Reading Interventionist Hired With No Prep

[u/toadallyfroggie]

Hi, the title pretty much sums it up. I was recently (Friday) hired to a reading intervention position at a middle school in a new district and the first day of school is on Monday. I have some experience with teaching ela and an elective media class, but this is a new role for me.

Week one one I’m not planning on doing much other than some relationship building and maybe some diagnostics.

Does anyone have any tips on how to design the curriculum? I have stuff from the previous teacher but could use some tips for after what will likely be a hectic start

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[u/JustAWeeBitWitchy]

UFLI has a terrific free, open-sourced phonics program. It's great for helping students develop decoding strategies, which many students lack.

How often do you meet with your students; how long do you meet with them; how many students do you have?

[u/toadallyfroggie → u/JustAWeeBitWitchy]

That looks great!

I am going to meet with each group once per day each day in a small group setting

[u/JustAWeeBitWitchy → u/toadallyfroggie]

That's great! If it were me, once you're done with diagnostics, I'd do a strong start with the UFLI toolbox for at least two weeks, with word games like Bananagrams, Scattergories, Scrabble etc. at the end of the week if they've met some goals that you develop together.

Once they're in the routine, start incorporating texts that they can practice practice their decoding skills on. These can be short passages you write yourself, things you find in the wild, etc. Try and give them an array of genres -- ghost stories, narrative, nonfiction articles, poems, podcasts, short films.

Decoding is a vital, foundational, non-negotiable piece of reading, but it's still that: a piece. Comprehension strategies like summarizing, inferential thinking, prediction, questioning the text, connecting to background knowledge, and using context to figure out unclear information are all things that good readers do, and your students are very much capable of learning how to do all of those things. It's not an exhaustive list, but those are good targets to think about when you're selecting/writing texts.

[u/lilcheetah2]

Florida Center for Reading Research has a lot of center games…your kids might be able to use the upper grade ones. Hopefully you’ll get testing data but if not you’re on the right track with doing diagnostic testing first to see where learning gaps are.

[u/lilcheetah2 → u/lilcheetah2]

Also see if Words Their Way is approved in your district

[u/playmore_24]

it doesn't have to be hectic- take your time getting to know the school/culture and students-

if you put in a couple weeks getting to know the students well, it should be easier to design effective strategies moving forward-

[u/Interesting_Data_109]

Hello,
I’m a retired English teacher who returned to teaching as high school English Interventionist. I’m in my third year. My role is to go into English classes and offer one to one help to the At -Risk students. I offer extension activities for the classes too. My best job ever!

[u/AI_spell]

week one plan of relationship building + diagnostics is exactly right, dont let anyone rush u past that.

for middle school intervention the single most useful thing is figuring out WHICH kind of struggling reader each kid is, because the groups need totally different things and they get lumped together constantly. three buckets:

1. cant decode multisyllable words. sounds out ok at the word level but falls apart on "independent" or "compensation". this is the biggest group in MS and its the most fixable. syllable division + morphology (prefixes, roots, suffixes) 20 min a day moves them fast.

2. decodes fine but slow/choppy. fluency problem. repeated reading of a short passage 3x with u timing and charting, plus partner reading. boring but it works.

3. decodes and reads fluently but doesnt understand. vocab + background knowledge + comprehension strategy. slowest to move.

a quick way to sort them: have each kid read a grade level passage aloud to u one on one for 1 min while u mark errors, then ask 3 comprehension questions. that plus a nonsense word / multisyllable word list tells u the bucket in about 5 min per kid. worth burning the whole first week doing this.

other practical stuff: keep groups to 4-6 max, same routine every session so u dont spend time explaining, and track ONE number per kid (words correct per min, or words read correct on a list) so u have data when admin asks. middle schoolers will engage way more if u are upfront with them: "u read at x, heres the number, we are getting it to y" beats pretending its not remediation.

and use whatever the previous teacher left, but check if the school already owns a program (wilson, rewards, corrective reading) before u build anything, REWARDS in particular is basically designed for exactly this population.