February President’s Message
The ability to read is the foundational skill for academic success. Students who lack the vocabulary and other reading skills are challenged to do well in other content areas such as math or science. Nationally, we know that the amount of time kids spend playing on devices has increased at the expense of time spent reading. CLASP’s latest data indicated that 70% of the students that teachers referred to CLASP were two to three grade levels behind in reading proficiency.
This finding prompted CLASP to partner with the UC Riverside Institute of Reading Development for a pilot summer reading program in 2025. The program was a success. Eleven students and their families actively participated. The program was effective in improving students’ reading skills, and their participation helped to prevent the backward slide that often occurs during summer vacation. Six follow-up training sessions were offered to CLASP tutors and staff this past fall to generalize the key ingredients of the program to our tutoring sites.
Those tutor training sessions were immensely helpful to me. Previously, I had thought you had to be an expert in cognitive science to teach reading. While that background is helpful for teachers, the basic principles can be broken down into simple intuitive practices for us volunteer paraprofessionals. Here are two examples:
1) Sparking the student’s curiosity about a topic is the anecdote to fears that they may not understand the words on paper. Try asking them some questions about a topic they will be exploring before having them start reading. This increases their motivation to delve into the passage to figure out the answers. 2) Giving kids ways to organize their thoughts and apply their prior experiences to a reading passage helps them to understand and remember what they’ve read. Ask questions to elicit what they already know about a topic and try organizing that into some sort of map or diagram.
Next summer we hope to nearly double the spaces available for CLASP students in the UC Riverside reading program. We will again offer six professional development training sessions next year to help tutors and staff become better reading coaches. For myself, instead of saying: “Here, read this and write three summary statements;” I will start a reading session by asking: “Say, do you think ducks get cold swimming around a pond in the middle of the night? What do we already know about ducks that can help us figure this out?”