Resource Series Overview
This online professional development is designed to enhance teachers’ knowledge and skills so they can effectively teach adolescent students who struggle with reading. This professional development consists of a series of resources with videos that demonstrate how to teach reading and spelling skills to struggling adolescent readers. The resources are organized so that later lessons build upon earlier ones. The series can be used as a set of sequential lessons or separately to address the particular needs of students.
The goal of this series of resources is to increase teachers’ knowledge of the building blocks of reading. The information gained from an oral reading fluency test such as the Texas Middle School Fluency Assessment (TMSFA) can be used to provide targeted instruction for middle school students with reading difficulties. Teachers can use the data to choose areas of instruction on which to focus. For example, if a student made many errors while reading multisyllabic words, a teacher may want to begin with teaching the six syllable types and build up to the multisyllabic word reading routine. Other resources focus on contractions, affixes, and consonant blends and digraphs. The purpose of the series is to increase teachers’ knowledge of the basic elements of word reading, so that teachers are equipped with the skills to diagnose and intervene when students are struggling in particular areas.
Each resource consists of an introduction, an overview, and a video demonstration. A copy of the lesson, lesson materials, related word lists, and a video transcript are available for download for each resource. Links to other helpful resources are also provided throughout the lessons.
Click play on the video when you're ready to begin.
Video Demonstrations
In the video demonstrations, viewers are invited to take an active role as a "student participant," in order to practice the skills and better understand the concepts and effective instructional techniques.
The lessons presented in the video demonstrations are taken from two sources: Word Recognition and Fluency: Effective Upper-Elementary Interventions for Students with Reading Difficulties and Effective Instruction for Middle School Students with Reading Difficulties: The Reading Teacher’s Sourcebook. The chapter upon which each lesson is based is provided in each lesson and available for download. The student materials for all lessons are available here.
A key element in the video demonstrations in this series is the depiction of the features of effective instruction. The features of effective instruction are:
- Explicit instruction with modeling
- Systematic instruction with scaffolding
- Multiple opportunities for practice
- Immediate and corrective feedback
In each lesson, the skill is explicitly and systematically taught. The teacher provides ample opportunities to practice the skill and immediate and corrective feedback is provided if an error is made.
In some of the lessons, the teacher can be seen modeling effective corrective feedback by acknowledging the error and guiding the student to the correct answer through the use of questioning. The viewer should take note of these and other instances of effective instruction.
If you would like a copy of the transcript for the above video, please click on the button below.
Resource Series Table of Contents
Click the topics below to view the resources in the Building Blocks for Teaching Adolescents with Reading Difficulties series. Each topic will open a new resource with instructional information and a video demonstration.
Teaching Adolescents Who Struggle With Literacy
Spelling Rules and Irregular Words
Consonant-Vowel-Consonant Words/Closed Syllables
Vowel-Consonant-e (VCe) Syllables
Affixes with Unchanging Base Words
The -ed Suffix with Unchanging Base Words
