Hello, I am new to this board. I am a Title 1 reading specialist at a 6-8 middle school and am now in charge of teaching tier 2 and 3 classes for our kids. I was just wondering if any of you were aware of any interventions that you found successful at your schools that you could pass on to me. Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!

Welcome to the discussion board.

I think the first thing to do is figure out what type of reading difficulties your students have. Ideally, your general screening assessment will point you into a direction or two. Usually, you'll want to then follow up with more specific diagnostic assessments. Some experts disagree with me on this. For some reason, they don't believe that there is as much value in figuring out what the problem is and believe its more important to just start applying interventions. (They may be exaggerating to make a point of difference between excessive diagnostic testing and the need to intervene.) I believe that the types of reading difficulties are different enough that you want to use interventions that are designed for the problems your students are having. Once you have that data and analysis, you can begin the next stop of applying interventions.

There's a lot of very knowledgeable people out there. Once they know the specifics of the problems your students are having, you'll find a lot of support.

Take care,
Charles

I would like to stretch the discussion by someone qualifying exactly what off the shelf cbm's that people are using to monitoring progress. Also, what diagnostict assessments are being used on the secondary levels?

6-8 and 9-12

Joe:

Thank you for "stretching" the conversation.

At the secondary level, particularly 9-12 there are fewer CBMs that we see at the elementary and middle school levels. There are a few solutions, but they are not perfect fits. Aimsweb is a highly touted solution. The quality of graphing and the relative ease of use makes it a nice solution. In terms of reading, it tops out at the 9th grade reading level. NWEA MAP assessments are also popular. Since these assessments don't offer something for the entire school, high schools are understandably reluctant to use them. More and more high schools are using them at the freshman level, or for ELL, SPED and some at-risk populations.

As an alternative, that meets the needs of high schools, is to design a tight system of formative and summative assessments and use Professional Learning Teams to develop the necessary validity and reliability to make the assessments viable as data instruments. A colleague of mine at Empowered High Schools has just written a piece on this. You can find it at http://www.empoweredhighschools.com/blog/?p=42