Intensive Reading Intervention Program

Make a case for an optimal intervention program for struggling elementary readers or struggling secondary readers. Support your vision with textbook and/ or article citations. Describe the objectives, resources, personnel, materials, and assessments of your intervention program.

My case for an optimal intervention program for struggling readers will be developed for intermediate elementary students, grades 3-5, since this is the age group of students I am most comfortable and experienced in working with. 

The suggestions I make will be based on personal experience but, more probably more importantly, on Richard L. Allington’s book What Really Matters For Struggling Readers: Designing Research-Based Programs, Third Edition (2012).

OBJECTIVE: 

Students reading below grade level will be reading on grade level, or make a year or more growth by the end of the school year. 

PLAN OF ACTION (P.O.A):

This endeavor would be quite an undertaking and take much more serious thought than what I am putting into this discussion forum.  However, with that said, I feel confident that I can offer a skeletal version of the necessities of such a plan.

FIRST:  Students must be assessed by teacher.  Regardless of the student’s FCAT or SAT-10 score from the year before, the teacher must personally know the issues each student struggles with whether it be fluency, decoding, comprehension, motivation, etc.  Assessment may come in different forms and may not just be a standard test given at the beginning of the year, but may be a compilation of tests, reading with the teacher, or reading surveys. 

SECOND:  Once the teacher has properly diagnosed (which may take some time, preferably no more than a month as to minimize wasteful instructional time) each student with areas of weakness, the teacher can then begin to prescribe “treatment”.  As Allington attests, no reading program or added personnel can adequately substitute for effective teaching (2012).  In other words, the teacher, if effectively trained, will make the most difference in his/her students’ reading abilities.  If the student is struggling with fluency issues, then the teacher must prescribe an intensive fluency building activity.  If the student is struggling with comprehension, the teacher must prescribe intensive comprehension building activities.  And so on, and so on.  (Of course, most teachers can attest that if students are struggling with decoding, then fluency, and comprehension are a problem as well.) 

Allington (2012) suggests that struggling readers benefit most from tutoring from a highly-effective tutor, and then the next best solution would be to be in a small (3-5) student group, receiving intensive instruction. 

THIRD:  Lastly, teachers must be able to track students’ progress (hopefully) within these intensive instructional periods.  Assessments must be carefully considered and chosen in order to show students are improving in areas of weakness, and ultimately will attain the objectives set forth by this plan.    

So, what will be needed to carry this through?  Following are my thoughts on this:

RESOURCES/PERSONNEL:

Time, money (if necessary), and effort must be invested to see changes.  As pointed out before, Allington has strong convictions about the value of effective teaching.  In order to improve instruction, teachers should be willing to participate in studies of how to meet the needs of struggling readers.  Perhaps, schools can invest money in subscribing to professional magazines/journals which will offer reading that can best assist teachers in dealing with current issues.  Then, there must be accountability to ensure that teachers are reading and following through with suggestions made and discussing findings and opinions with colleagues.  Expert peer teachers, who are usually used as resource specialists can then use time to train and mentor teachers, rather than primarily students. 

Additionally, teachers need to have access to books and other reading material that meet the needs of each struggling reader in the classroom.  This may not be a standard text book series, but an array of magazines, books, leveled readers, etc. that match all students’ interests and readability. 

Because one-on-one tutoring seems to be the most effective form of intensive reading instruction, teachers may call on volunteers and paraprofessionals (who are adequately trained in how to help students with specific issues, otherwise this is a waste of time) to sit, read, and address immediate needs of each student.  This may consist of the volunteer practicing sight words, or decoding skills, or building fluency with timed passages, whatever the need may be with the student.

Obviously I could go into far more detail as to specifics on how to build comprehension, fluency, vocabulary skills, etc with this intervention plan, however that may take a Thesis to cover each topic. 

Hopefully, with an outline of a successful plan, the other important pieces will be sought out to plug in and work for the betterment of each struggling reader.

Resources:

Allington, R.L. (2012).  What really matters for struggling readers: Designing-research based programs (3^rd Ed.). Boston, MA:  Pearson Education, Inc.