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Middle school is a time of change and struggle for many students. For those students who have been traditionally marginalized due to race, class, language, or (dis)ability, the challenges middle school poses can be even greater (Losen & Skiba, 2010).
Academic demands increase, as do social changes, such as adolescent identity development where identity markers become more salient. Common challenges include discrimination and/or cultural mismatch between schools, teachers, and students (Tatum, 1997). These heightened academic and social factors increase the risk of failure for many students from marginalized groups. Middle school, then, is an essential time to foster students' feelings of both success and social connection in the classroom.
We interviewed 17 middle school language arts and reading teachers who used Collaborative Strategic Reading (CSR), an evidence-based intervention (Klingner et al., 2010), in their classrooms. 1 In this article, we will use the resulting data to show that CSR has benefits for all students, but is especially effective in creating connections and success for those who traditionally have been marginalized and may be at risk of failure in middle school. The teachers we interviewed included four reading intervention specialists, two eighth-grade language arts teachers, ten seventh-grade language arts teachers, and one teacher who taught language arts in both seventh and eighth grades. We asked them several questions, including whether they thought some students benefitted more from CSR than others and why, and which components of CSR they perceived to be most (or least) helpful. (For information about the interview, other data sources, and data analysis procedures, see Klingner et al., 2010.) The student examples were from observations audio-recorded during the school year.
The teachers were part of a larger study in Colorado and Texas on the effectiveness of CSR in ethnically and linguistically diverse schools with a range of socioeconomic levels (Vaughn et al., in press). Classes were randomly assigned to either CSR (intervention) or typical practice (TP). In CSR classes, teachers taught CSR 1-2 times per week throughout the school year; in TP classes, there was no CSR and teachers taught the language arts content as they chose (Vaughn et al., in press).
CSR has been shown to be effective in supporting growth in reading comprehension for culturally and linguistically diverse middle school and...