Re-thinking Reading Interventions

Prereading stories from the anthology used to be a common intervention in old reading support programs such as Title 1 and the old resource special ed. programs twenty years ago. This has been left by the wayside because it isn't a "research-based" intervention. If you'll do the research I'll bet we can bring it back. :-)

This post really has me thinking. I agree that students need more scaffolding when they read more difficult texts. I could see the experiment you're proposing as being worth trying if there were a system change at the school level (or at least grade level). However, in the reality of my school, I know that if I don't read texts the students can actually read during the time they see me for reading interventions, they may go the entire day not actually able to successfully read a single text. Instead of seeing easier texts used for whole-group instruction (or perhaps in addition to it), I'd like to see classroom teachers restructure their instruction to include less whole-group instruction period. Then perhaps there would be time for students to have the best of both worlds - reading text at their level and reading more challenging text with additional scaffolding.

Tim,

As you know from previous posts, I am a Common Core skeptic. I don't believe that I, or many, many other skeptics and oponents belong in the clown car that you and David Brooks would like to confine us to. I read Brooks column when it camne out and I found it disturbing. It was recycled Department of Education talking points on the CCSS. Others did a fine job of skewering Brooks. I chose to focus on one statement Brooks made that was absolutely absurd and related to literacy instruction.

"The [Common Core] English standards encourage reading comprehension. Whereas the old standards frequently encouraged students to read a book and then go off and write a response to it, the new standards encourage them to go back to the text and pick out specific passages for study and as evidence."

As a person who, not unlike you, has spent the last 35 years of my life providing children with very good, research-based comprehension instruction, I was offened and I was offended for all of my colleagues as well.

I vented in this posting.

http://russonreading.blogspot.com/2014/04/david-brooks-hearts-common-core.html

Do you really want to cheerlead for a guy this clueless?

Russ—

The circus has come to town, indeed.

Over the past few weeks I’ve pored over the most recent raft of diatribes leveled against Common Core. The most flamboyant of these continue to confuse CCSS with testing, President Obama, NSA surveillance, and a host of other off-track issues.

Many of these challengers want to end federal support for schools (you know, the money that goes to teaching poor kids, disabled kids, and immigrants), or they hate the idea of young children learning to read despite scads of research to the contrary (they somehow “know” that early reading damages young’uns minds). The anti-college crowd is playing this calliope, too-- (“I didn’t go to college and I did fine”).

I grant that the less-clownish of the opposers at least know what CCSS is. That’s a start.

However, even they (sans greasepaint) continue to miss the point: 42% of students who meet the previous standards (the standards the CCSS-opponents evidently prefer) require remedial classes in college. These aren’t the high poverty kids and second-language kids that populate the bottom quartile of American students (those kids usually don’t get to college). No, these are the kids who—according to the CCSS-adversaries—are doing just fine. Be offended about that, Russ; that really is offensive.

CCSS points us in the direction of teaching rigorously more pertinent skills. That so many find oppose that is as nonsensical as a Volkswagen overflowing with clowns