Response to Intervention Article

[Anonymous]

http://www.edweek.org/tsb/articles/2010/04/12/02allington.h03.html?cmp=RTI41210&

This is a very interesting article if you are interested in remedial reading and teaching of reading in elementary schools.

[Anonymous]

I think it takes someone who knows what they’re doing to start with, and virtually every school system already has those people on their staff. Again, we know from the research literature that, while a lot of kindergarten and 1st grade teachers might not be that strong in academic instruction, at least 25 percent of kindergarten and 1st grade teachers are in fact very skilled. So that 25 percent is out there whose expertise can be built on. The problem is they’re just typically ignored.

But, yes, the most successful training models are those that involve teachers who are actually working with each other, where the teachers who don’t know what to do in delivering reading instruction are given a few days each to observe a teacher who does know what to do. The skilled teacher, that is, becomes a mentor teacher who helps others acquire those types of skills.

And the effects of a little high-quality training can be significant. One of the studies on reading professional development that the [U.S. Department of Education’s] What Works Clearinghouse has rated as having strong evidence—actually I think it’s the only one—was done by my wife [University of Tennessee Professor Anne McGill-Franzen] in Philadelphia with kindergarten teachers. This program primarily involved using mentor teachers and some staff from an organization called the Children’s Literacy Initiative. And it really only required about three days of work before the school year started and about three hours a month of professional development and, for some teachers, a little in-class support. But the difference in performance was dramatic: Students in the classes of the teachers who got the training ended the year in about the 45th percentile in reading, while those with teachers who didn’t get the training ended the year at the 13th percentile.

And I’ll tell you, I actually went down to help my wife with some of the debriefing interviews at the end of the year. We had veteran teachers—people my age—breaking down in the interview and starting to cry, saying, “Why didn’t anyone ever teach us this before? Why have I been teaching for 30 years and never knew how to teach kids to read?”