What Happened to My Intervention?

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Five weeks ago, while Auckland was in alert level 1, I made a plan to implement my intervention. My aim was to run it for five weeks, then reflect on how it was going and the adaptations that I had made. This is what my intervention has looked like over the last five weeks (I have started in week two as an inquiry intensive meant that I did not see my literacy class in week one).

Week 2

They returned! It was amazing to see my literacy class altogether for the first time since week 8 of term 1 (we taught all curriculum subjects to our maths classes once they returned to school in term 2, as opposed to changing classes for different subjects). I ran my intervention this week with my two target groups. It actually took a bit of work getting reciprocal reading set up again as we had some new students and we hadn't done it in a really long time. I discussed reading strategies really explicitly with my learners and noticed that these questions came easily to me, as I had been working on them while teaching literacy to my maths class.

                               

Week 3

I had one more session with my literacy class and began discussing strategies with my groups again. I noticed a few of my students articulated when they did not understand a section of the text - this was fantastic! We then went to camp which was amazing, it felt like such a win as our camp had to be postponed due to Covid-19.

Weeks 4-6

Auckland went back into lockdown, quite suddenly. This was frustrating as only 10 students in my literacy class tuned into online learning. However, we are making the most of our online lessons and this does once again provide an authentic opportunity for the students to independently make sense of unseen texts. These are the same students who attended my online lessons earlier in the year, many of whom made accelerated progress. I think it will be worth following these students very closely, particularly to see how well they do in their PAT results. Could it be I need to offer many more opportunities for independent reading? I will compare there progress this year to their progress last year, as it would be unfair to compare their progress to students who have missed 12 weeks of school!

What next?

I am going to give my intervention my best shot for the last four weeks of term. I will teach one reciprocal reading lesson and one guided reading lesson (where we explicitly discuss the students monitoring their understanding of a text). I will give my students as many opportunities for independent reading as possible, using read theory to support this.

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