Intervention as an Inside Job

After fewer than two years of the lab, our learners have made great leaps—and we have learned a lot about intervention.

Designing Our Laboratory

Using the Woodcock-Johnson Reading Battery, test scores, teacher reports, and report cards, we identified students who needed the most reading help and strongly encouraged these learners to participate in the lab. We parsed the data to identify four essential areas in which these learners needed help: building vocabulary, understanding embedded clauses, increasing the amount of successful reading they engaged in, and, most important, building their self-esteem as readers and thinkers.

In designing the lab, our school consulted Allington's (2005) standards for effective interventions and concluded that we needed expert teachers providing instruction, small student–teacher ratios, a solid system for matching students to texts in independent and guided reading, and close coordination with classroom instruction.

We achieved the first two conditions by choosing two reading specialists to lead the lab and by hiring five full-time teachers (plus two graduate students over the summer) to serve 35 reluctant readers. Selected students work in the lab for five weeks over the summer, three hours a day, four days a week. During the school year, they are in the lab for two 30-minute blocks of instruction every school day and two 90-minute blocks after school each week. During both the summer and the school year, the school builds collaborative planning time for the teachers into each day.

Lab Work

Time in the reading lab involves four major instructional components: small-group tutorials, independent reading, teacher readalouds, and vocabulary study.

Learning in Small Groups

In groups of three or four, our hesitant readers receive instruction in word-reading strategies, with tasks that depend on what different groups need. Some students receive decoding instruction using methods like the Wilson Reading Program; some work with Dolch and Fry's list of sight words; others learn morphemic analysis.

We also use guided reading groups; each group moves together through a text at that group's level. Our guided reading is influenced by Palincsar and Brown's (1984) Reciprocal Teaching (Oczkus, 2003). In guided reading sessions, instructors teach new strategies, reinforce learned strategies, and incorporate all students' burgeoning reading knowledge into a process of making meaning.

Students take turns leading their group in the processes of Reciprocal Teaching—predicting, questioning, clarifying, and summarizing. Skills and strategies are incorporated into a dynamic process of thinking, reading, and comprehending. For example, in one guided reading group, students used clarifying strategies to understand figurative language in the poem "My Papa's Waltz" by Theodore Roethke. Getting clearer on language in the text led them to make important inferences about the narrator's point of view and the poem's themes.

Reading Independently

In cooperation with classroom teachers, reading lab instructors identify each student's reading level. They help readers find books matched to their interest and skill level. Students have free reading time in the lab every day, and teachers expect them to read again at home. Reading Lab teachers keep records of pages read and books completed or abandoned. Because lab teachers are responsible for a small number of students, they can confer with them every two to three days; these conferences become platforms for both informal assessment and coaching in discrete skills.

Listening to Great Literature

During the summer reading lab, we group students by grade so each group can listen to its teachers read out loud a work of historical fiction on group members' grade level. We relate each novel to a curriculum unit that the group will encounter in September. For example, last summer students read Copper Sun by Sharon M. Draper, which related to a unit on the colonial United States, and Pharoah's Daughter by Julius Lester, which related to the study of ancient Egypt.

As reading lab students discussed their novel, wrote about it, and even acted it out, they developed expertise and vocabulary that would help them understand content in the curriculum in the coming year. This work allowed students to engage actively with great literature—to consider complexities of character, analyze the author's craft, and argue about theme. In short, because they gained access to a classic, our formerly reluctant readers did the kind of heavy intellectual work with books they'd often only watched classmates do.

Soaking Up Words

Our struggling readers badly need to know and use more words—and more colorful synonyms for common words (Beck, Kucan, & Mckeown, 2002). So teachers devote part of reading lab time each day to vocabulary development. Words come from lists of appropriate middle school vocabulary as well as words from independent and guided reading. Students have even suggested words for the group to learn.

We teach students about 100 words throughout the year, knowing that they will need between 8 and 12 meaningful encounters with the words to learn them. We use a mix of the serious (putting words in families, making personal connections to words, drawing figurative representations) and the silly (acting out words with wild exaggeration, doing competitive games). Cumulative vocabulary quizzes, designed so that students show they know the words well and can explain relationships between words, reinforce word gains.

The Payoff for Participants

Two years in, our data show the reading lab has had great success. Students who participated in the five-week summer program in 2009 showed an average growth of eight months in reading level on the Gray Silent Reading Test. Halfway through the school year, our average growth for lab participants on this test was more than 1.5 years. We have also used Fountas and Pinnell's (2007) assessments of how well students read both fiction and nonfiction to give us a sense of each student's progress as well as the progress of the group. This assessment showed an average growth of 2.8 levels in six months.

Our faculty is learning as well. All components of lab instruction are supported by ongoing professional learning. For one hour each day during the summer, and one hour each week during the school year, reading lab teachers discuss articles that pertain to teaching reading, share strategies, and together review students and data. Teachers keep data binders with charts about each student's strengths and weaknesses, test results, anecdotal notes, reading logs, lesson plans, and other documentation. They share data with students and parents throughout the year through narrative reports and conferences called chart reviews every 10 weeks.

As teachers discuss shared problems of practice, visit one another's classes, discuss student artifacts, and ask lots of questions, they engage in real inquiry. They describe student behavior, look for trends, and share frustrations and successes that come from using different strategies.

Lessons Learned

We have learned four key lessons about what makes successful intervention for at-risk readers:

Interventions should be "inside jobs."

As the people who know the students best—and are most accountable for their success or failure—teachers are best suited to identify students at risk and assist them. Our school paid no outside experts to tell us about our problems or pose solutions. Instead, teachers from the school, with varied backgrounds and experience, sat together and developed our reading lab. Reading lab instructors coordinate well with classroom instructors; together, teachers translate what is learned through work in the lab into better teaching practices in the classroom. This in-house program has also created leadership experiences for teachers.

Teachers' learning matters, too.

The school planned to offer teachers a chance to extend their knowledge of teaching reading while simultaneously tossing a lifeline to low-skilled readers. Often, middle school teachers have not been trained in teaching reading yet find themselves facing many students who struggle. By putting together teachers with various levels of expertise, we offer participating teachers engaging professional development at daily meetings in summer and weekly ones during the year.

Good interventions use strategies flexibly but adhere to clearly defined principles.

Instruction can't be a one-size-fits-all approach; educators must try a variety of strategies to match the needs of each learner. In any given day in our lab, an observer will see many practices in use. One teacher may be conferring with a student about his or her reading; other students do partner reading of a readers' theater text, and a second group is rewriting a children's book by breaking up text into manageable chunks. While our teachers vary their methods, however, they all hold to five principles:

1. Students need to read a lot of text with high levels of success.
2. Relationships and social interaction are at the heart of learning.
3. Strengthening self-esteem is essential for students who have experienced failure as readers.
4. We need to explicitly teach what students don't know how to do.
5. Reading is a recursive process that involves doing many things at once, so skills must be integrated.

Effective intervention "closes the loop" by using data to improve instruction.

Teachers must track their observations of students and let observation lead us to make strong decisions about what we should teach next. The best lesson in the world means nothing if it isn't engaging the right student with the right skill at the right time. This has been one of our biggest challenges. Our reading lab instructors had to refine again and again strategies for noticing, collecting, and tracking both students' growth and the effectiveness of interventions. We've done this collaboratively—with classroom teachers, families, and students themselves.

At the end of each day, our reading lab teachers sit around a table and engage in essential questions of teaching and learning: What is working with this reader? How can I help him or her learn this? Our students inspire us as they come to us day after day to work at something that doesn't come easily. We know that their effort in the reading lab will pay off as they rise to meet the challenges of high school.

References

Allington, R. L. (2005). What really matters for struggling readers: Designing research-based programs (2nd ed.). Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon.

Beck, I. L., Kucan, L., & Mckeown, M. G. (2002). Bringing words to life: Robust vocabulary instruction. New York: Guilford Press.

Fountas, I. C., & Pinnell, G. S. (2007). Fountas and Pinnell Assessment System 2: Grades 3–8, Levels N–Z. New York: Heinemann.

Oczkus, L. D. (2003). Reciprocal teaching at work: Strategies for improving reading comprehension. Newark: International Reading Association.

Palincsar, A., & Brown, S. (1984). Reciprocal Teaching of comprehension: Fostering and comprehension-monitoring activities. Cognition and Instruction, 1(2) 117–172.