I am so excited! The Instructional Coaches for the district came over last week to help develop a schedule which will include 2 - 90 minute blocks of instruction. One block is for Communication Arts and one block is for Math. Since I've been a principal at the Elementary level, I continually hear frustration from the teachers about how many times students are pulled out of their class: special education, remedial reading, speech, counseling, etc. By developing these blocks, we can eliminate the pull out system and incorporate more small group instruction in the classroom. The special education teachers and Title 1 teachers will go into the classroom and help the regular education teacher. In addition, we incorporated a 30 minute intervention block which will allow us to give intensive intervention time with struggling students. YEAH!
To Do List:
1) Create a schedule that has large blocks of learning time
2) Talk with teachers about this. Listen to pros and cons
3) Find out who is hesitant to implement and why
4) Determine professional development needs for Guided Reading
5) Continue to shift traditional ways of thinking about instruction
Wait! I need to go back to #3............my district has always implemented Title 1 services via a pull out method (that doesn't sound very good, does it?). I need your help - how does your school implement Remedial Reading? Literacy Specialist? Title 1? How do we make the switch from pull out to push in? What does that look like? Is that what is best for reading instruction? I would appreciate any and all help you can give. In the meantime, I'm Googling my behind off (hopefully)!
We should really chat on the phone or skype about this! I instituted a 90 minute reading block for this purpose. It started out with support staff (sped, title) coming into the classrooms during the reading block, however, since teachers only know pull-out, it eventually went back to that so now our students that need additional reading instruction are not getting the "double dose" they have.
ReplyDeleteI have started conversations with my staff about an intervention block-however, we're far from getting there. We're working on establishing our curriculum now (ack!) I am curious what you will be doing with the intervention block.
In our reading blocks, we have CSR (classroom size reduction) teachers push in for 40 minutes daily. They work with small reading groups so that each guided reading group can meet with an adult each day for direct reading instruction. For the students who are below level, they meet daily for an additional 30 min. block with the developmental reading specialists for a double dose in reading.
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