Before you read chapter 5, brainstorm about what you know about literacy intervention. Pose questions for yourself to frame your reading of the chapter. Consider literacy interventions at your school. WHat new thoughts do you have about them since reading this chapter?
6 comments:
Literacy intervention is something I have heard about but never actually seen in action. As an English teacher I was trained in literacy analysis and the writing process but never in how to actually help kids learn to read. As an administrator I knew that we needed literacy intervention but now where to get the professional development for the teachers. I have also wondered about the best structure for this intervention. Should it be pull-out? Should it be supplementary? What are the entry points? What is the best way to determine when someone needs intervention and when someone simply needs to do his or her homework? Should it be graded? And how to I convince critics that it is necessary?
Last year I was able to locate a source of professional development and have been working with the person to provide it to a cadre of teachers. I now see that cadre as a literacy team. After reading chapter 5, I now see that I had a very narrow definition of literacy and that I need to use the broader definition to respond to intervention critics. I can also use the research-based assumptions in the chapter to publicize intervention efforts. Probably the most helpful thing I learned from this chapter, however, is the section on the external dimensions of literacy interventions. the authors diagrammed all of the scheduling, human resource, and other logistical concerns I have been thinking about. They didn't necessarily provide answers, but they gave me the questions to ask. I can't tell you how helpful this will be.
We have been experimenting with a number of models for intervention over the past year and each seems to have advantages and disadvantages. On our third grade team, we knew we wanted to have higher levels of classroom coordination, so we have been working to embed the interventions within the third grade pod with classroom teachers and literacy specialists co-planning. One of our concerns has been how to provide struggling students with access to high-level content, comprehension skills, and vocabulary, and still meet their needs for basic decoding, and fluency practice. We, too, worried about the “Matthew Effect” and struggled to make sense of what we saw as mixed messages about what works for struggling readers.
By the end of the year and many manipulations of our interventions, we feel we have developed a model that promoted the greatest successes for students, so far. Not perfect, but getting better. We planned together to provide lessons to all third graders in common reading strategies and used Beck and McKeown’s Text Talk with read-alouds to work on vocabulary. Classroom teachers held their regular guided reading groups. Then for a period each day, we flexibly grouped kids across classrooms for more skill-driven groups, targeting specific needs such as highly focused phonics groups, or fluency groups. Struggling students were grouped in smaller groups with our most intense groups having two students. All students had opportunities to read authentic literature and we devoted time for to help connect these reluctant readers them to “just right” books that interested them.
Moving students across the hallway for the flex groups has had its drawbacks. We lose time in getting to know kids, but the return is that this has demanded transparent practice and shared planning has moved our teaching to a much higher level. We have begun to develop better ways to transfer assessment and observations so that we are really co-teaching. For the first time, we were seeing regular classroom teachers excited to provide rigorous instruction to our lowest-performing students.
I appreciated seeing the authors’ perspective that we are moving away from the “deficit model” toward a more developmental, supportive model and expanding our inclusionary practices. This seems pertinent in my school where our overbloated “second system” was collapsing under its own weight.
I was struck by a number of things in this chapter. Early on, the section on Early Intervention programs got my attention. It began by describing some early reading programs, including Reading Recovery. I know little about Reading Recovery except that we use it in our district, and its long-term effectiveness is a subject of heated discussion among our Special Education and elementary staff. I am only on the periphery of these discussions. Unfortunately, these authors do not tie this discussion together. Reading between the lines, I inferred that RR is a pull-out program that the authors do not care for. I am not certain I am reading that right, and if anybody has any insights on this, I would be interested.
Like Jill, I was struck by the discussion of the "Matthew Effect." Somehow, the solution to this problem eventually must be adding time for struggling learners. While we fiddle with this approach around the edges, the major commitments are yet to be made.
The discussion of instructional strategies was also informative. I now realize that the strategy that I observed in the clinic that I was most impressed with was reciprocal teaching. I was familiar with the term before, but reading it after seeing it in action brought home what it is.
Other insights that appealed to me were the notion that intervention methods for older readers should include some complex text and perhaps even very in-depth exploration of a few paragraphs of text. This would rankle content teachers, but it forces kids to think.
I am ambivalent about the notion that vocabulary should be self-selected by kids. Has anybody had experience with that? I can see including self-selected words among the vocabulary we expect kids to learn, but it would worry me to rely on entirely self-selected vocab.
I like the idea of older kids reading to younger kids. Having an audience is always a great incentive to do well. It also provides older kids a great excuse to read picture books. I am struck by the depth and enjoyability of so many picture books that my kids read. Both my younger ones are heavy into pictureless chapter books already, yet when we go the library I always make a point to take a selection of picture books, and they love them. For my sixth grader, those picture books are now graphic novels, some of which are pretty darn good.
Lots to think about in this chapter, no? How will intervention play into you school-wide plans so that support to kids who struggle is seamless and appropriate.
I wanted to pick up a couple threads that Jeff mentioned. I also read about student selected vocabulary with some wonder and skepticism. I enjoyed a very rich course on academic vocabulary with Kate Kinsella a couple of summers ago and have since really begun to look more critically at how I teach vocabulary. She, like Beck and McKeown, advocate for direct instruction of vocabulary- front-loading vocabulary and building not just their receptive, but also expressive vocabulary. If asked to choose their own vocabulary, most of my students would choose the words in bold print or archaic words, and perhaps not the words that are frequently found and heard, are critical to understanding, and have multiple nuances depending on context. I think there may be a place for some self-selection, but I think students would need lots of guidance and clear criteria for selecting words.
As for the Reading Recovery question, that ranks right up there with the phonics debate in terms of emotional response. I stay out of arguing whether it works or doesn’t work and like Vogt and Shearer’s guiding question… “What works, for whom, under what conditions?” (p. 90)
In my brainstorm on literacy intervention I wrote: 1. What is good for the struggling readers is good for the stronger readers (vise-versa); 2. we need to build lots of positive experience with varied levels of print; 3. intervention can be done in small groups or one-on-one. My guiding questions was: Just what does differentiated instruction really mean for reading and writing? What modifications (AKA interventions) really help?
At our school the literacy interventions tend to be ‘apply more effort,’ ‘spend more time,’ ‘ask for help,’ and then we may find you a tutor who has some experience in reading or writing (but no one has been sure how appropriate the match or how sound the instruction).
The 10 research based assumptions for struggling readers were wonderful to have listed out. I say some points (3,4) in which we are generally strong or had the potential to be strong as a school (2, 5, 10) with more intentionality and training. Our culture is progressive, but our instructional practices are scattered, invented without research or out of date. I was particularly thrilled with #7 because I gave exactly that vocabulary building advice to a new 9th grade English teacher just yesterday.
In closing, I echo Shawn’s question – when does the kid need intervention and when does s/he need a swift kick in the pants. I clearly need to develop my assessment for intervention skills. At the high school level motivation becomes a very significant player.
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