Miguel Aguilar

Miguel Aguilar has been recognized as one of the most effective teachers in the L.A. unified school district. By devising a method of his own for teaching reading and language skills, he moved his students from the bottom 30% in the district to well above average. When they looked at what he was doing, they found he wasn’t simply ‘teaching to the test’. He broke the material down and prompted students to identify narrative components while they read. For instance, he would frequently stop and ask them questions about the goals and actions of the characters. He Then did something interesting. He would ask the class if they understood what kind of information he was looking for. Example: was it an inference about the character’s intention or a prediction about the consequences of their action. He wasn’t just teaching them to read the narrative explicitly ..but how to process the narrative implicitly [link]. I’ve heard people refer to this as the ‘meta’ or ‘pragmatic’ levels of comprehension. Studies show that when students start doing this on a regular basis, they become more active participants in what they previously considered to be a passive activity .. and reading scores improve dramatically [link].