Hannah joined EBLI in August 2011 and is responsible for all operational activities at EBLI and is the glue that holds it all together. She is also involved in teacher training and consulting. Previously, she lived and worked in Ann Arbor, MI where she attended and graduated from University of Michigan. While in high school and college, Hannah attended several EBLI trainings and taught students in Detroit public schools as a volunteer for Beyond Basics.
Laughter rippled through the room yesterday morning when high school principal Ron Reed joked about his old strategy for dealing with poor readers in his school: blaming the teachers at lower grade levels. But the audience sobered when he went on to say, “And how well is that working for us?”
The truth is, it’s not working. And the crowd of over 100 educators who attended the EBLI presentation got the truth. Nora began by speaking about the EBLI Secondary Training and why high school students need more than comprehension work: the majority of our secondary students lack foundational reading skills. Training comprehension when students don’t have those basic skills is the equivalent of “moving around furniture to fix the crumbling walls in the house.” It simply doesn’t work.
High school teacher Brady Lake followed Nora by presenting the impressive gains his students made on the ACT after receiving EBLI instruction. He caught the attention of the audience when he asked them to raise their hands if they knew the reading levels of every student in their respective schools. When only 5 hands went in the air, he told them frankly, “That is a big problem.”
Ron Reed and his assistant principal John Tafelski then shared their school’s model of using EBLI – every 9th grader in the building is required to take an EBLI class. They recognized that fact that because most middle and high school students aren’t reading to their highest potential, it is impossible for their teachers to effectively teach all of the required content.
It was clear that the presentation was a wake-up call to the audience, and they were receptive and enthusiastic. By the time they left, they understood that secondary teachers must teach reading, despite the required paradigm shift. They understood that EBLI is here to turn the situation around and they no longer have to feel helpless as educators. When the presentation concluded, there was a rush of people asking how they could get EBLI in their schools.
Seeing the reactions of the audience members made me realize that the EBLI staff aren’t the only ones who see the necessity of change in education. And the more people there are who are aware of that, the closer we are to teaching the world to read. Congratulations to Nora and many thanks to fellow presenters Mark Thomas, Brady Lake, Ron Reed, and John Tafelski for helping to get our message out to the world.
LinkI’ve been working with a second grader over the past few months who becomes so anxiety-ridden whenever she sees a book that she either rushes through her reading without taking a breath or begins to cry. She is so terrified of reading that she will do anything and everything to “deflect,” or distract her teacher, tutor, Mom, Dad, and anyone else who asks her to pick up a book.
I try to imagine what it must be like for her to go to school in the morning. She probably sees her school day as a huge mountain she cannot scale. She has told me numerous times that she’s “a bad reader,” and that’s just how it is. She is only seven years old, and yet she has already formed a negative opinion of herself that is taking an exceptional amount of time to undo, in spite of her progress. She can now read multi-syllable words, spell words correctly, and read books she’s never seen.
She’s seven years old, in second grade. I think of those in fifth grade, seventh grade, twelfth grade, college, beyond. I have met many of them. How hardened their negative perceptions of themselves have become. And not because they’re unintelligent; that is absolutely untrue. They struggle because they simply haven’t been given the information they need.
I have a habit of checking in with myself once in awhile about the choices in my life and internally asking, “Why am I doing this?” Just to let myself know whether or not my intentions and actions are in line. Sometimes the answers come slowly, or I don’t like them, or I find I have no answers. But when I ask myself why am I working for Ounce of Prevention and EBLI, the answer comes instantaneously: I cannot fathom living a life in which reading is anything less than a joy. To me books have always been priceless and reading is something that, especially as I get older, is a treat. The fact that it causes anyone pain or negatively affects their self esteem is my call to action.
Teaching these children, teenagers, and adults to read is the easy part. With EBLI, we now have the information necessary to so quickly and effectively. For that, I’m grateful every day for Nora and her passion and the fact that I was lucky enough to be born her daughter. The difficult part is helping learners to change their minds and form positive opinions about reading and their own worth. If every child were effectively taught to read when it was supposed to happen, before the negativity sets in, I believe that the English-speaking world would be a very different place. That is why I’m doing this: because if my efforts bring quality reading instruction to even one more person, changes can be made. So bring it on, 2012, because EBLI is teaching the world to read!
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