From Struggle to Strategy: What we were never taught about high school reading

We’ve all been there: watching a student stare at a Shakespearean sonnet, a Social Studies textbook, or a safety manual in the shop as if it were written in a foreign language. For years, we’ve been told to just "encourage a love of reading" or tell kids to "guess from context," but those tips don't actually help when a student is stuck on a page. In this session, we’re diving into the science that usually gets left out of high school teacher training. We’ll look at how the adolescent brain actually processes a page, and why it isn't "wired" to read naturally. We’ll also dig into why "sounding it out" stops working by Grade 10 and how we can give students a better toolkit for navigating the heavy vocabulary they see in every subject, every day.