Reading Skills at Secondary Schools

Transformative Educational Leadership Journal | ISSUE Fall 2025

Tashi Kirincic is taking a systems-oriented inquiry response to secondary schools’ bewildered cries around how to support “kids who can’t read”. In this piece, Tashi lays out the Spiral and her leadership over the past year in a way that shapes this work as possible, resonant, and clear. As you will see, her inquiry has a couple of layers and iterations, and is heading towards increasingly powerful impacts.

By Tashi Kirincic

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High school students are reading less and struggling more—but teachers don’t have to tackle it alone. My goal as a teacher leader is to equip and embolden teachers to persist in effective practices so all students can read well enough to navigate our increasingly complex textual world. Here’s what happened when we tried small, practical strategies in science classrooms—and what we learned along the way.

I started with a simple but important question: What’s going on with kids’ reading skills in high school?

When I posed this question to high school teachers, similar themes surfaced:

• students’ reading abilities appeared to be declining,
• the quality of their submitted work was falling, and
• their stamina for reading and other challenging tasks was decreasing.

Teachers had many hunches about the causes – such as availability of technology, increased time spent on screens, and lack of direct reading instruction in previous grades – but all of us were uncertain about how to respond.

It also became clear that addressing literacy across the system at once would not resonate with high school teachers; their primary concern was supporting students in unlocking the content of their particular subject area. Although they cared about their students’ reading abilities, they do not see themselves as reading teachers. They were, however, curious about how reading strategies could serve as a vehicle for improving content understanding.

These insights shaped my approach to my new role as the Inclusive Literacy Practices Coordinator. Rather than focusing on reading as a general skill for which every teacher is responsible, I would focus my work in one subject area and the particular reading strategies that could be applied directly to learning that particular content. I launched my work in science, knowing that work in one subject area would provide a blueprint for exploring reading across other subjects. My first step was to meet with science teachers and learn what they were noticing about students’ reading and learning.

Scanning

I started by bringing lunch to science departments at five high schools with an invitation to a conversation about reading and science. I opened the discussion with this question: What are you noticing about students’ reading and learning in your science classes? A consistent set of observations about students’ reading and learning in science emerged across the schools:

• Reading skills and strategies: Many students struggle to identify main ideas, process complex text independently, and follow lab instructions accurately. Additionally, students often fail to recognize when they don’t understand. Teachers expressed frustration at having to repeatedly scaffold tasks that students then failed to complete independently.
• Academic and specialized language: Students struggle with vocabulary essential to understanding science content. While teachers expected difficulties with subject-specific terms (Tier 3 vocabulary), they were surprised and concerned that high-frequency academic words used across subjects (Tier 2 vocabulary) also posed a significant barrier to student understanding. Examples included encounter, exist, abundant, cease, impermeable, and analogous.
• Engagement and motivation: Students frequently avoid reading and prefer videos to text-based materials. Some teachers acknowledged that they also rely on videos to boost engagement and began questioning whether this reliance might contribute to declining reading skills. Teachers feel an expectation that they will “spoon-feed” content to students.
• Retention and knowledge transfer: Students often forget previously learned concepts and struggle to apply understanding across topics. Teachers are particularly concerned about middle- and low-performing students as they observe that the gap between those students and high-performing students is growing. This is a significant source of frustration for teachers as they spend a lot of time re-teaching.
• Perseverance and work ethic: Students are less willing to tackle challenging tasks or follow multi-step instructions. Teachers hypothesized that this was both the result of and a contributor to lagging reading skills.
• Curriculum and instructional shifts: Teachers wonder about the role of instructional and curriculum changes, such as reduced textbook use, scarcity of quality texts and shifts to 21st-century learning models, as contributors to students’ struggles with reading and comprehension.

As I spoke with more and more teachers, I realized it would be helpful to hear directly from students, so I met with 13 high school students to ask about their experiences with reading in school. Their responses largely reinforced the concerns expressed by the science teachers. Notably, all 13 students reported that their go-to strategy when they encounter difficulty reading is to “ask the teacher.” When prompted to consider alternatives if a teacher were unavailable, most said they would ask a friend. Only after further prompting with the question, “What would you do if no one were available to help?” did students identify strategies such as slowing down, rereading, using context clues, or looking up unfamiliar words. This student scan confirmed teachers’ observations that students struggle to read and comprehend independently. Interestingly, one student highlighted a theme that the science teachers had hinted at but not stated explicitly: students are not regularly reading in class because the teacher just explains it.

Focusing

Among the science departments I met with, one team led by a motivated Department Head expressed interest in pursuing this work and invited me to return. Building on our initial conversation, we turned our attention to a more focused discussion about how small, deliberate shifts in teaching practices could support students’ reading and learning in science. We situated this work within the school’s broader inquiry focus and asked: Can integrating literacy routines into science instruction enhance student success in science, and how might this focus affect our own mental health and well-being as educators?

These questions became the guiding focus of our collaborative work. The group was open to trying new strategies and eager to measure their impact. They were also mindful of potential workload challenges, so I prioritized making the strategies accessible, immediately usable, and directly relevant to their current content.

Developing a hunch

From the outset, I was most interested in exploring how to encourage teachers to engage with and test new approaches to reading instruction. I had a hunch that if I:

• offered targeted, practical learning about reading instruction,
• provided clear models and tools for implementing strategies,
• made the suggested instructional changes easy to apply, and
• gave teachers choice in how deeply they engaged with the support I offered,

they would be more willing to integrate reading-focused strategies into their teaching. I also believed that once teachers saw positive impacts on student learning, they would be motivated to continue using these approaches.

As the science department began exploring ideas about reading and reading instruction, curiosity grew about how incorporating explicit literacy strategies might influence students’ literacy skills, overall well-being, and success in science. The teachers were eager to experiment and shared a hunch that these strategies would have a positive effect on both teaching and learning. We decided to start small, focusing on approaches that felt both effective and manageable and focused on explicit vocabulary instruction and repeated reading routines.

Learning

The learning phase unfolded through two informal lunch meetings and a planning day where I was available to plan how to integrate the strategies into upcoming lessons. I introduced the strategies to the teachers and provided instructions, templates and examples to ensure the teachers understood the necessary tools to implement the strategy of their choice. Teachers had the option to:

• try the strategy independently,
• work with me to co-teach the lesson that included a strategy, or
• watch as I taught the lesson to model strategy.

For teachers, the learning was about how to use the strategies with their content and understanding the reasons behind the strategies’ effectiveness. For me, the learning was about understanding how these reading strategies would function in science classes, what barriers teachers might encounter in their implementation, and how to overcome or mitigate those barriers.

Taking action

During this stage, teachers implemented one or more strategies. After each attempt, students completed an exit slip to reflect on what they learned and how the strategy supported their learning. (I provided a bank of sentence stems and questions to simplify the process for teachers.) I met periodically with teachers to review progress, troubleshoot challenges, and suggest next steps. Teachers tried the following strategies:

• Introducing Key Words Routine
• Recording Definitions with Customizable Graphic Organizer
• Pre-Reading with THIEVES
• Partner Reading with Paragraph Shrinking

Beyond the planned strategies, teachers experimented with highlighting key information and pausing to notice important lab terms. One teacher co-created a before-during-after reading framework, the Reading Guide, and developed vocabulary slides for Life Science 11 and Anatomy and Physiology 12. Another teacher adapted the THIEVES framework into a shorter version, THE.

Checking

To determine whether our actions made a difference for students, I analyzed data from student exit slips, teacher observations, and a Teacher Perception and Impact Survey completed at the end of the project.

Feedback from both students and teachers confirmed the science team’s hunch: integrating literacy strategies into science lessons had a positive effect on teaching and learning. Students reported that the strategies helped them better understand the material, and teachers observed increased engagement and comprehension.

The teachers were also curious about how this work might affect their own mental health and well-being. The survey results showed:

• Teacher workload: Four teachers reported a slight increase, while two noticed no change.
• Stress and well-being: Three teachers reported no noticeable impact, two said the strategies added some extra stress but were worthwhile, and one found the approach too time-consuming to sustain regularly.

I also reflected on my own hunch that if I offered targeted, practical learning about reading instruction, provided clear models and tools, made implementation simple, and allowed for choice, teachers would be more willing to try reading-focused strategies. Although engagement varied, all six teachers implemented at least one strategy, demonstrating a meaningful level of participation. A final indicator of success came when I was invited to share this work at this school’s two school-wide professional development days, to extend the impact of this inquiry beyond the science department.

Looking ahead

This inquiry was a first step in exploring how literacy practices can support learning beyond science classrooms. When teachers are given practical strategies, clear models, and choice in how they engage, they prioritized experimentation and reflection on their practice.

The successes of this project offers a blueprint for expanding the work to more teachers and departments. Key elements such as co-design, manageable experimentation, and simple feedback loops can be adapted in other schools and contexts to support literacy across disciplines.

Going forward, the focus will be on deepening collaboration, building collective understanding of how literacy enhances learning, and continuing to embed strategies that are relevant, doable, and aligned with teachers’ core work.