, because older students are already supposed to be competent readers.

When the first batch of teachers at Dixon was trained and began sharing the information with others at the site, they were met with reluctance from a few core science and social studies teachers who didn't see it as their job to teach reading or literacy strategies. Today, however, the majority of teachers realize that if they don't do the job, no one else is going to step up to the plate.

"I think that now we're over that hump and we realize that it's everybody's job here," says English teacher Lisa Krebs.

As a school that was facing sanctions under II/USP (Immediate Intervention/Underperforming Schools Program), Dixon High received extra funding to boost student achievement, and applied a big chunk of it toward paying for the SLI training. It appears to have paid off. After two years, the school was taken off the list of underperforming schools, and is no longer facing state sanctions.

Teachers are happy about the test scores, but they are even happier about the changes they see in how students learn and participate in class.

"It's a big thing, because classrooms are actually transformed," says Gayle Cribb, who teaches honors classes in U.S. history and Spanish. "When it's really working, students are generating questions, reading for themselves and learning from each other. They aren't just answering questions at the end of a chapter. It's the real thing — not just students jumping through hoops for the answer."

At the beginning of the year, she teaches new students how to "talk to the text" by modeling for them. She challenges them to "stump" her by bringing in reading material that's hard to understand, then demonstrates the process she goes through to master it.

"I read it little by little, and tell them everything I'm doing to try and figure it out. I'm showing them what goes on in my mind. They have a lot of 'aha' moments. When you are not a good reader, it all looks like magic until someone slows it down and shows you how to make meaning from the written word."

The school offers special literacy classes for the lowest-level readers during freshman and sophomore years, as well as some pullout programs. But whenever possible, teachers incorporate reading strategies as they're teaching core curriculum.

Some teachers admit that before the SLI training they would often "teach around the text" as a way of covering the standards in a timely manner by explaining the information to students and providing activities. They would, in fact, do anything but ask them to read and comprehend the text because that had not been successful.

"We became experts at delivering the material in other ways," says Cribb. "Students would learn the material somewhat effectively, but would not be empowered to learn from reading. And they would read less, which meant they did not improve their literacy skills."

Now students can tackle the material themselves.

"It takes time to teach this way, but it's worth it," says Ivan Chaidez, who uses the strategies in his Spanish and Chicano studies classes. "We've been doing it for three years now and our test scores are going up. And I find that in my classes, discussions are richer and the kids are more engaged."

When his Chicano studies students read a poem, he asks them to use the program's "I saw I thought" strategy, which encourages students to write down their own thoughts and reactions next to the text. The poem "Maestro," for example, describes racism against Latinos, and students write comments such as, "Yes, that's happened to me." One of the goals of the literacy program is to have students bring their own experiences and cultural identity to understanding text so that information seems real to them, not just a nebulous concept.

Krebs finds that the strategies are useful even in her honors English classes. "Sometimes you hear students groan or say, 'Why do I have to do that?' But most of them are familiar with these strategies because they've been using them since freshman year."

The culture of the school has changed, says Cribb. "Instead of saying, 'Oh no, are we going to have to read?' the more common response is, 'So, what are we going to do with the text this time? And how are we going to read today?'"