My students try really hard. Many of them have made significant gains in their reading. Several of them have moved from being non-readers to being readers... but they still read at non-reader rates... "The fat cat dep... de... depended on the food."
AHHHH! One day I found myself snapping out a pace-- "COME ON," I was thinking. "Pick it up!"
After snapping (mostly literally), I thought... this is it... I'll get out a metronome and have them start picking up the pace.
I did a long lesson on fluency and rate, which used the metronome. Then we practiced quite a bit.
When the kids retested today, several of them had made HUGE gains. They've been able to read most of the words for awhile now, but they were plodding along, as opposed to briskly reading all the words except for the tricky ones. The practice with the metronome made a gigantic difference! One student moved from 75 words read correctly per minute (wpm) to 100 wpm. Another went from 134 to 173 wpm. Another kid made a 36 wpm gain... the others were mostly 8's and 10's... but 2 wpm per week is normally the expectation for growth.
So YAY! It was a great teaching moment.
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