Stories best tell what we are about.

Wade’s story

Wade’s story comes in three parts. Two parts are the stories of two students, Karen and Jake (Names are changed.), who inspired Wade to develop tools that are initially available through Student Empowerment Group. The third story is his own, so you know who he is.

Karen, the catalyst for the Read Through It Strategy

         Karen was 16 years old and pregnant.  She had never been a great student, and she did not believe she could be a good student.  She was just going through the motions of doing school, hoping she would graduate and find a job.

         I was asked to work with Karen because she was a slow reader and always behind in her work. I started to work with her on simple fluency activities to increase her reading from 90 wpm to hopefully one day 130 wpm.  She was making some improvements but struggling with even upper elementary level material. Her heart was not in it.  But I continued to be encouraging and optimistic.

         One day she was reading a passage, and she read the word “little” as “small”.  She did not notice her error.  She just kept reading. Ordinarily, that would have been counted as a reading error, but something told me to instead count it differently. I reacted by giving her credit for comprehension even though she mis-read the word, and that change in my reaction has made all the difference in the world to Karen and dozens of other students.

         I pointed out to her that she was reading from her brain instead of her eyes.  She was reading ideas and not words.  She was surprised and pleased with her performance in a way she had never felt before. From that fateful day, I taught her differently with an emphasis on capturing her mind’s activity rather than her oral expression of words. After about six months she was reading 6th grade material at 120 wpm.  More importantly she started producing more work in her other classes than she had ever done before. By the time she graduated she was confidently reading 7th and 8th grade materials at 120 wpm, but her story does not end there.

Shortly before she graduated, she came to me and confidently declared, “My son will be a reader!” It still brings tears to my eyes as she realized a power within her to learn, and more importantly, she realized a power she had that she could pass to her children.

Jake, the catalyst for Stages of Studenting

Jake was a sophomore with a very challenging past. His mother was a victim of domestic violence. But unusual in this instance, Jake’s father had been a loving and engaged family man who had suffered a car accident that left him with a brain injury that caused violent temper outbursts and an inability to create income. The family had to leave their home and Jake’s father just for their own protection.

Jake was an intelligent student who had very good skills in school earning mostly B grades in all subjects. He was engaging and had goals for his life. He was very responsive to the therapy arrangements that had been created for him. School was difficult and not without emotional challenges, but Jake persevered.

In January of his sophomore year, Jake returned to school to report that his father had been killed in a violent altercation with police. He was devastated, but he continued to attend school. Unfortunately, Jake no longer produced school work. His grief was great, and he kept responding to questions with a sincere, “I don’t know.” He truly did not know his thoughts about questions asked of him. He was numb.

Teachers were concerned about his emotional well-being, and they were also concerned about his lack of academic performance. Something had to be done. As his special education case manager, I was given the task of creating something different for him. The result was Stages of Studenting.

I realized that he kept coming back to school, somewhat erratically but enough to be considered an attending student. He produced no work, but he was present. I decided that we needed to acknowledge where he was, in an all-consuming state of grief, so we needed to use that as our starting place for our expectations of him.

With a focus on Stages of Studenting, teachers became more creative with ways to reward him for small steps of “studenting” such as attendance and participation even though he was not producing enough work that could be graded. Gradually, his participation increased and eventually he was producing work that could earn credit. After 18 months of processing his grief, he was again a fully engaged student, still with struggles and gaps, but he could earn a diploma.

Wade, founder of Student Empowerment Group.

Author of Dare to Read: Improving Your Reading Speed and Skills

Author of The Read Through It Strategy: Building Confidence First Then Comprehension for Struggling Secondary Readers.

Author of “Stages of Studenting”. Article in Principal Leadership, April 2018.

Wade has been working with students with emotional challenges since his graduation from Reed College in 1980. He earned a Masters in Teaching degree from University of Portland in 1987 and taught special education in middle and high schools for 31 years until his retirement in 2018 when he founded Student Empowerment Group.

Wade will sometimes introduce himself as a slow reader because although he started reading even before kindergarten, by third grade he was in slow reading groups in the back of the classroom. Being a slow reader haunted him throughout his schooling especially in college. Whenever, a teacher gave students a few minutes to read a passage in class, he immediately became anxious about his inability to complete the task in the time provided.

In the process of creating the Read Through It Strategy, Wade realized that he had been taught to read word-for-word as if correct pronunciation of words would create understanding. He discovered that this assumption was not always correct. His students taught him that he could correctly pronounce words that he did not understand, and vice versa he could understand words that he could not correctly pronounce.

When Karen read the word “little” as “small”, he was suddenly aware that there was a source of comprehension that did not come from the words. Readers create images in their minds that complete the picture of what the words provide. Sometimes these images were not completely correct, but all too often the images were accurate enough to provide adequate comprehension for the student.

Wade decided that he needed to figure out a way to acknowledge and give credit to the student for the level of comprehension that was being created in these images. Thus the Read Through It Strategy was created.

More generally, Wade realized that students needed to be recognized for what they brought to the teaching relationship. Teachers will give credit to students for what is produced, but all too often the product comes in the form of a structure that was created by the teacher. Students are essentially just filling in the blanks. While this can be and frequently is very effective, there are also many occasions when the students feel no particular connection to the work. For struggling students, there is no feeling of empowerment with accomplishing these kinds of tasks.

Wade created the Student Empowerment Group to provide a mechanism for bringing to teachers tools that empower the students, tools that start with the student and what they bring to the teaching relationship.