Dante’s Divine Comedy, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Dumas’ Count of Monte Cristo. These titles to be found on an advanced college reading list are the very same titles that sophomores in the Schuler Foundation’s Reading Improvement Program are completing for pleasure reading. This is the second year of the Reading Improvement Program and  Schuler Scholars are eager to read advanced placement, college-level reading material that prepares them not only for the testing and application process that they will undergo in preparation for college, but provides the critical thinking and literary basis that is necessary for them to excel while they are there.

            All sophomore Schuler Scholars are required to participate in the Reading Improvement Program that is applied through an intensely focused one-on-one tutoring session delivered twice a week by Schuler Scholar Coaches.  The beginning of the academic year is filled with assessments in areas including reading comprehension, vocabulary, syllabication, prefixes, root words, suffixes, reading speed, and contextual vocabulary understanding. This intensive five-week assessment is designed to allow each tutor/student combination to work most intimately and precisely in the areas that the student will benefit from the most attention.

            After the initial assessment phase, the tutor moves the student into an extremely focused period of reading aloud for comprehension and fluency. This stage of the program is regulated with periodic testing to measure consistent improvement. The material that the tutor and student work with is a book of the student’s choice from a vast collection of recommendations and begins to build the foundation of the student’s own bank of great literature.

            At the completion of the one-on-one reading phase with the tutor, the student is chosen to move into the seminar phase of the Reading Improvement Program. The Seminar consists of a small group of students and tutors who meet every few weeks to critically assess a piece of literature or poetry much like one that would be found on the Advanced Placement exam for literature. In between these group meetings, the members and tutors collectively participate in an online discussion of a piece of literature and critique its purpose and literary merit.

            The work and time that the students and coaches pour into this program is not without significant gain. Over the course of one academic year the average expected increase of a student’s reading ability is one grade level. With three months of tutoring in the Reading Improvement Program, Schuler Scholars’ reading level increased by 1.8 grade levels. One may ask, “Why concentrate so heavily on the student’s reading ability, when there are so many other subjects to focus on?” The Schuler Scholar Program can answer this question with the advice of Harvard University to the student on how best to prepare for Harvard:

You can bring to college no more valuable a possession than a mind well-stocked from reading. Just as speaking is modeled on hearing, so writing is modeled on reading. Every good writer was a good reader first.