Over the summer I took a professional development course focused on improving reading for older students, which was something I'd had my eye on for a while. Since I was trained as a secondary English teacher (my original certification is in grades 7-12), I didn't really have any background in actually teaching students to read.
One of the key ideas I took away from the course was fluency practice. If you teach middle or high school students, you might be wondering why it is so important, even for older readers.
The Benefits of Fluency
Fluency makes reading easier. Fluent readers struggle less with difficult words and can more easily understand complex topics.
Fluency is highly correlated with reading comprehension. Research shows that when a student reads fluently, they are more likely to understand what they are reading.
Fluency allows readers to connect ideas. Fluent readers can make connections between the text and their own background knowledge. These connections help them to retain knowledge.
What It Looks Like In My Classroom
This is my first year making fluency a part of my daily routine in my sixth grade ELA class. Each class period, students read aloud to a peer to practice their reading fluency. Each partner reads as much of an assigned selection as possible in 1 minute.
Students read to the peer seated across from them. These are high/low pairings so a fluent reader is modeling for a dysfluent reader. Students are encouraged to kindly help each other. Students take turns with who reads first and who reads second each day. I will fill in if there is a student absent or pair up students as needed just for the day.
As students are reading with their partners, I circulate the room, listening in for common errors, but also providing targeted support to dysfluent readers. After each partner has read, I ask students if there are any words they want to hear again. Students repeat the word chorally after my pronunciation. Often I’ll define the word as well as point out any word parts.
What We Read For Fluency Practice
Students read the same selection all week. We most frequently use passages from our vocabulary book because it is a grade level text with challenging, multisyllabic words.
If we’ve exhausted our vocabulary passage and we are reading a whole class novel, I will select a page or two from that to reread. This repeated reading then helps boost comprehension.
If we’re not presently reading a whole class novel, students will select a page from their independent reading book to read to their partner, which is a great way to expose students to new books and authors.
If you are looking for fluency resources for your own classroom, you can find free passages from Student Achievement Partners leveled by grade band here.
When Fluency Happens
Fluency happens at the beginning of class, right after we've reviewed our Do Now, if we are using our vocabulary books for fluency practice this week.
If we are using our independent reading books for fluency practice that week, fluency will take place at the end of class, right before our independent reading.
Linking our fluency practice to one of the already established routines at the beginning or end of class helps to ensure it happens every day and doesn't get lost in the shuffle of our agenda.
Using a text that we're already reading in class also helps integrate fluency into what we're already doing.
My Reflections So Far
I saw gains for many of my students, especially lower level students, on our fall MAP testing and I'm hoping to see the same in the late winter with our fluency practice as a contributing factor.
Though this is my just first year incorporating fluency into my classroom, I'm already thinking about ways to make it even more meaningful next year. I think it would be motivating for students to track how many words they read accurately per minute each day. I'd need a set of five graphs plus a copy of our texts with the words counted out (or a set of 9 graphs since students are supposed to also practice fluency for homework).
I'm also considering how to assess students growth with their fluency, maybe a rubric where they score their peers at the end of the week while I'm scoring a handful of students at the each of each week with the goal of getting to all students throughout the month.
I'd also like to do some writing connected to our fluency passages where students would also incorporate vocabulary from the current unit. I'm always trying to weave together the different parts of class.
You can find the slide for my fluency routine here.
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