Do you know how many times I googled Science of Reading for Secondary, and in as many iterations as I could think of, before I found ANYTHING genuinely helpful? Have you done the same thing?

Under any other circumstances, I would say that I’m just crazy but since I’ve had the same conversation with many teachers, who were just as in the dark as me, I know that I’m not.

My SoR origin story starts way before I ever even knew what the acronym stood for… I wasn’t even a teacher yet. I was a part time teaching assistant during my last year of college. I worked a couple hours a day in a high school library and one of “my kids” confided in me that she really couldn’t read. She said that she could sound the words out but once she said them in her head, they were just gone. She didn’t remember them long enough to be able to understand the sentence and she laughed at the idea of comprehending full paragraphs or articles in class.

That was the first time I googled “Comprehension for Older Kids.” I found a lot of strategies for thinking while you read, to activate working memory. We worked through some of them but she said teachers had already tried everything with her in the past. She was tired of it.

I’ll flash forward to when I finally learned about SoR, even though I’m skipping over a ton. The principal of the elementary school in my district asked us (the entire middle school ELA department) if she could pay for us to take something called LETRS training. “Uh… sure. What is it?”

Long story short, we got the training and I was hooked! I am a firm believer in the idea that you have to be able to UNDERSTAND a problem in order to be able to FIX it. And knowing how the brain makes sense of sounds, letters, words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, texts, stories, etc. was one of the most eye opening revelations of my life. No exaggeration.

Even knowing all of those things didn’t change the fact that I couldn’t find anything about it for secondary students, though. Seriously… have you noticed that? Everything says, “Phonics, Decoding, Vocabulary, Background Knowledge and COMPREHENSION.”

But like how…. does the brain comprehend? What does that mean!?!!?

Because it is NOT something that my girl that I mentioned at the beginning of this post was able to do, no matter how many strategies she learned. Something wasn’t connecting.

Well, I’ve read a lot of books and listened to a lot of podcasts and if you are still in the dark, as much as I was, I’m going to share with you the best book to help us get to comprehension and keep sharing all of the little tips and tricks that I can.

Here’s my own personal resource list/cheat sheet for all things #SoRin2ndary.

And if you want to take it a step further, check out the Planning with SoR in Mind Course just for Secondary Teachers!

What about you? What is your #SoRin2ndary origin story?