Don’t Teach Strategies: Self-monitoring & Cross-checking (part 1)

When teaching children to read it is important that we ask ourselves whether we are teaching strategies to our students or whether we are teaching our students to be strategic readers? You might be wondering what exactly I mean by this? What is the difference? *Just to clarify - I am using the word "strategy" …

What Works? Independent Reading Works!

"Research is clear that when students spend time in school reading self-selected books with a teacher who is working hard providing direct and individualized instruction, results are impressive. So, in essence, IR is the perfect use of instructional time!"

Experiencing the Reading Process as a Novice Reader

Recently, I started the exciting journey of learning the Korean language as well as Hangul, the Korean writing system.  While learning a new language I have had the opportunity to engage in the reading/writing process as a novice reader/writer. Disclaimer:  As a literate adult with a whole lot of experience with reading and writing English, …

Reading Teachers: helping students take responsibility & embrace mistakes

In our role as literacy interventionists, we often work with students who are afraid of failure. Many of our students lack a sense of agency because they have experienced repeated failures. " Student agency" can be described as a student taking an active role in his/her learning. When students do not feel a sense of …

Independent Reading: The Necessities

If you read my last post you know that I just finished reading No More Independent Reading Without Support, written by Debbie Miller and Barbara Moss. I highly recommend this book to anybody that wants to understand more about why independent reading is important, why we can not simply have independent reading without explicit teaching, …