Divide and Conquer...Reading Intervention!

My school has a large population of struggling readers. It's a Title 1 school, and everyone gets free lunch. The reading specialists are fantastic and pull kids as often as they can, but there are simply just too many struggling readers and not enough teachers to get them the small group help they need. This post is all about working with your team to get your students reading!

This year my team and I decided to try something new. Well, this idea certainly isn't new, but grouping the students this way and working together was for us. During reading intervention time, we decided to level the remaining kids and divide and conquer reading intervention. There are four teachers and roughly 80 kids left in our rooms during intervention time. We have four groups - on/above level, approaching level (strategic), below level (intensive), and way below level (intensive). As we call them, 2 high groups and 2 low groups. 

The low groups have fewer kids so we can focus on more intensive instruction and more individual attention. The way below level group has 12 students, and the below level group has 15. The 2 higher groups have about 27 students each. Each group has a different focus depending on what the kids need. The lowest group focuses mostly on phonics and decoding strategies; 2nd lowest group phonics and fluency. The higher groups focus on fluency, comprehension, and writing. 

To figure out which students go where, we ranked the students by their DIBELS scores. At the beginning of the year we started at the bottom and went up; second semester we started at the top and went down. If at the "break" there were multiple kids with the same score we put them in the same group. So far it's worked out pretty well - many students in the lowest groups doubled their scores and students in the higher groups showed a lot of improvement, too!

I'll be back in a few days with a post about what I do with my reading groups. Stop back to see what I do to get my kiddos reading!