As a teacher of teens with mixed ability classes, I teach students with huge variations of abilities, and it can be extremely challenging to ensure all my students are able to engage with text in the lesson due to the difference in reading ages. How are we supposed to cater to this?
A lot of us often write our own content for our lessons or we download resources online, so it can be a challenge to know whether the text is pitched right for our own students and their needs.
If you’re not sure whether your text is pitched at the right reading age, a great idea you can try out is actually analysing the reading age of your text! It’s actually very easy to do - all you need to do is copy and paste a blanket of your text into this website and it will give you some valuable data in the readability of your content (it can also check the readability of websites too!) I challenge you to check the readability of some of your resources right now and see how close your text is from the level you are teaching at. In fact, I checked the readability of this blog post and it came to a reading age of about 16-17, which according to the website, is apparently very high for the average adult!? But you know, we’re teachers ;)
It is amazing how we’re never really taught to consider the readability of our text in lessons but imagine how much more effective our students’ learning would be if we just took this extra tiny step to ensure we are pitching content just right for our learners. We could even use this as an effective differentiation tool to include a couple of variations of text to cater to the differing abilities and reading ages of our students: let's ensure we set our learners up for success!
Thanks for reading this post :) If you found this valuable, leave a comment below or share it out!
I truly believe if we take this one step to ensure we are pitching our lessons just right for our learners, we will see significant progress in our students' learning and confidence in the classroom.
Take 5 minutes to check the readability of one of your resources - is it pitched right for your students? Are you surprised at the outcome? Do you even agree with this method?! Leave a comment below, I'd love to chat more!
If you’re not sure whether your text is pitched at the right reading age, a great idea you can try out is actually analysing the reading age of your text! It’s actually very easy to do - all you need to do is copy and paste a blanket of your text into this website and it will give you some valuable data in the readability of your content (it can also check the readability of websites too!) I challenge you to check the readability of some of your resources right now and see how close your text is from the level you are teaching at. In fact, I checked the readability of this blog post and it came to a reading age of about 16-17, which according to the website, is apparently very high for the average adult!? But you know, we’re teachers ;)
It is amazing how we’re never really taught to consider the readability of our text in lessons but imagine how much more effective our students’ learning would be if we just took this extra tiny step to ensure we are pitching content just right for our learners. We could even use this as an effective differentiation tool to include a couple of variations of text to cater to the differing abilities and reading ages of our students: let's ensure we set our learners up for success!
Thanks for reading this post :) If you found this valuable, leave a comment below or share it out!
I truly believe if we take this one step to ensure we are pitching our lessons just right for our learners, we will see significant progress in our students' learning and confidence in the classroom.
Take 5 minutes to check the readability of one of your resources - is it pitched right for your students? Are you surprised at the outcome? Do you even agree with this method?! Leave a comment below, I'd love to chat more!
