ESSER: Solving the Right Problem in ELAR

 Texas has gathered an army of support for our kids. To have such funding and resources to serve our communities presents a gift we have coveted and needed. Yet it also provided challenges. Region Service Centers offer training in High Impact tutoring through TEA. You can find the High Impact Tutoring Toolkit here. The guide offers key research principles and program design. In addition, the guide explains how to assemble the team and develop workable schedules and curriculum resources. 

Over the last few weeks, I've had several calls from tutors, asking for one thing or another. We've all needed a sounding board for how we can best serve those in our charge, often with limited resources and serving students with wide ranges of needs. 

When I taught American History, we simulated the Battle of Gettysburg with bottles of Catsup. Each child had an identity card as an orderly, doctor, or casualty. First, they had to perform triage and separate the wounded into categories of likely survival before calling the doctors. Triage. It reminds me of medical practices even now. Doctors use the data of course, but decisions are primarily made by ruling out other things through conferencing with the patient after reviewing the data. And the best medical care looks for the root cause. 

In ELAR, our data will show that our kids struggle with Inference and Summary.  But why? What causes that? As we begin to work with our students, our code red imperative is to triage through student conferences after a deep dive into the data. Only then can we identify the underlying causes. If we are working on reteaching inference or summary, we might be treating the wrong problem. 

My friends and I came up with these categories to drill down far enough to find the right problems. Only then can we match the students to solutions that will cause growth.

Phase One: Can the students decode and read with prosody out loud and in their minds? Listen to them read. Model reading for them. Ask them to hear that kind of reading in their minds when they read silently. If students are having problems with decoding, teach ways to break down words and connect to meaning with context or dictionaries. When they struggle with a word, they should reread from the beginning to reconnect to meaning. Ask students to emphasize one word at least per sentence that helps emphasize the distinctive main points. (That's just beginning guidance, right?)

Phase Two: What strategy are students using to set their purpose for reading and monitor their comprehension? Often, students will use a narrative strategy to read an informational text. Problematic. 

Phase Three: Can students recall the information and find where it is in the text to reread and consider the text evidence? When students struggle to read, they can't remember everything and they struggle to find what they need. Marking the text with logographic cues that follow text characteristics and elements can ease the "finding" process so they don't have to reread the passage a thousand times. Using a story board or fact tracker on a piece of paper for note taking can also help students offload some of the cognitive demand for memory. This also provides a concrete, simplified text that helps with online testing. (As we know, the more complex the text and task are, the more concrete the text should be. We can't fix the everyone-online-syndrome, but we can provide strategies to manage online text.)

Step Four: Do students know how to process the questions with logical reasoning that matches the ways answers are wrong as well as the ways answers are right? For instance, do students realize that in summary, some answer choices will contain wrong information, misrepresent the main purpose/focus? Do they realize that some answers will only be details? Do they know that picking something from the Beginning, Middle, and End might not fully represent the author's purpose and message? 

Students Exhibiting problems with Steps One, Two, and Three need reading instruction for the foundational strategies that will lead to skillful reading. We do not see TEK focused teaching until we see students struggling with step four. Yet, most of our interventions begin with a TEK focus. In returning to the medical example, that's like treating Eczema with lotion. The cause is internal. By doing instructional triage, we can find what is below the data and solve the internal problems students experience with ELAR and cause growth.

I've written more about steps three and four here. If there's interest, I can develop more for you in steps one and two.