This post is a follow-up to the poll on my website about interventions. I appreciate those who read and voted on the questions I posted. Thank you for your time.

In education today, interventions are a required part of teacher lesson plans. With such a diverse group of children in the classrooms now, there is evidence that not all students perform equally. The push in education is to narrow that performance gap and support every student’s ability to read at their grade levels and above.

Such a daunting task for a classroom teacher when one student reads above grade level, ten read at grade level, and nine other students read at several levels below what their grade level. Thus, the need for interventions! Every classroom teacher should develop interventions for their students. Title I and Special education teachers can and should collaborate with the classroom teacher about what students need if a student receives support from these teachers also. However, the primary person responsible to assess a student’s performance is the classroom teacher. This teacher is also the one who works with the student through specially designed lessons. based on data collected through small group and large group instruction about the student’s progress on concepts taught.

These lessons need taught daily, or as often as possible weekly. Each lesson provides progress the student made through the lesson presented. This information then determines the next lesson’s content. Effective interventions need to last 15-30 minutes in length.

As a Reading Specialist certified K-12, an intervention lesson for reading should include three components: 1) word study (phonemic awareness activities, phonics, or vocabulary), 2) fluency, and 3) comprehension. These three reading skills impact one another. I use a passage from a book written at the student’s instructional or independent reading level. Worksheets do not allow the student to apply the reading skills, but books and real print devices such as magazines, newspapers, Internet articles do. The point of a lesson is teach the struggling student to apply the skills when reading life-relevant print.

Some teachers design lessons for only fluency, or only word study, or only comprehension. If a student can’t understand a passage, could the problem be s/he doesn’t understand the vocabulary words (word study concern) in the passage, and this interrupts the ability to comprehend what the passage says? Or does it mean only that the student needs to learn “ask questions while reading,” a comprehension strategy? Perhaps the student struggles through the passage and reads disfluently (fluency problem), but the problem is the inability to decode the words in the passage (a phonics problem). These skills and strategies are all related to how well the student reads and comprehends what s/he reads.

If this article interests you as an educator, and you want to discuss this more, leave a comment or contact me. If you are a parent and your child is struggling in reading, contact me and we’ll discuss my tutoring schedule and cost. As always, thanks for visiting my sight. Have a super day!