I’m a reading interventionist, but I don’t teach reading

I’m a reading interventionist, but I don’t teach reading.

Last year, when my 6th graders began a unit on Latin America, I realized that no one in their entire class knew what Native Americans are. Indigenous people? American Indians? No. Didn’t know those either. At the time, I thought maybe it was the timing of the Covid lockdown and our state’s social studies standards. But then again, this year, my 6th graders couldn’t define Native Americans, Indigenous people or American Indians. One student said tentatively, “Tribes?”

I have a lot of thoughts about the lack of representation of Indigenous people in our schools in the United States today, but those aside, it’s clear that our students desperately need to build lasting background knowledge and richer vocabularies.

This is why I don’t teach reading to my reading intervention students in Tier 2 and Tier 3. I teach social studies.

When I was an Orton-Gillingham trained elementary reading interventionist, my working hypothesis that I could focus on decoding and reading fluency and students’ reading comprehension would follow. For many of my younger students, that was true.

However, when I made the move from elementary to middle school reading intervention, I saw right away that if their intervention time didn’t directly improve their background knowledge, reading comprehension, writing skills and vocabulary, my students in intervention were never going to catch up. I had to change my approach.

Previously I followed a version of the Orton-Gillingham lesson plan where the bulk of my instructional time was spent having students decode and encode words selected for their orthographic patterns. Now, the bulk of my students’ time is spent reading and engaging with rich social studies texts that connect directly to what they are learning in their social studies classes. We still work on decoding with a focus on multisyllabic words. I still build phonemic awareness (though not in isolation). We still do daily fluency work. But now, every word I put in front of them relates to the informational text they’re reading.

Like many of you, my intervention time with students is limited. I can’t do a daily or even weekly structured routine and fit in everything they need. Instead, for each text, I plan a series of instructional activities that follow about the same structure, weaving in the foundational skills they are working to master, and we work through that text for a few weeks as time allows.

For each text, here are the steps of the lesson flow we generally follow over the course of a few weeks.

Daily Practice

• Students practice decoding and writing multisyllabic words from the text. For some students, we do fluency drills with the word list as well. I integrate morphology here.

• Students practice timed fluency reads. This year I started using an approach called “Read, Read Back, Read Again, where the student reads, I read, they re-read. I learned about this approach from Tal Most, who is an EBLI practitioner. I use this website to make my text into an easy to use fluency passage.

Before Reading

• Activate prior knowledge and curiosity by looking at multimedia elements like videos, podcasts, images, primary source documents, or maps. List questions about the topic.

• Preteach 2 meaty juicy vocabulary words. I used to try to preteach all the vocabulary I knew they would struggle with, but like Court wrote in their post, we need to move more quickly to actually reading the text. I am also workshopping my vocabulary approach after hearing more about Sean Morrissey’s curriculum. I’d love to hear your thoughts on how to balance effective vocabulary instruction with our limited instructional time!

During Reading

• It’s a small group, so we do round robin reading aloud (strategic round robin is not the enemy!), choral reading, echo reading or silent reading depending on student need.

• Students annotate the text, pausing to discuss text-dependent questions that I pose. Students may be asked to jot down questions and comments, to paraphrase sentences or paragraphs of the text, or to answer a text-dependent question in writing.

• When they reach an unknown word, they use my multisyllabic decoding routine.

• After each paragraph, students complete Writing Revolution sentence level activities that both check and develop their comprehension and of course, also give them practice with vocabulary, syntax, writing, spelling and handwriting. We usually do sentence expansion, because but so, appositives, and sentence stems with subordinating conjunctions.

After Reading

• Write a gist statement summarizing the text. Read more about that here.

• Optional: Write an essay or constructed response based on the text. After my life changing and fabulous Releasing Writers (formerly ThinkSRSD) training, I am experimenting more and more with putting writing at the center of my lesson.

For those of us in the intervention or SPED space, we simply can’t afford to only focus on decoding and fluency and spelling, even if those are a student’s primary goals. Though my practice shifted and my students spent less time decoding individual words, they still grew an average of 33 words correct per minute this school year.

And at the same time, because we are talking about the same text for multiple lessons, sometimes over multiple weeks, students have the chance to really gain mastery of the content and vocabulary terms themselves, building their long term background knowledge for future reading comprehension success and bridging the gap from intervention to the classroom.

This knowledge is meaningful for my students. After our October break, some of my sixth graders excitedly told me, “Ms. Quinn! It was Indigenous People’s Day over the break!” They had been celebrating the holiday in their class group chat. For me, the purpose of reading intervention isn’t just for my students to be able to read words. The purpose is that they have meaningful access to a richer experience of the world.