Navigating Your Literacy Intervention

Hi friend,

Last week, we talked about how our literacy intervention is like a car. Our data is the gas that fuels our intervention, our lesson design is like the directions from a navigation system, and implementing our lessons is like actually driving the car and trying to get to our end destination (getting students to close the gap).

In order to power our intervention, we need fuel. If you haven’t read about how our data fuels our instruction yet, check out last week’s blog >>here.<<

This week, we are talking about design.

In intervention, it is easy to try and just jump in and go, teaching things as they come up.

However - there are a few risks we take here.

First, if you don’t have a clear scope & sequence…

…(an outline for your intervention) it is easy to get lost and confused.

When I think of this like a car, I imagine myself trying to get somewhere without directions - relying instead on street signs. I don’t know about you, but that sounds like a nightmare to me. If I don’t want to end up completely turned around, lost, stressed out, and wasting hours upon hours trying to figure out how to get where I want to go, I need a navigation system to help outline it for me. Our students need to understand where we are starting, where we are going, and how everything comes together if we want them to make meaningful growth.

You can grab our scope & sequence inside our 7-steps to Reading Intervention that Works course! Keep reading to learn more…

Second, if you don’t have a clear outline for your intervention…

…and you’re relying on teaching things as they come up - it is like letting your students drive. Now, I love my students but I do not want to be in a car with them driving. If we want to get to our final destination (getting students to close the gap) - we need to be driving, not our students.

Finally, if we know that research tells us we need to be hitting on all 5-Core Components of Literacy, teaching every rule explicitly, working systematically, building in multisensory components, showing students to apply what they’ve learned, and so on…

…wouldn’t it make more sense to have this all planned out ahead of time?

That way, when it is actually time to implement the lessons (drive the car), we are focused on one thing and not trying to juggle a hundred different competing demands.

For more information on designing your lessons, check out all of our “how-to” posts, here.

If you are like me and want to have a navigation system tell you step-by-step how to get from point A to point B when driving, you may want to check out our How to Create Systematic, SOR-Aligned Lesson Plans. This workshop will help you determine what actually needs to be included in a Science of Reading-based lesson, how to build a lesson plan based on the Science of Reading, and how to optimize your lesson plans. Plus, we’ll share our lesson planning guides!