Literacy Intervention Teachers Implement Their Theory of Action

In this thoughtful article in The Reading Teacher, Diane Stephens (University of South Carolina/Columbia) and a group of colleagues in South Carolina school districts describe a three-year evolution in their thinking about Tier 2 RTI intervention teaching in their elementary schools. The new thinking developed in classrooms, weekly teacher meetings, summer retreats, and a series of graduate courses on literacy. Here are the challenges these educators encountered – and what they learned:

• Challenge #1: Naming our beliefs – At the beginning of their work together, teachers didn’t have a clear set of literacy beliefs. “No one had ever asked us before,” said one. Three years later, they had a carefully honed “Theory of What Matters for Readers,” namely that they wanted all students to:

• Understand that reading is meaningful;
• Believe in their ability to make sense of texts;
• Consider reading a pleasurable event;
• Self-monitor spontaneously and consistently;
• Have the knowledge, skills, and strategies to problem-solve to ensure meaning;
• Use this information flexibly;
• Use this information independently;
• Use this information with increasingly sophisticated texts.

Teachers used these goals to assess students’ instructional needs each year, and were surprised to find that there were bigger deficits in the attitudinal areas (for example, one-third didn’t know that that reading is a meaning-making process) than in strategies and skills (only about nine percent needed help here). Students who weren’t clear on the first three items on the list were stuck, and conventional reading instruction made little difference. Students who had positive beliefs in the first three were ready to soak up instruction and get better. 

With this broad-gauge diagnosis of their students’ needs, teachers began to focus on changing students’ beliefs about reading. 

• Challenge #2: Constructing a theory of students as readers – For example, one of the intervention teachers noticed that a boy was reading with only fair comprehension and was a year behind grade level. Her immediate impulse was to work on increasing his sight vocabulary, since many words weren’t in his oral vocabulary, but that had already been tried by his regular teacher and wasn’t working. The intervention teacher saw the deeper problem: the boy didn’t enjoy reading and never read on his own. So she began reading high-interest books aloud, gave the boy audiotapes to take home, and saw a marked increase in independent reading, self-monitoring, and vocabulary development. With lots of support, this student was reading on grade level within a year.

• Challenge #3: Choosing appropriate texts – Initially, intervention teachers worked to get students reading texts at the “just right” level. But as they worked with students, teachers noticed that many regarded reading as “work.” So teachers switched to a new selection criterion for books: students should see them as fun and easy. Students’ pleasure and enjoyment increased, as did their confidence, content knowledge, sight-word vocabularies, and sense of story structure – and students’ reading levels accelerated.

• Challenge #4: Providing focused instruction consistent with the “what matters” list – Many of the students in teachers’ intervention groups scored “Not yet” on every one of the items on the “What matters” list, and it was tempting to try to address all of the factors at once. But this confused and overwhelmed students, and teachers learned to home in on one thing at a time. 

• Challenge #5: Helping students develop a generative theory of reading and of themselves as readers – “Changing the trajectory of a student as a reader would be a much simpler process if we… could simply tell students what to do and when to do it, and then spend time reinforcing that behavior,” say the authors. But that was clearly not working with a girl who believed that reading was just calling words, substituted a nonsense word every time she got to a word she didn’t know, and didn’t believe a text needed to make sense. “To help a child succeed as a reader,” the authors concluded, “we must create a context in which the student can construct a generative theory.” Once this is in place, students begin to self-monitor and problem-solve using skills and strategies they already have and those that teachers introduce. 

With this girl’s intervention group, the teacher began to read aloud from a book about a princess (the girl’s favorite topic), paused, discussed the action so far, and challenged students to guess what would happen next. Soon students were flipping ahead in the book and using pictures and words to generate predictions. The teacher read other books in the princess series, discussing the meaning and continuing to challenge students to predict outcomes. In her independent reading, the girl began to pause when she came across unknown words and work to figure them out. She wanted the text to make sense, and for the first time she understood that reading was meaningful. It took her six months to change her theory of reading and then she made rapid progress and was soon reading on grade level.

• Challenge #6: Ensuring consistent instructional focus across stakeholders – At first, there were differences in the instructional approach in Tier 1 and Tier 2 classrooms. Over time, intervention teachers worked with regular-education teachers, speech therapists, and others to create a seamless instructional experience for students throughout each school day. One strategy was to frontload content material and vocabulary so struggling students would be more successful during Tier 1 classes. Regular-education teachers also introduced below-level books and modified assessments to help below-level students grasp material and feel successful. 

What were the results? Using careful pre- and post-assessments, the team found that, on average, students gained two months of reading proficiency for every month of instruction. 

“‘I Know There Ain’t No Pigs with Wigs’ – Challenges of Tier 2 Intervention” by Diane Stephens, Robin Cox, Anne Downs, Jennie Goforth, Lisa Jaeger, Ashley Matheny, Kristi Plyler, Sandra Ray, Lee Riser, Beth Sawyer, Tara Thompson, Kathy Vickio, and Cindy Wilcox in The Reading Teacher, October 2012 (Vol. 66, #2, p. 93-103), 

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/TRTR.01094/abstract; Stephens can be reached at stephend@mailbox.sc.edu. 

From the Marshall Memo #459