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My name is Stacy Wenzel, and I am a teacher at Sequoia High School in Redwood City, California. As part of my sabbatical experience, I explored the following question:

How can schools best support the reading development of high school students who have not yet reached a sixth-grade reading level?

With the support and guidance of my adviser and mentor, Dr. Helen Maniates of University of San Francisco, I have considered this question both for native English speakers and for language minority students and have sought insights by visiting schools, reading research and interviewing teachers, district leaders and academics. I explored multiple sub-questions related to this overarching question. The intended audience for this website is educators in my own district, but others are welcome to see what I have learned.

Perhaps one of the most important findings is that we do not yet have empirical research at the secondary level to answer all the questions I sought to answer. I did learn about many promising approaches and theories and found some answers to questions based on empirical evidence. Another finding, which should come as no surprise, is that the teachers' expertise in literacy instruction and teachers' general effectiveness significantly impact educational outcomes for students who are not yet reading at grade level (Allington, p. 114-121). Not surprisingly, this finding calls districts to put the selection, placement, support and development of teachers front and center. Teachers need to be able to respond and adapt to their teaching contexts and the student achievement that results from their instruction.

This Google site outlines some additional key discoveries in the following areas: text complexity, phonics instruction, assessment, school models and specific approaches to reading instruction for language minority students. Since the Four Resources model informs my thinking in all these categories, it may be helpful for readers to first read the Four Resources Model section before exploring the rest of the site. Given the limited scope of this project, the information on these pages is not a comprehensive review of the research on each of these topics as it relates to secondary literacy. Instead, I identify some of the most helpful resources I found and provide my own insights into the topics.

The following quotation from Gina Cervetti and David Pearson conveys hope and caution as educators consider the most effective, engaging and respectful ways to support developing readers:

We must find a way to engage all readers, not just our most able readers, in traversing all four of the resources every day and every week. We must avoid the trap of assuming that there is a hierarchy or an order of acquisition to the resources—that students must first master the code breaker stance before they get opportunities to engage text as a meaning-maker, a text user, or a text critic. It would be easy, and even appealing, to assume that each resource was logically a prerequisite to its successor. If we fell into that trap, we would end up implementing a kind of basic skills conspiracy of good intentions. The conspiracy goes like this: First, you have to get the words right and the facts straight before you can do the what if’s, I wonder what’s, and the says who’s of text understanding.

The problem with the basic skills conspiracy is that students on the low end of the performance continuum will end up spending most of their school careers getting the words right and the facts straight—and they’ll never get to the what if ’s, I wonder what’s, and the says who’s.

Pearson, P.D. & Cervetti, G. (2015). Fifty years of reading comprehension and research. In Research-based practices for teaching common core literacy.