Welcome:

The Reading First Office, in collaboration with the Florida Center for Reading Research, is proud to present Intervention News. Intervention News is a newsletter that will assist you in providing services to your students in the area of reading intervention. The newsletter will provide principals, reading coaches, and teachers with guidance, motivation, and the latest Reading First updates, along with new tools and additional resources to assist you in meeting the needs of your most struggling readers. We are very excited to share this new resource with you and hope it is both helpful and supportive of your efforts in serving your students.

During the 2006-2007 school year, there will be four more newsletters sent via email to principals and coaches. The email version of each newsletter will have a link for a printable version to be shared with teachers.

The regular sections of the newsletter will include:

1) Research Corner - We will highlight and summarize an article or a chapter of a book focusing on the theme of the newsletter or on interventions in general. Also included in this section will be questions that might be used in a professional development workshop or in a book study discussion group.

2) School Profile – This section will recognize a Reading First school that has demonstrated success over time with their intervention program. This profile will provide specific details around the school’s programs, schedules, data management and professional development.

3) Instructional Tips - Each issue will provide teachers with instructional tips that can be used in their classroom during reading instruction, primarily with their struggling readers.

4) What’s new with Reading First in Florida – Each newsletter will highlight some of the projects that FCRR teams, RFPD coordinators, Just Read, Florida! and others are working on to help schools across Florida. Also in this section, links to other resources will be provided.

Why a newsletter?

• A regular reminder about interventions - keeping our struggling readers on the radar
• Based on the data from the first three years of Reading First, we are making progress, but we are still having trouble reaching the bottom 20% of our students
• To provide a regular source for books/articles/topics as well as questions for your professional book studies and workshops

Research Corner: Successful interventions always increase the intensity of instruction
by Dr. Joseph Torgesen, Director, FCRR

Reading First schools in Florida are working to provide instruction that is powerful enough to teach all students to read well by third grade. Our goal is to provide every child with the instruction he or she needs to meet or exceed grade level expectations during each grade from kindergarten through third. The goal is a difficult one to achieve, because some of our students may require four, to six, to eight times more instruction than others in order to learn all they need to learn each year.

Although successful interventions for struggling readers may vary in their focus depending on student need, one thing they always have in common is increased instructional intensity. The logic behind the need for increased instructional intensity is simple. If students are identified as performing below grade level expectations on a screening or progress monitoring measure, this means that they are already behind their classmates in one or more critical reading skills. If we expect these students to “catch up” with their grade level peers, we must provide instruction that can accelerate their reading growth so that, for a time, they actually learn faster than their classmates who are reading at grade level. This may seem like an unrealistic expectation. After all, these students have, up to this point, been learning more slowly than their classmates. However, the logic of the requirement is inescapable. Further, we have ample demonstrations from research that such acceleration is possible if the right type of instruction is provided with sufficient intensity.

The key to increasing a student’s learning rate for almost any type of skill or knowledge is to increase the number of Positive Instructional Interactions (Pii) per school day. A Pii is defined as any interaction between a teacher and student in which the student learns something new or establishes a skill with greater mastery. For example, a Pii can occur when a teacher explains a concept clearly, at the right level, and the student is actually attending and processes the information correctly. A Pii would also occur if a teacher were to correct a student’s error in a way that allowed the student to respond correctly the next time. As a third example, a Pii might involve the teacher modeling a correct response, with the student attending and learning from the model. Successful interventions for struggling readers always provide a significant increase in the number of Pii(s) the student experiences per school day. Instructional intensity is increased when the number of Pii(s) per school day is increased.

There are two main ways to facilitate an increase in the number of Pii(s) per school day for students needing intensive interventions in reading. One way is to teach students in smaller groups, and the other is to extend the time for instruction. The greatest increases in instructional intensity are obtained when students receive significant amounts of instruction in small groups of 3-5 students. The maximum instructional intensity is achieved when students are taught one-to-one, although this is frequently not possible in Reading First schools. Teachers can deliver more Pii(s) to each student during a 30 minute intervention session if there are only 4 students in the group rather than eight. Alternatively, four students are likely to receive twice the number of Pii(s) in a 40 minute session than in a 20 minute session. Pii(s) are also increased when teachers are able to keep all students fully engaged during the entire instructional session.

The most important point of this brief discussion is that, when planning interventions for struggling readers, principals, coaches, and teachers should think first of how they plan to increase instructional intensity. Once the conditions to support increased instructional intensity are in place, then the focus should shift to insuring that the instruction is properly focused and of consistently high quality. What we know from research is that all of these conditions (intensity, focus, and quality) are essential if we are to accelerate reading development in our most struggling readers.

Discussion Questions

1) Pii is a term we are not that familiar with--how else could you describe this concept?

2) Can you think of a recent example of a Pii in the area of phonics instruction? How about in the area of vocabulary instruction? What about for comprehension instruction?

3) Think about 2 ways you could increase the number of Pii(s) in your classroom.

4) As the principal and/or coach, what are 2-3 ways you can assist your teachers in increasing the number of Pii(s) in their classrooms?

School Profile: Highlight of 2 Schools to repeat in top 10

In each newsletter, we will highlight a school that has demonstrated student growth through a strong intervention program. In this section, we will profile the school discussing such topics as schedules, professional development, data use and programs. For our first issue, we wanted to highlight two schools that had excellent results in both the 2004-2005 and 2005-2006 school years. Using the Effectiveness of Intervention (EI) Index as well as other specific criteria, these two schools were in the top ten for both years for all Reading First schools across the state. Both schools are in Orange County – Lake Gem Elementary and Winegard Elementary.

Lake Gem Elementary is located on the Northwest side of Orlando and is home to approximately 800 students, K-5. Eighty percent of the students qualify for free or reduced price lunch, 87% are minority students, and 20% qualify as limited in English language proficiency. Mr. Ray King is the principal of Lake Gem Elementary and credits their success to dedicated teachers, fidelity of program implementation and focusing on each learner’s individual needs. Lake Gem’s Effectiveness of Intervention Index for the 05-06 school year was in the 99th percentile when compared to other Reading First schools in the state.

Winegard Elementary is located on the South side of Orlando and is under the direction of principal, Dr. Ella Barnes. She and the teachers at Winegard serve a student population of 671 children that is 86% minority, 84% students who qualify for free or reduced price lunch, and 62% students who meet limited English proficiency (LEP) requirements. Dr. Barnes believes their success is due to the dedicated, passionate staff who hold high expectations for their children and work together as a team to ensure that the students and families of Winegard are validated and supported. Winegard’s Effectiveness of Intervention Index for the 05-06 school year was in the 98th percentile when compared to the other Reading First schools in the state.

We congratulate the administrators, teachers, and students of Lake Gem Elementary and Winegard Elementary.

Explanation of EI Indices

Last year, the Just Read, Florida! office asked the Florida Center for Reading Research (FCRR) to provide you with some additional analyses of your Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) data that we hoped would give you another tool in working to improve student outcomes in reading. This year, two additional indices will be calculated for each Reading First school. The two additional indices are related to the effectiveness of interventions. To improve the precision of the previously reported EI index, we are providing more detailed analysis of the growth of students who began the year performing below grade level expectations on the DIBELS measures. This will allow principals and teachers to evaluate the effectiveness of their interventions across the full range of risk levels in the PMRN. These new indices are explained following our discussion of the two indices you received last year.

Effectiveness of Core Instruction (ECI) — this index shows the percentage of students who began the year reading “at grade level” and are continuing to meet grade level expectations at the mid-year or end of year assessment. This index tells you whether the core instruction is sufficiently powerful to produce a year’s growth in reading skill for a year’s worth of instruction for all students who begin the year at grade level.

Effectiveness of Interventions (El)* —this index shows the percentage of your students who began the year at some level of risk for reading difficulties (reading below grade level) but who have grown rapidly enough to advance to a lower level of risk by the mid year or end of year assessment (i.e. they move from intensive to strategic, or from strategic to grade level). This index, and the two explained below, provide information about how effectively intervention programs are working to accelerate the development of students who are lagging behind in reading growth.

*Please note that the overall EI index is calculated in a slightly different way this year than last year in order to acknowledge growth of students at the highest risk levels that may move from intensive to strategic. It remains the most general overall summary of intervention effectiveness provided by these analyses.

The two new indices are:

Effectiveness of Interventions for Intensive Students (EI-I) — this index shows the percentage of students that moved from the “intensive” risk category to the “strategic” risk level or to grade level.

Effectiveness of Interventions for Strategic Students (EI-S) — this index shows the percentage of students that moved from the “strategic” risk level to grade level.

Each of the indices are calculated separately for each grade level (K-3) so that you can evaluate the strength of reading instruction at each grade level within your school. You will also be provided with percentile ranks for each index that shows where your school falls within the distribution of all Reading First schools in Florida. This will enable you to see how your school is performing in comparison with all other Reading First schools at each grade level.

Instructional Tips

Phonological Awareness:

When working on the phonological awareness skills of counting, segmenting or blending different units of language (word, syllable, and phoneme), it is helpful to use manipulatives that provide concrete scaffolding to demonstrate the differences between these levels. For example, if you are using sponges as your manipulative, you would have strips that are the whole length of the sponge for words, cut those in half for syllables and cut the syllables in half for phonemes. If the children require more scaffolding because that difference is too subtle, you can use three separate items, but again, matching the size of the level. (e.g. a ruler or paint stirring stick for words, a popsicle stick for syllables, one unifix cube as a phoneme.) Another form of support for struggling readers is to provide different color phoneme manipulatives to differentiate between consonant sounds and vowel sounds (e.g. the vowels are always the blue sponges and the consonants are always the yellow sponges).

Phonics:

When working on blending with your struggling readers or in the initial lessons with all children, it is helpful to use phonemes or sounds that are continuous sounds (sounds that can be held for several seconds without distortion) vs. stop sounds (sounds that can only be said for an instant, otherwise the sound will be distorted) in the initial position so that you can “stretch them” or “slide them” together. For example using the letter ‘s’ instead of the letter ‘t’ like in the words sat vs. top. A child can say the continuous sound /s/ as sssss aaaaaa t vs. having to keep repeating the stop sound /t/ t-t-t-t-t- ooooo p. Some additional examples of continuous sounds are: f, h, l, m, n, r, s, v, z and more examples of stop sounds are: b, d, g, k, p, t.

What's New?

Assessment Team at FCRR

• The DIBELS measures will now be used for progress monitoring three times a year. Schools should discard scoring forms and probes from the 2nd assessment period and use the materials from the 1st, 3rd, and 4th assessment periods for progress monitoring of their students. The new risk levels align with the original DIBELS risk levels from the University of Oregon. The only exception is the first assessment of ORF in first grade. Since Oregon does not assess first graders on ORF until assessment 2, the risk levels for first grade ORF, assessment 1, are extrapolated scores.



• The DIBELS Risk Level Chart has been revised as of September 2006. The new chart can be found on FCRR’s website at: http://www.fcrr.org/assessmentReadingFirstScoreInterpretation.htm

Curriculum and Instruction Team at FCRR

• Student center activities for grades 2 and 3 are now available to be downloaded at the FCRR website: http://www.fcrr.org/curriculum/studentCenterActivities23.htm.
  The Professional Development DVD is also available online to provide assistance with implementation of these activities in your school. All 2nd and 3rd grade teachers in Reading First schools will be receiving their classroom copies this fall.

• “Differentiated Reading Instruction: Small Group Alternative Lesson Structures for ALL Students” is a document designed to provide guidance for teachers in the development of effective small group instruction utilizing two common lesson types: guided reading and skills focused. It is a useful springboard for school level professional development and can be downloaded from: http://www.fcrr.org/forCoaches.htm.
  
  
• Visit: http://www.fcrr.org/FCRRReports/index.aspx
  to read the most recent FCRR reports on intervention programs: Phonics for Reading, The Imagination Station, and Rewards Plus.
  
  
• A comprehensive “Glossary of Reading Terms” is posted at: http://www.fcrr.org/Curriculum/curriculum.htm
  to provide definitions and explanations of key terminology in reading and reading instruction.

PMRN Update

• Please make sure that your school’s grades are listed correctly as “ALL” or “SELECT” at: http://www.fcrr.org/pmrn/sy0607_pmrn_schools.pdf (PDF)
  If your school is marked as “ALL” and you are only testing select students, the FTE Survey will Enroll all students back into your school.
  
  
• If you receive an automated E-mail from the PMRN, please reply to helpdesk@fcrr.org and not pmrn@fcrr.org. The pmrn@fcrr.org E-mail account is not monitored regularly.
  
  
• Sections six through nine of the PMRN Elementary User’s Guide show the reports available in the PMRN. The User’s Guide can be accessed online at: http://www.fcrr.org/pmrn/ug/0607_elem.htm.
  A User’s Guide on CD was mailed to your school’s principal at the end of the summer.
  
  

RFPD Update

• Each year, Reading First Professional Development provides quarterly trainings to all Reading First Reading Coaches throughout the state of Florida.
  
  
• The first Quarterly training of the 06-07 academic year held in September and October focused on alternative lesson structures so that small group, differentiated instruction and targeted interventions would meet the needs of all learners. The two types of lesson structures that were discussed included: Guided Reading and Skills-Focused Lessons.
  
  
• The next Quarterly training, scheduled for November and December, will weave coaching considerations into the focus on improving student outcomes - specifically, ensuring mastery of the alphabetic principle early in first grade, and providing research-based instruction and practice in fluency for first, second, and third grade students. In addition, guided reading and skills-based lesson formats will continue to be studied.

Links