Why Your Student-Support Meetings Go in Circles (and How to Fix Them)

“He's just not getting it.”

By October, the student-support meetings begin. You sit down with a teacher, maybe the reading specialist, maybe the parents. Everyone cares about this child. And yet, by the end, it's often not clear what will be different tomorrow morning.

Most of these meetings follow the same pattern. We share our concern: “He's below grade level.” “She's a weak reader.” “He keeps forgetting what he learns.” Everyone agrees. Then we add something: another small group, more time, a different program. A few weeks later, we're back in the same room with the same student.

The meeting goes in circles because it's about the student in general, not about the specific skill that's breaking down.

That costs time a struggling reader doesn't have. Principals I've spoken with worry about exactly this: a student gets labeled a weak reader, and a learning difficulty isn't recognized until much later, when intervention is already delayed. That delay matters. In one well-known study that followed 54 children from first through fourth grade, a child who was a poor reader at the end of first grade had an 88% chance of still being a poor reader at the end of fourth grade (Juel, 1988).

A meeting that moves forward answers two questions:

• Where exactly is reading breaking down? Hearing the sounds in words? Sounding out unfamiliar words? Reading accurately, but too slowly to hold on to the meaning?

• What will change in instruction? Not just “more support,” but what will be taught, how, by whom, and how we'll know in a few weeks whether it's working.

If the team can't answer the first question, start there. Ask the teacher: What are you noticing? What have you tried, and what happened? If no one can say, that's important information too.

Then don't leave without the second answer in writing. “He'll get extra help” isn't a plan. A named skill, a change in how it's taught, and a date to check back is.

There's also a bigger leadership question. With one or two students, it's an individual conversation. But if meeting after meeting, across several classrooms, ends with “he's just not getting it,” the issue may be bigger than those students.

That's where my work begins: training teachers to use Orton-Gillingham (OG) strategies consistently, alongside the curriculum your school already has, so they can pinpoint where reading breaks down and know what to teach next.

Your next step: Use the free Principal's Struggling Reader Binder before your next student-support meeting. This binder helps you and your teachers pinpoint where reading may be breaking down and record what's already been tried. Notice what it tells you about the students, and about your teachers.

Try this week: Pull the notes from your last student-support meeting. Look for two things in writing: the specific skill that's breaking down, and what instruction will change. If either one is missing, that's where your next meeting starts.

If pinpointing the breakdown and knowing what to do next is hard across many classrooms, let's talk.

Schedule a time to talk →

Lisa Gelberman

Literacy Decoded

Source: Connie Juel, “Learning to Read and Write: A Longitudinal Study of 54 Children from First through Fourth Grades,” Journal of Educational Psychology, 1988. View source