Struggling Readers

My first reaction to these selections is that struggling readers come in all shapes and sizes. They can be the obvious slumped over kid, or they can be the perky girl in the front row. It seems that there are far more dependent readers than independent readers. My immediate fear is that I cannot relate. I remember being able to read from a very early age, my mother was a reading teacher. I always read well above my grade level. I did watch my little brother struggle through a learning disability, but my parents felt it was important to hide this from his older siblings. They didn't want an insensitive comment to discourage him and ruin what little confidence he did have. The reality is you cannot protect most struggling readers. By the time they've reached middle school, they've probably had moments of embarrassment when they attempted to read aloud to the class. This means that the cat is out of the bag. More than likely, all the struggling readers' classmates know his secret too. So how, as a teacher, do you build confidence in one struggling reader without calling attention to the fact that they are, indeed, a struggling reader? In a classroom full of students, how can you focus your attention on the struggling readers while not neglecting the independent readers? In what ways could independent readers set an example to the dependent readers and help them build text confidence without destroying their social and emotional confidence? Beers makes it very clear that a GROWTH mindset is the most essential part of creating independent readers.