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The guidance for Reading First specifies
a set of practices and strategies that should be “visible
in any Reading First classroom in the country.”
Success for All incorporates all of these practices
and strategies, as follows:
Standards and accountability are at the core of Success
for All at grade levels K–3. First, the Success
for All materials have been aligned painstakingly with
the reading/language arts standards of almost every
state, and with most state assessments and national
tests (such as DIBELS, TPRI, SAT–9, CTBS, and
Terra Nova). In several large states, state-specific
adaptations have been made to further align Success
for All content and response formats with state standards
and assessments.
Within each Success for All school,
practices continually link student performance to standards
and assessments. Principals and facilitators (full time
coaches from the school’s teaching staff) participate
in Leadership Academy training, which focuses on the
effective use of data to move the entire school to higher
levels of performance. For example, principals post
around the school the number of children currently reading
at or above grade level and update this number every
eight weeks. Principals and facilitators constantly
examine data on student performance and use these data
as the basis of self-evaluation of school progress and
teacher evaluation, as well as using them to make and
revise school-level policies and practices.
The objectives and expectations for student performance
are clear to students, teachers, and administrators
in Success for All schools. The entire program is designed
around the goal of bringing every child to grade level
in reading by the end of 3rd grade. Assessments along
the way give teachers constant feedback on the progress
each child is making toward this goal. Beginning in
first grade, children are assessed every eight weeks
on reliable, valid indicators of reading performance.
In addition, more frequent assessments indicate children’s
levels of performance to the teacher. These include
weekly assessments of story comprehension, vocabulary
development, and reading fluency and accuracy. Every
day, teachers informally assess children’s progress
on Treasure Hunts, oral reading, writing, reading comprehension
strategies, home reading, and book reports. Because
all of these assessments contribute to team scores,
students themselves are intensely focused on their performance,
and encourage their teammates to make maximum progress.
Success for All is a structured, sequential, comprehensive
approach to reading instruction. It provides detailed
teacher’s manuals, student materials, videos,
and supplementary materials that are all fully integrated
with each other and oriented toward the goal of every
child reading by 3rd grade.
Beginning in 1st grade, Success for All uses a cross-grade
grouping plan called the Joplin Plan (see Slavin, 1987).
Based on formal eight-week assessments, children are
regrouped according to their reading level, more or
less regardless of their age. That is, a class at the
2–1 reading level might include mostly 2nd graders,
but also some 1st graders and some 3rd graders also
reading at that level. This regrouping takes place only
during the 90-minute reading period; the rest of the
day students are in heterogeneous, age-graded classes.
The Joplin Plan gives each reading teacher a classroom
of students all at one reading level, which eliminates
the need for “followup activities” and greatly
facilitates classroom management and effective use of
time, because each teacher has, in effect, a single
reading group. Within the reading classes, teachers
work with individuals and small groups to follow up
on whole-class lessons. Overall placement in reading
groups is re-evaluated every eight weeks, and children
capable of being accelerated beyond their current placement
are moved to higher-level classes. This flexible grouping
strategy ensures that children can move at a rapid pace
toward or above grade level as their skills develop.
As any visitor to a Success for All school can attest,
the program calls for and routinely produces remarkable
levels of student engagement around a well-structured,
research-based reading approach. In grades K–3,
children are constantly engaged in whole-class and small-group
interactions around challenging content.
Children in kindergarten and 1st grade
do a great deal of partner reading by working in dyads
on phonetic readers called Shared Stories. In 2nd grade
and beyond, children begin to work in four-member teams
on a series of activities built around their basals
or trade books, reading comprehension units, writing
activities, book report activities, and so on. The team
structures and team incentives motivate children to
stay on task, to help their teammates learn, and to
make rapid progress in the reading content. At grade
levels K–3, Success for All uses classroom management
strategies designed to maximize active student engagement.
These include maintaining a rapid pace of instruction
with high success rates, frequent feedback and monitoring
of children’s work, frequent use of student responses,
management signals and routines to minimize down time
and time off-task, and so on. All of these strategies
engage children in the pursuit of clearly articulated
academic goals, which are continually monitored and
assessed.
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