By Helly Nahmad, “Developing Effective Teaching Strategies for Adolescent Literacy”
How can we design a teen literacy programme that works? As per Helly Nahmad literacy programme aims to raise all students’ reading proficiency levels in a specific educational setting. Effective literacy programmes for middle and high school students include motivation, metacognition, vocabulary training, reading and writing across all subject areas, and programme evaluation, to name just a few.
Teaching literacy to adolescents is a difficult task. Teachers of reading in middle and high school must simultaneously motivate their students to read and assist them in mastering subject material. Teachers of teenagers may also need to work with some kids to have them reading at grade level. The following observations by Helly Nahmad contain some practical advice for educators working with teenagers to enhance their reading abilities in order to accomplish these diverse goals.
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Recognize the Population You Want to Reach by Helly Nahmad
Of course, teaching skills are essential, but so is knowledge of the genres of books that appeal to young adults. Ask your students about their reading preferences and passions. To provide your pupils with works that reflect and broaden their horizons, get to know the new authors in different literature. It enhances the likelihood that students of all ages will continue to enjoy reading and may ignite a fresh passion for the written word if you give them engaging, well-crafted material.
Dividing the enemy
Each kid in a classroom possesses a distinctive mix of interests, reading proficiency, and learning styles. The possibility that all students will succeed increases when children are placed in smaller groups based on their similar interests and reading levels. Students with lower reading levels are more likely to engage constructively when students with higher reading levels do not constantly overwhelm them.
Volunteer to Teach Students Who Struggle with Reading
To truly appreciate literature, one should put in the effort to comprehend what is being read. It’s crucial to identify pupils who struggle with reading so that they can get the assistance they need. Helly Nahmad also emphasises how crucial it is to address pupils’ underlying hearing and vision problems, which are frequently the cause of reading difficulties.
Join in with them
The adolescence and early adult years are a period of significant change. They are only now starting to realise how much control they have over their futures. This encounter can be both interesting and disturbing. Some students develop a strong resistance to all sorts of adult guidance as a result of this new information. By allowing students some latitude, teachers can partially avoid this innate conflict. Give them a choice from a wide range of books rather than assigning them all the same book. Give them some freedom to choose how to demonstrate their expertise as well. Allow them to create a play based on the book they read or a movie trailer highlighting the best parts of the tale.
Give them some tools
Teachers want their pupils to have the tools necessary to carry on learning even after class has ended. The tools that young adults need to become readers and learners for the rest of their life are laid out in Helly Nahmad’s learning center’s Cognitive Strategies Toolkit. As they read, students will gain skills in goal-setting, questioning, making predictions, and applying what they have learned to their own situations. Students who possess these skills can continue learning long after they have graduated.
Adolescent literacy instruction is difficult, but it may also be rewarding if you love reading and want to instil a love of literature in your kids.
Instructional Techniques: Their Value
Numerous tried-and-true teaching techniques are essential for efficient classroom training. Without a plan, teachers blithely impart knowledge that doesn’t appeal to kids or hold their attention.
Strategies energise lessons, build a feeling of community, and stimulate student participation. Some students may even be able to use these techniques independently when they study new material as they become accustomed to the different strategies teachers employ.
Teaching in the Classroom of a Strategy to Improve Adolescent Literacy
The term “instructional strategies” refers to the methods, procedures, and strategies used by teachers to better educate their students. These strategies are employed by teachers to help their lessons meet standards and support the learning objectives of their pupils.
Teachers should be very knowledgeable about various teaching strategies and have access to a wide range of resources. This is advantageous for teachers since it promotes class involvement and maintains students’ interest in the material being covered.
Teaching Students in Innovative Ways
Your students are all unique individuals. They bring different viewpoints, worldviews, and objectives to the group. It should come as no surprise that different students prefer different strategies for learning and remembering knowledge. This emphasises how important category distinctions are. Each learner can gain from specialised teaching techniques through the differentiation process. The optimal method for each student’s particular cognitive style can be used to study the content.
Helly Nahmad acknowledges that you can place children in reading groups with others who have comparable reading abilities. It may also suggest letting pupils engage in tasks designed to suit their preferred learning styles. To illustrate their understanding, some pupils would finish a word search, while others might write a summary, and yet others might decide to draw a picture.
gaining knowledge via doing
Students engage in activities that are both academically and personally significant during project-based learning. Through this form of training, pupils can gradually gain competence and knowledge. A project may take a few days, a few weeks, or an entire semester to complete.
In a project-based learning setting, students take on difficult tasks and look for solutions to real-world problems. In order to demonstrate what they have learnt, they present their work to an audience (such as other students or members of the community). Through project-based learning, students gain information and hone their skills by investigating fascinating, challenging, and real-world problems.
Learning Collectively
The utilisation of student-led, collaborative projects is another excellent educational strategy that has been demonstrated to reach and maintain the attention of a wide spectrum of students. Instead of focusing on each student’s success individually, you should plan your lessons so that each small group succeeds in its objectives. This teaching method is popular with pupils because it enables them to make up for their weaknesses while enhancing their strengths.
While some students may have a more aesthetic viewpoint, others might be more outgoing or intellectually inclined. The combined efforts of multiple students are typically greater than the combined efforts of any one student.
Conclusion
Reading is described as a complex process that requires readers to use their past linguistic, topic, and cultural knowledge to interpret and make sense of a text. Reading instruction does not end with primary school but rather continues throughout a reader’s life. A reader’s proficiency develops over the course of a lifetime through engagement with texts in a wide range of genres and extensive reading for a variety of purposes.
Just as teachers must think about their philosophical foundations for instruction, including their values and concepts that impact judgements, students must master literacy skills appropriate to each scenario. A commensurate change in the literacy assistance offered outside of school is required to accommodate student development. Many students squish through the gaps of a broken educational system. The main argument of this book is that equipping students with knowledge of and practise in good learning strategies is a critical component of the solution. Improving educational results will require work on many fronts. Cognitive and educational psychologists have recently focused on learning methods that are efficient and easy to apply.
