Help for Middle and High School Readers with Adolescent-literacy Expert Matt Bardin

In this episode, I focus on struggling readers in middle and high school. 

Adolescent-literacy expert, Matt Bardin is with us today to discuss how to increase the reading levels of middle and high-school struggling students. He is an educator with 25 years of experience and founder of Zinc Learning Labs. He has written on adolescent literacy for the Hechinger Report and The 74. He also authored the book, Zen and the Art of the SAT, as well as hosted the REAL Learning show on Sirius XM.

Matt's  motto is “Advancing Literacy to End Information Inequality," with the  mission to deliver reading growth to middle and high school students using love-based learning and conscious reading, referred to as the ZINC approach. He states that zinc is known as “the hidden element.” Most people don’t realize its importance for health, but without it, we can’t survive. Reading is often similarly undervalued. It’s the hidden element in school and career success. Zinc stands for: Get in the ZONE, IGNITE Reading Success, NURTURE Skills and Love, and CONTINUE to Grow.

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Sponsored by Dr. Gregg Hassler Jr., DMD
Trusted dental care for healthy smiles and stronger communities—building brighter futures daily.

Chapters

• 0:53 Adolescent Reading Data
• 2:11 Matt Bardin
• 3:38 Advancing Literacy to End Information Inequality
• 7:32 Will Phonics Fill the Hole and Make Kids Good Readers?
• 14:00 Growing Kids Vocabularies
• 16:35 ZINC Results
• 18:59 Articles Over Books
• 20:57 Recommendation
• 24:14 Call to Action

Transcript

Help for Middle and High School Readers with Adolescent-literacy Expert Matt Bardin

Lisa Hassler

Welcome to The Brighter Side of Education. I am your host, Dr. Lisa Hassler, here to enlighten and brighten the classrooms in America through focused conversation on important topics in education. In each episode, I discuss problems we as teachers and parents are facing and what people are doing in their communities to fix it. What are the variables, and how can we duplicate it to maximize student outcomes?

In this episode, I focus on struggling readers in middle and high school. Failing student reading scores have been splashed across the news and made into major academic debates, especially since the pandemic.

The reading levels of our students are frightening. It appears that adolescent student reading proficiency is spiraling down and out of control. But the reality is that it's been consistently low since the National Center for Educational Statistics NCES started tracking the national reading levels with the National Assessment of Educational Progress NAEP Reading Assessment back in 1992. That's 30 years of low.

In 2022, only 31% of 8th grade students performed proficiently on the reading assessment, which was three percentage points lower compared to 2019, yet the exact same as in 1992.

The most recent NAEP data for 12th graders was from 2019.Data showed a 3% drop in proficiency from 1992 to 2019. That's 37% of the 12th graders in 2019 read proficiently, compared to 40% in 1992.

Ineffective reading skills are leaving our children with little hope for a successful socioeconomic future with few well paying jobs that don't require advanced literacy. So how can we help them?

Adolescent literacy expert Matt Barden is here with us today to discuss how to increase the reading levels of middle and high school struggling students. He is an educator with 25 years of experience and founder of Zinc Learning Labs. He has written on adolescent literacy for the Heckinger Report and the 74.

He also authored the book Zen and the Art of the Sat, as well as hosted the Real Learning Show on SiriusXM. Welcome to the show, Matt.

Matt Bardin

Good to be here.

Lisa Hassler

So what was your journey into education and how did it lead you to developing Zinc Learning Labs?

Matt Bardin

I started out as a high school and then middle school teacher here in New York City public schools, and I did that for several years. And then ever since, I've been a tutor and a test prep tutor, and what I saw, one on one, really opened my eyes. In the classroom, you're confronted with so many kids, even if it's a smaller number, it's too many to see. What I saw when I was tutoring one on one and responsible for moving the numbers, and what I saw was low. Reading comprehension was probably the first thing that jumped out at me.

We assume, those of us who are strong readers, that everybody kind of reads right. But in reality, most people really struggle to comprehend, especially as reading advances in complexity.

Lisa Hassler

So your motto is Advancing literacy to end information inequality. What is the meaning behind this? And is that possible with the age of social media?

Matt Bardin

Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, the meaning is just I'm convinced that reading is the way to get a lot more information, and it's also very strongly correlated with critical thinking skills. And we're living in a world where adult literacy is actually really low in America. The percentage of adults who read at or above adult proficiency is 13. And adult proficiency is not necessary for everyone. But it would be good when you have that level of reading proficiency, you have a lot more access to information and ideas. And I'm convinced that also when you gain that ability in adolescence, it builds out your critical thinking skills.

Lisa Hassler

Yeah, absolutely. And I think about proficient, if we were to gauge that now, a proficient level on, like, an NAEP reading assessment would be like three, right? It would be like a level three- four. I think anything below that would be a basic level, which means that you can sound it out and you're getting the basic ideas, but you're not really comprehending at a deeper level. So that proficiency is linked with the fluency. And then our adolescents are at 37% right now and 13% of the adults, we're linking those two numbers together to see how that is either going down to adults or that it's not really progressing beyond that high school level.

Matt Bardin

Yeah. I actually want to say two more things on this one. What are these levels? It's pretty hard to say exactly what they mean, and I feel like our standards have eroded with grade inflation. And you're pointing to it, lisa, there's a gap, right? Like, 30% of American adults have graduated from a four year college program, but only 13% read at or above adult profision. I'm not exactly sure how these numbers stack up, but the Barbara Bush Foundation conducted a study, a very thorough study in 2020, where they showed that the adults who are reading in the level three category have a significantly higher income level than people who read below that.

But adults who are in the 45 are 20% higher than them. So it's something like $62,000 annual income for someone in the level three, but $73,000 if you're in the level four to five. Now, what I want to know is, what about the people in the level five? Right? Yeah, they're, I'm pretty sure, in a totally different stratosphere. And that's why we have millions of jobs sitting unfilled, too, is that there's nobody qualified to do them. The jobs are not reading jobs per se, but in a service economy, the kind of critical thinking skills and the ability to deal with language in this more sophisticated way, I'm convinced is underlying a lot of these abilities.

Lisa Hassler

Yeah, I would agree with that. Something to be mindful of is 80% of the adult prisoners cannot read above a fourth grade reading level. When you're thinking about those low reading numbers and what that means for people when it comes to their jobs and how there's these jobs that are open, what happens for those adults who are reading at that one and two level and they're making bad choices to be able to make ends meet? Possibly. And so the socioeconomic impact of those individuals and their future is definitely correlated with reading abilities as well. And of course we don't want that for our students.

So what can we do to help them? Right, so this is where you come in. Education reformers are recently focused on better reading instruction in early grade and they're focusing on phonics. Do you think that's enough to advance reading for middle and high school students if they're just focusing on that phonics piece?

Matt Bardin

No. Simple answer is no. I mean, I think it's great and it's absolutely necessary that we focus on that and it's really encouraging to see how much parents are getting involved and saying, wait a minute, I need my kid to read. It's just getting you to a third or fourth grade level and you and I talked about this earlier that does correlate very strongly with better reading outcomes later for obvious reasons. But two points about that. One, the answer is no, that's necessary but not sufficient. And number two, let's not give up on kids who are still behind in third grade because what I know from tutoring is that these are correlated with brain development.

So brain development is uneven. Some kids walk when they're eight months old. It doesn't make them the next LeBron James. And if you're a late walker, it doesn't make you incapable of doing sports or even excelling at them. So when the ability comes in later, we need to make sure we meet kids still and we teach them phonics and we get them reading whenever their brains are ready to handle it.

Lisa Hassler

Yeah, absolutely. So if a student is not reading on grade level, we were talking about third grade reading levels and those being academic indicators for success in high school graduation rates and college, there are those students that have not maybe had that full piece of the phonics and the comprehension, but we can't stop teaching them those things in third grade and moving on from that learning to read to reading to learn that switch that happens in third grade, there still needs to be that instruction with reading. And so I think that's something that people are starting to realize right now is that we can't just stop teaching to read at that third grade level and that there needs to be some continuation of even the phonics, the vocabulary and the comprehension pieces that are going to go deeper in third grade and beyond as well.

Matt Bardin

Not for everyone. That's one of the biggest challenges I think middle and high school teachers face is the kids abilities are so uneven, so the kid who doesn't really have the phonics down in 4th, 5th, even in 10th grade, just teach them phonics. It's actually not that hard. So Zinc is offering a reading protocol that gives your students a mechanism to engage with these ideas and also gives you a vocabulary for talking about it and understanding what's going on in your classroom better.

Lisa Hassler

And I think that there's a couple of things that I wanted to remark on with that one. Absolutely, you're right. Teachers are not reading specialists sitting in their classrooms. If they were reading specialists, they would be the ones that are pulling out the children and working with them. And so most teachers that are behind those students in a full classroom, especially general Ed, they're not reading specialists and they are searching for help. They really are. And so something like this, this is what we're looking for and hoping is out there and not being able to find.

So you're filling this gap. And also that it sounds like with the differentiation and the whole classroom approach versus a tutorial experience. The Zinc Learning Lab sounds like it's more of a one on one meeting kids where they are. Is this online?

Matt Bardin

Yeah, it is. So it's a web based platform that has a whole bunch of components that support ELA instruction for middle and high school students. And it's kind of like a one stop shop for vocabulary articles and mainly reading instruction. That's really where we want to engage our teachers who use us is to give them this tool that a, gives them a handle on how to talk to kids, like I said, but also gives kids it is more like one on one instruction. Like a student logs on, they do a level placement when they're assigned ignition, which is like this key component, like I said, the reading ignition unit,they do a level placement so we know where they are. And then we're giving them a series of very short passages and a presenter is asking them questions like, okay, so it says this leads to blah, blah, blah, drag the word this and drop it on the word or phrase that this represents. Because when you miss that connection to the pronouns antecedent, you're done comprehending. Right?

Now you can't do that on a one to one basis with every student in your class. But if your students get to do that for just few minutes in the early part of your school year, they suddenly know to look for the pronouns and connect them to the antecedents and then they're comprehending, or at least that's a key component.

We find that you need all of these components to actually comprehend. The point is successful comprehension. And then that's when you as the teacher, can take them to the next level. You know them, you care about them, you figure out, well, I got to give this kid this short story to read because it's going to blow their mind. So you mentioned love based learning. That's the other component of our approach from tutoring. The only thing that works is love in life. You obviously love learning and thinking about learning and doing this podcast. So you're great at it, and if you hated it, you'll never be good at it.

I think even the NFL has figured this out. If you just yell at the guys, they're not going to perform better. Really? If you get them engaged and caring and working hard and pulling together, that's how you win championships. So we're trying to engage kids so that teachers can then bring the next level of, like, oh, okay, read this.

Lisa Hassler

Starting to entice them and encourage them and then building that relationship of trust and then of success as well, because when you start having that successful outcome, then you get excited and feel like, well, I can do this, and so I will continue to do it. Because it's something that you feel like you can do. So that's really important. So you've got, get in the Zone for Z, Ignite reading success for the I, Nurture skills and love for the N. This is zinc, right? So get in the Zone, Ignite reading success, Nurture skills and love, and Continue to grow.Those are what you are talking about with the ZINC.

All right, well, you stated, "When I was a student, decades ago, my teachers gave me vocabulary lists every Monday, they quiz me on the new words every Friday. I always crammed on Thursday evenings, ace those tests and then forgot the words by Saturday morning. My teachers were assigning me vocabulary, but they weren't teaching it to me."

Now, I think everyone can relate to this experience. I've done this with spelling tests. I think I've done this for every test. I mean, let's face it, who hasn't? Now you suggest a better way to I like how you call it "grow kids" vocabularies. Can you explain what the brain science says about vocabulary acquisition process and what you do to better equip adolescent vocabulary?

Matt Bardin

Yeah, so the brain science is very, very clear on this, and I think you had Dr. Daniel Willingham on your show, who is also talking about a similar idea. Maybe this is a little more specific. So short term memory is actually pretty easy to upload information into your short term memory. And that's what we're talking about when we memorize the dates or the facts or the Photosynthesis process, whatever it is that you get it tested on. Long term memory is a different matter. The key ingredient for that is what's called spaced repetition. So it's the idea that you want to get something in a short term memory, but then you want to let it go.

So those kids who are those anxiety learners who just cram a cram, cram, cram, they tend not to remember, or they remember it in a non understanding way. And if you really want something to stay in your memory, you need to learn it once. And then you need to set it aside for maybe 24 hours at least, right? And then you come back and you check and you see if it's still there, and then you do that again with increasingly large gaps between each visit to the information. So our vocabulary tool on Zinc Learning Labs is designed with that component.

And frankly, a lot of teachers find it hard because they don't want to have a six week process for kids to learn the list. But the ones who are doing it successfully say okay and also gives the students some responsibility. They can check in and monitor it, but for this semester, you have to learn these 200 words or something. That's the only way they're going to actually retain the words because some kids probably memorize it once and learn some of them, but if you don't see them again in context and reading and things like that, you're not going to retain them.

But as far as memorization goes, space repetition is what is well documented to work.

Lisa Hassler

What results have you seen then with the students who have used your program and how are you measuring it?

Matt Bardin

So we make a lot of efforts to do that. Like I said, particularly with Ignition, which is the reading growth component, students do a level placement before and after, and a third of them go up a full zinc reading level. And this is very consistent. It's weird. Now, some teachers have more like 40% going up, and I think that's because of the way that they're instructing. But we're seeing universally across the board over the last couple of years, the students who complete the program. A third of them go up by a full zinc level, which is the equivalent of more than a grade level.

And they've done this activity for a total of somewhere between one and 5 hours of class time over two or three weeks. But the more compelling statistic for me, because we also see a few kids go down, right? And how can your reading level go down? I think they're bored and they're tired of it or whatever. But what we also do is we ask them, did it help you improve your comprehension when you read? 85% say yes. It's a simple yes or no survey question. 85% say yes. And then we ask them, do you enjoy the experience?

And only 60% say yes to that. And that to me is compelling because I don't think they're just gassing us up here and trying to tell us what we want to hear or worried about the teacher saying it or something. I think they're being honest. And the 85% number, I think, is true. And that's what we hear anecdotally from teachers, that it's a total game changer in terms of the way their students are comprehending when they read and talking about the text that are being taught. Also, as far as evidence goes, in 2020, the College Board did a full controlled study that showed that ignition had a significant impact on PSAT reading scores.

And I'm pretty sure we're the only thing that's ever done that. So that is also compelling evidence. It was done during the pandemic, so I think we're a lot better now than we were then, and we're excited to have more opportunities like that.

Lisa Hassler

That's exciting. Are you in any Florida schools? Since I'm in Florida, I want to know.

Matt Bardin

We're in a ton of Florida schools. We're partners with Springboard, which is the college board's ELA curriculums.

Lisa Hassler

Perfect. As we wrap up, I want to talk about recommendations. You've suggested that articles can be a better choice for assignments over books for middle and high school students. Can you explain why and then add another recommendation for teachers or parents?

Matt Bardin

Yeah, the main thing is we alluded to it before, and this podcast isn't really focused on it, but learning needs to be love based. So the main recommendation is let's just win. People like don't assign kids stuff they can't do. Don't make them miserable. Try to find something that's a win. And a win could be a graphic novel. It could be a comic book for a younger kid or even an older kid. Like, we want to establish the habit. They're going to get sick of it. If they read comic books all day, they're going to do it all day.

But if they read a comic book every day, they could do that for a few years, and then they'll get tired of it. Right. And they'll want to read something more substantial. So always look for wins and give them things they can do. And an article is a great way in. So in tutoring, I'm always trying to challenge my students reading level, and that's what we do in Zinc Learning Labs, is we give them those higher, more challenging level text in short chunks, get them to succeed at understanding it. Look for something that will actually engage them, that they'll care about.

Like if I get you to put in the effort to actually comprehend the opening of Zora Neil Hurston's their Eyes are Watching God, do you come away feeling enlightened and excited about what you read? Or is it just like, Eh, whatever, and if it's just whatever, that still could have value. And as English teachers, we kind of have to do that sometimes. But what you're really looking for is something that engages them and is meaningful to them. And when you do that and you get them going, then if you can find ways to challenge and give them the harder things in small doses, that's where we find works.

Lisa Hassler

Excellent. Any other recommendations?

Matt Bardin

I mean, can I plug my product here?

Lisa Hassler

Yeah, absolutely.

Matt Bardin

I guess we've been doing that. Yeah. I want anybody who's interested in who's a teacher out there who's interested or an admin in the product. It's zinclearninglabs.com and you can reach out to me directly, Matt@zinclearninglabs.com, if you have questions or comments. I think for parents, if you're a reader, if you can establish some kind of reading hour or reading half hour in your house where everybody is just reading and we didn't get to this, you mentioned social media. I know that's a huge threat to everything, but that's also an opportunity. That's why this is so critical right now.

But it's also like kids are relieved. If they can get away from their phones for a while, they're relieved. And I'm convinced reading is the cure or it's one of them, right. To get you deeply engaged with something. You know, Lisa, like, when you find a great book, there's nothing better. So you're not selling them snake oil, you're not selling cod liver oil. It's not like a punishment to ask them to read. So, like I said, let's win, baby. Let's go out and win. Find stuff that works for your students, for your kids. Get them excited about it because they will be.

We love reading, right? Nothing's better than a great book, and sometimes you need to build up to that.

Lisa Hassler

Absolutely. Yeah, I've got a book right now and I keep trying to figure out it's almost like a little drug. I keep trying to figure out when do I get to go back to it, right? When I get done with this and I get done with this, I can actually take some time for myself to go back to it. So it does draw you in. You're excited about it, you're like, I want to know more. And I do think that of kids struggle with screen fatigue as well as all of us when you're on that device for a long period of time, regardless of what screen, I just feel like we do get some screen fatigue.

And so taking that break and having a book to be able to go to actually feels good on our eyes and it's nice for our brain. So I think that once we start saying, hey, let's do this, and take those moments of structured downtime for reading, that then they might be able to enjoy that experience and then continue to go back for it as well, especially with the books that they really enjoy.

Well, thank you, Matt, for joining me today to discuss the reading crisis and effective strategies to improve adolescent literacy. And thank you also for your dedication and commitment to helping kids who struggle with reading so that they can have better futures.

Matt Bardin

Thank you.

Lisa Hassler

If you would like to know more about Matt Bardin and Zinc Learning Labs, you can go to www.zinclearninglabs.com. And do you have another place for them or I think you did you tell them your email address if you wanted someone to get in touch with you.

Matt Bardin

 Matt@zinclearninglabs.com, but the website is a great portal and has some resources there and we love to hear from teachers with any input.

Lisa Hassler

Absolutely. I went there. There's a lot of information there and you have some information for some free resources for teachers as well I noticed. Teachers, you can go there, parents especially if you want to head out there and look at what he's got on there, there's a lot of good information.

So here is a call to action get involved with Tween and Teen Literacy. Advocate for reading interventions at the middle and high school levels. All students deserve a successful socioeconomic future.

If you have a story about what's working in your schools that you'd like to share, you can email me at drlisarichardsonhassler@gmail.com or visit my website at www.drlisarhassler.com and send me a message.

If you like this podcast, subscribe and tell a friend. The more people that know, the bigger impact it will have. If you find value to the content in this podcast, consider becoming a supporter by clicking on the Supporter link in the Show Notes. It is the mission of this podcast to shine light on the good in education so that it spreads, affecting positive change. So let's keep working together to find solutions that focus on our children's success.