Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Literacy Instruction and the Fourth Dimension

It was mid-January. I sat there at my desk in the CDC classroom, head in my hands, feeling tired before I even began. As I reviewed the assessments I’d done for my proposed RTI students, I wondered how I could possibly address all the reading deficiencies documented in front of me. Second- and third-grade students reading at Level B (and sometimes not securely within that level) were in dire need of help before they moved up to new challenges in line with curriculum expectations but far beyond their zones of proximal development. In 25 minutes per day, how best could I help them?

The Challenge: Do It All, Right Now!
As we gathered around the horseshoe table, the students were eager to come to grips with the new “remedial” basal text I brought, the flashcards, the tiles and board games. They were motivated to explore the guided-reading books I had in my cart, with their bright photos of real-world things. The problem came in knowing how to begin. Even with no training, I could see that reinforcing concepts of print were first on our list. However, I could also see that developing phonetic knowledge was first on our list, since none of our group could identify the entire alphabet or all the letters’ primary sounds. And what about comprehension? Shouldn’t the use of context cues such as pictures, punctuation, and previous text be first on our list?

Working Memory and the Fourth Dimension

In his 2001 book Improving Comprehension with Think-Alouds: Modeling What Good Readers Do, Jeff Wilhelm brings out an important consideration: working memory only has room to actively consider about three things at once. This being the case, it’s essential not to attempt to remediate in all areas at once! My students didn’t become three years behind their grade level in reading overnight, and they wouldn’t attain grade level all at once, either. So – how best could I organize my instructional process to help my RTI groups?

In her 2003 article (“What Do I Say When They Get Stuck on a Word? Aligning Teachers’ Prompts with Students’ Development”), Kathleen Brown offers the necessary mental adjustment: I needed to actively remember that reading is a developmental process, with recognizable stages and appropriate teaching strategies for each stage. Her article reminds me that I wasn’t really faced with a herd of strategies and concepts to teach, each clamoring for recognition; instead, our work on each concept and strategy had a proper place in time. Back when I wrestled with the problem of bringing my students forward, I needed to refocus my view of the job ahead of us as a chronological process rather than a “to-do list” on which every item was top priority.

Our groups made progress, but the process would have been more efficient (and probably resulted in more progress) if I had been more reflective and alert to the function of the fourth dimension in our literacy instruction.

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