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Intervention: A Key to Reading Success
Teachers today are faced with many challenges. From the overcrowding of classrooms to adapting to the various learning abilities of their students, to meeting the demands of high performance on federally mandated testing, teachers have never faced such pressure and challenges.
In order to meet some of these challenges faced by educators, many highly effective reading intervention programs have been implemented in classrooms throughout the United States. Intervention programs are designed and formulated to help students who are at the most risk of failing to learn to read and write appropriately for their grade level.
One such program that is well documented to be successful is helping struggling student to regain lost ground is the named Reading Recovery. The idea behind this program is early intervention once a problem with reading is detected. Students need to feel successful as early as possible before feelings of failure and discouragement towards reading occur. Within the confines of the program, daily thirty minute sessions are conducted between the student and teacher in a one on one environment. The students involved in the program read, write and are taught a variety of decoding strategies to assist them in comprehension and retention of the reading material.
Reading Recovery uses a student's miscues to teach specific strategies. A key element of the reading programs success is proper teacher guidance and involvement. However, due to the required amount of one-on-one time, this program may only be practical in a resource setting, and not in a regular classroom setting with thirty plus students. It has been reported that 78 percent of Reading Recovery students that complete a full set of lessons were able to read at the average for their grade level after twelve to twenty weeks of instruction.
Other types of reading programs are designed for Title 1 instructors working with small groups of low achieving students. Two of these types of programs include Early Intervention in Reading and the Boulder Project. These two programs emphasize phonemic awareness and phonics as the primary learning methods of intervention.
These reading programs do not require extensive training on behalf of the teacher and may be implemented in small groups by the classroom teacher. Schools without Title 1 funding, however, may not able to utilize these reading intervention programs as easily as schools that have such funding available. Another such program, Early Intervention in Reading, teaches skills through a spelling approach.
The Success for All Program was designed for an entire elementary school and stresses a preventive approach for creating opportunities for success. This program has a proven track record for success against control groups in pilot schools where it was initiated.
Most of these reading programs are focused on early intervention for children that are having trouble with reading comprehension. The federally mandated No Child Left Behind Act was designed by the department of education to meet the goal of having all children be successful readers by the time they leave third grade.
However, there are many older students that were not able to benefit from these programs before they were initiated in the classroom and these students subsequently slid through the cracks as reading intervention programs were being put in place in the classroom. According to research studies conducted by the Carnegie Corporation approximately 8 million young people currently enrolled in school that are between fourth and twelfth grade struggle to read at their grade level.
For students that may be older and were passed over when the No Child Left Behind Act was initiated may not have received early reading intervention or that have special needs considerations, Scholastics Read 180 program has a high level of proven success. The Scholastic program focuses on differentiated instruction for students using technologically driven learning, which promotes engaging students in the program. This program utilizes literature and direct instruction from teachers to improve a student's reading, writing and vocabulary skill sets.
Other intervention strategies can be implemented in basal and literature anthology programs. These types of programs have the advantage of being tied to the core program to keep students in step with their classroom peers that are currently reading at grade level. Educational reading programs from Halcourt Trophies provide a parallel intervention program that follows the same themes as the anthology, but is written on a lower level that includes decodable text for students to more easily interpret and comprehend.
The reading selections of the Halcourt Trophies program incorporate the use of high-frequency words and introduce students to much of the same vocabulary as the regular text. Students participating in this reading intervention program are able to feel included in the regular class, but are also able to receive instruction at their level.
All of these programs stress the importance of providing students with the opportunity to read materials that are appropriate for their individual reading level. If students feel pushed to read at a level that is above what they are capable of then a student may become even more frustrated and foster feelings of discouragement by not comprehending the material that are forced to study.
In order to be successful, students need to be taught effective reading strategies. In order to integrate with their peers, students must to learn how to decode words so that they can develop necessary comprehension and fluency levels in their reading. To truly become competent at their grade reading level, students need to have teachers that monitor their progress and who can determine what the student's specific strengths and weaknesses in reading are. Perhaps the most important consideration to take into account is that students need teachers that really do believe in them and care about a student's progress enough to give them their best work.
In 1998 the International Reading Association made the statement that research has shown that simply retaining students in a grade is an expensive and ineffective approach to meeting the needs of struggling students. Students who are retained generally never catch up with their non retained peers and are more likely to drop out of school. A number of studies have shown that, with high quality professional support, most children can attain high levels of literacy proficiency: Some just need more help.
Children who exhibit reading difficulties need to be provided with early reading intervention and ongoing support from educators and parents. Those who did not receive early intervention before completion of the third grade should receive instruction from other reading intervention programs, such as Read 180 or Soar to Success programs that are available to teachers through the school resource instructor. Children are an important national resource and should be given every opportunity to prove themselves important members of society.
About the Author At Scholastic (http://www.scholastic.com) we really love reading and most of all, we are thrilled when we get kids excited about books. If a child is struggling, we offer top quality, effective reading intervention programs. Art Gib is a freelance writer.
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