Prevention of Reading Failure Starts with Effective Core Instruction

Spark Your Thinking With These 10 Tips 

1. Get Explicit

State what you want students to do and provide a direct model.

2. Increase Engagement

Get students talking and interacting with partner practice, choral responding, and the use of silent signals (no more calling on one student with her hand raised).

3. Sequence Skills

Think about all of the skills to be taught across the year and order them easier to harder. Which ones depend on others? What are the pre-requisites?

4. Practice to Automaticity

Provide multiple practice opportunities for skills that students can do with 100% accuracy. Think carefully about homework and centers.

5. Think Speech to Print

When students want to know how to spell a word or come to a word in text that they don’t know, cue them to say the phonemes, then match graphemes to the phonemes.

6. Integrate the 5 Components

Look at the daily and weekly schedule – how much time is spent on each component? Are there ways to integrate across components such as integrating spelling and phonics instruction?

7. Cumulative Review

Review previously taught content before moving to new content.

8. Manage Transitions

Increase academic engaged time by reducing transitions with silent signals and routines.

9. Immediate Corrective Feedback

Don’t let students practice mistakes

10. Use Assessment Data

What do your students know and what is the next skill in the instructional sequence that they need to learn?

View a Recorded Discussion About RtI/MTSS