This year in reading I have the privilege of team teaching with another 4th grade teacher. Our class has every ability level you can think of and I have been focusing on the struggling readers. For my action research I knew I wanted to find strategies that help struggling readers catch up to grade level. I came across an article that was very interesting. The article is written by Richard Allington and is called What At-Risk Readers Need. He talks about what we should do with at-risk readers and the RTI process that could help. What I found most interesting was the part about what is not working in schools. The things he talked about that don't work are things that are going on in many schools. It really made me think about some of the systematical changes our schools need to make. Here's the article:
What At-Risk Readers Need
We are following the RTI model at our school. Unfortunately, many of the "things not to do" are the things we are doing for Tier 1. I feel that so much of what we are doing for Tier 1 interventions is limited because of the lack of resources/ teachers to help.
ReplyDeleteWe are also doing those "don't do" things. I wonder what it would be like if we stacked our interventionists in our lower grades to help get them caught up. Eventually those students would move up and continue to progress at grade level because they had that extra help. Just thinking ideally here...
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