The Actual Cost of Duct-Taping Your Intervention Together
Hi friend,
Have you ever felt like you are buried under resources, and yet, you can’t find a single one to use?
Or maybe, as students’ needs change, you always feel like you are trying to pull resources from a hundred different places?
We get it - we’ve definitely been here.
In reading intervention, it has become SO common to take a scrapbook approach to our lessons - pulling a word list from one book, a PA task from another, a writing task from Teachers Pay Teachers, finding a reading fluency task to build off of Pinterest, and so on.
Now - we know that this is the approach that so many use because either…
They don’t have a comprehensive curriculum/program
Their training/program didn’t provide them with all of the materials they need
They are trying to individualize every piece of their lesson for every student.
Whatever the reason may be, we need to take a long hard look at this approach because honestly - it’s just not effective.
Think about it - how long does it currently take you to lesson plan? How long are you spending digging through piles of books and resources, scouring Teachers Pay Teachers or Pinterest for your next activity, and trying to put them all together?
What if we could repurpose that time into something more worthwhile? Something like seeing another student, building a deeper connection with our current students, or even just giving ourselves a moment to breathe!
There are two main problems with relying on one-off resources to build lesson plans.
1. It is burning us out
Think about it - when was the last time (if ever) your lesson planning didn’t require you to go digging for something? When was the last time you spent every night of the week doing something FOR YOU or with friends & family and not taking personal time to find or create more resources for your students?
Burnout is real.
The National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future (NCTAF) estimates that the national cost of public school teacher turnover could be over $7.3 billion a year. (You can read the full report here).
These students need YOU - and you can’t pour from an empty cup. Imagine what you could do with 12 additional hours a week so that you weren’t getting as burnt out by the end of the year. You owe it to yourself and to your students to feel eager, energized, and excited about your intervention, and nationally the current approach of using one-off resources isn’t allowing that.
2. Lessons are losing cohesion and intention in their design
When we rely on one-off resources, we aren’t hitting on all of our students' needs (even if we pull resources specific to them). That is because students benefit from having a systematic, cohesive approach.
Students benefit when they can see how things tie together - that’s how they learn to generalize. That’s why we say that a scope & sequence needs to outline all 5 of the Core-Components of Literacy (for every lesson) and take students from the sound, to the word, to the phrase/sentence, and up to the paragraph and passage levels for reading and writing. This way, they can see how what they’re learning ties into every component of literacy and doesn’t leave them feeling scattered or confused.
If we are able to use the same phonogram for phonological awareness, phonics, vocab, within the fluency and comprehension passages, for reading and writing - the student will more easily be able to generalize and solidify their knowledge of that pattern instead of working through a phonological awareness task that doesn’t match the phonogram they are focusing on for phonics, and not having a chance to find that phonogram in sentences and passages.
We aren’t saying that resources from Teachers Pay Teachers and Pinterest don’t have a place - they absolutely can! What we are saying is that we need to find a way for our lessons to be cohesive, intentional, and not take hours out of our day to create because in the end that isn’t serving us and it isn’t serving our students.
If you are looking for a program that pulls everything together for you, one that targets all 5 Core Components of Literacy in EVERY lesson in a systematic, explicit, multisensory, and comprehensive way, so that students get what they need and you can spend your time enjoying your intervention again, check out our Delivering SMARTER Intervention program by clicking below!