Planning an Intervention

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After gathering baseline data and consulting research literature, it is time to plan an intervention!

In my previous posts, I have outlined the methods that I used to identify my students needs, current achievement levels and my current pedagogy. I also reflected on the research that I consulted which related to my inquiry question:

How can I support my students to monitor their own understanding of a text and their use of strategies?

My main insights so far have been; 
  • Reciprocal Teaching / Reading is a valuable strategy for supporting metacognition, but I am not doing it justice
  • I discuss self-regulation strategies with my maths class, but not with my literacy class at all!
  • While I teach reading strategies, I often don't ask my students what strategy they used to make sense of a text, or discuss using different strategies at different times.
In response to these insights, my students needs and the literature I have decided to start by making a few changes to my practice, as well as adapting the things that I have been doing previously. I definitely need to look at reciprocal reading in a different way - previously I have used this as a term long intervention for my 8-10 year readers. 

My new plan is to run reciprocal reading for my students who are reading up to 12 years. I need to consult the literature and do this strategy more justice, as I realised I was neglecting some of the elements of it. Reciprocal reading is great as the students take turns to take on different roles that would traditionally be carried out by the teacher (they are given prompt cards to read to support them). I will also still offer a traditional guided or instructional reading lesson (teacher lead) a week with a more challenging text.

I will include explicit teaching of self-regulation strategies in my reading lessons and include these questions in my student activities as well. These could be as simple as "what could you do if you don't understand a word?" or "how well did you understand that paragraph?". I will also ask the students what strategies they used to make sense of the text, to again encourage them to self-reflect.

My plan is to reflect on how well I am doing in 5 weeks time, but I will make note of the micro-decisions that I make and my alterations along the way.

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