Don't 'meet them where they are' and leave them there

"Meet students where they are," novice teachers are told. Provide different lessons for students starting at different points. But differentiation never ends, writes literacy coach Kristen McQuillan. Teachers are exhausted. Students who started behind stay behind.

Rather than ask less of some students, teachers need to provide scaffolding to get all students to the same learning goal, she writes. "That means providing extra, temporary support that helps all students access grade-level content without removing the intellectual work we ultimately want them to learn to do themselves.

"For example, a novice may need vocabulary explained, a dense sentence unpacked, the text read aloud, or a complex task broken into manageable chunks," she writes. But they shouldn't get an easier text to read or a less challenging task to do.

Scaffolding is temporary, McQuillan writes. Differentiation is forever.

The achievement gap between the strongest and the weakest students is large, and getting larger, according to an analysis released this year. In the same classroom students may be working at five or sex different grade levels.

Don't use AI to simplify texts for struggling readers, advises literacy educator Timothy Shanahan. Students should read complex tests with support, such as relevant background information. Teachers can have students read several things on the same topic with "guidance in how to make sense of the vocabulary, syntax, cohesion, and discourse structure, and in the use of helpful reading strategies." But AI use should be discouraged. Students have to do "their own reading (and thinking)."

When Michelle Brown taught seventh graders in rural Mississippi, she had a student who "spent months slumped over a 3rd-grade workbook" in her remedial English class. One day, "Johnny" wandered into her honors class, which was reading The Diary of Anne Frank. "He lit up," she writes. "He participated, asked questions, and made connections using words I’d never heard in my remedial class."

The meet-them-where-they-are system wasn’t designed to advance Johnny in reading, Brown writes in Education Week. "Struggling students are routinely pulled out of grade-level instruction and placed into interventions that often use different materials and instructional approaches." Expectations are low. Students "stay where they are" grade after grade.

"Every lesson should prepare students for the next, every grade should build on the one before it, and interventions should support rather than replace the grade-level material," writes Brown. She's now CEO of Common Lit, which helps districts find high-quality English Language Arts programs.