These educational strategies are available to build on your child’s strengths. Understanding these strategies can help you work with the school to figure out what’s right for your child. Learn more about the educational strategies you’re most likely to encounter.
Reading Programs: What You Need to Know
Reading programs are designed to close the gap between what a student knows and what he’s expected to know. They target reading skills and in many cases, students are removed from their regular classroom and taught in another setting.
Many students require extra help. For example, only 35 percent of year fours students are proficient readers (reading at grade level), according to the most recent National Assessment of Education Progress.
What to Look For in a Reading Program
When evaluating reading programs for your child, be aware that not all programs are effective. Solid reading programs:
What to Watch Out For
For best results, avoid reading programs that teach your child the material in the same way he was taught the first time around. That will likely just frustrate him. Also avoid programs that allow too many kids in the group. The idea is for your child to get more individual attention than is possible in a large class.
Instructional Intervention: What You Need to Know
If your child is getting help in school, you’ll no doubt hear the term intervention. A lot of people use this word loosely, to describe any sort of help a child gets. But intervention has a very particular definition. Knowing what the term means puts you in a better position to understand the help your child is getting in school.
What Is an Instructional Intervention?
An intervention is a specific program or set of steps to help a child improve in an area of need. Kids can have many needs. If a child is acting out, a school may offer a behavioral intervention. For subjects like reading or math, there are instructional interventions. (These are sometimes called academic interventions.)
Interventions have some key elements:
Marcia is in year 1. She lacks basic math skills and doesn’t recognise numbers from 1 to 10. But she hasn’t been evaluated for special education. Her school schedules an hour of small-group instruction each day to help her catch up. Every week, her teacher checks on her progress.
Here’s an example of what an intervention can look like for a child who has an IEP and is getting special education services:
Jeff is in year 5 and has dyslexia. He has issues with decoding and phonological awareness. The IEP team decides to give him 30 minutes of multisensory reading instruction three times a week. Every month, his reading progress is monitored.
Interventions are formal but they can be flexible too. For example, if a particular program isn’t helping a student, the school may change it. Or the school may use a stronger intervention.
This might mean increasing the amount of time a student receives reading support each week. Or it might mean getting more intense support—such as moving from small-group to one-on-one help.
An Intervention Is More Than a Strategy
People sometimes confuse strategies with interventions. But there are important differences.
A strategy is a set of methods or activities to teach your child something. An intervention may include strategies. But not all strategies are interventions. The main difference is that an intervention is formal, aimed at a known need and monitored. A strategy, by contrast, can be informal and is not always tracked.
Here’s an example of an instructional strategy:
Ms. Tomlin’s year 2 class includes many kids with attention issues. To keep her entire class engaged, Ms. Tomlin often uses movement to teach math. She’ll assign each child a number or a plus or equal sign. Then she’ll have the students move around to form equations.
An Intervention Is Not an Accommodation
Interventions are also sometimes confused with accommodations. These aren’t the same thing.
An accommodation is a change to the environment that gives your child equal access to learning. For instance, let’s say your child has trouble reading. One accommodation could be text-to-speech software that reads aloud to your child. This might not improve your child’s reading, but it will help her access the content in books.
Sometimes the distinctions aren’t clear. You may see interventions combined with accommodations.
Differentiated Instruction: What You Need to Know
In any general education classroom, there are students with various learning styles. Some learn best by reading and writing. Others prefer to watch a video, listen to a recording, or dig into hands-on activities. Differentiated instruction is a way of teaching that matches a variety of learning styles.
What Is Differentiated Instruction?
Teachers who use differentiated instruction tailor their teaching approach to match their students’ learning styles. All the students have the same learning goal. But the teaching approach varies depending on how students prefer to learn.
Instead of using a one-size-fits-all approach, a teacher uses a variety of methods to teach. This can include teaching students in small groups or in one-on-one sessions. Carol Ann Tomlinson, an educator who has done some of the most innovative work in this area, says there are four areas where teachers can differentiate instruction.
Differentiated instruction “shakes up” the traditional classroom, says Tomlinson. Students have “multiple options for taking in information, making sense of ideas, and expressing what they learn,” she explains.
Forty years ago, Tomlinson says, the focus was on individualized instruction. But teachers discovered that creating an individual learning plan for each student in a class wasn’t realistic. Differentiated instruction, on the other hand, uses several learning approaches. But it doesn’t require an individual approach for each student. All students have access to the curriculum in a variety of ways. This makes the whole learning experience more effective.
How Differentiated Instruction Works
Differentiated instruction can play out differently from one classroom to the next—and from one school to the next. However, the key features of this approach are:
A teacher uses differentiated instruction to give every student multiple paths to learning. That includes students who have Individualized Education Programs (IEPs). It doesn’t replace the goals and objectives in a child’s IEP, instead, the teacher personalises her teaching to help the student meet those goals and objectives.
What to Watch Out For
Critics say differentiated instruction doesn’t work in every classroom. If there are too many students in a class, or if the teacher isn’t experienced with this approach, the classroom can become distracting and chaotic.
Learn more about teaching strategies and techniques that help struggling learners. And find out more about the difference between individualised instruction and differentiated instruction.
Reading Programs: What You Need to Know
Reading programs are designed to close the gap between what a student knows and what he’s expected to know. They target reading skills and in many cases, students are removed from their regular classroom and taught in another setting.
Many students require extra help. For example, only 35 percent of year fours students are proficient readers (reading at grade level), according to the most recent National Assessment of Education Progress.
What to Look For in a Reading Program
When evaluating reading programs for your child, be aware that not all programs are effective. Solid reading programs:
- Are research-based, using proven teaching methods
- Teach step-by-step without skipping over content
- Are conducted at the student’s pace
- Offer regular reviews and practice exercises to reinforce learning and practice applying new knowledge
- Include a way to assess what the student has learned and whether he’s ready to move ahead
What to Watch Out For
For best results, avoid reading programs that teach your child the material in the same way he was taught the first time around. That will likely just frustrate him. Also avoid programs that allow too many kids in the group. The idea is for your child to get more individual attention than is possible in a large class.
Instructional Intervention: What You Need to Know
If your child is getting help in school, you’ll no doubt hear the term intervention. A lot of people use this word loosely, to describe any sort of help a child gets. But intervention has a very particular definition. Knowing what the term means puts you in a better position to understand the help your child is getting in school.
What Is an Instructional Intervention?
An intervention is a specific program or set of steps to help a child improve in an area of need. Kids can have many needs. If a child is acting out, a school may offer a behavioral intervention. For subjects like reading or math, there are instructional interventions. (These are sometimes called academic interventions.)
Interventions have some key elements:
- They’re intentional—aimed at a particular weakness.
- They’re specific and formal. An intervention lasts a certain number of weeks or months and is reviewed at set intervals.
- They’re set up this way so you and the school can monitor your child’s progress with an intervention.
Marcia is in year 1. She lacks basic math skills and doesn’t recognise numbers from 1 to 10. But she hasn’t been evaluated for special education. Her school schedules an hour of small-group instruction each day to help her catch up. Every week, her teacher checks on her progress.
Here’s an example of what an intervention can look like for a child who has an IEP and is getting special education services:
Jeff is in year 5 and has dyslexia. He has issues with decoding and phonological awareness. The IEP team decides to give him 30 minutes of multisensory reading instruction three times a week. Every month, his reading progress is monitored.
Interventions are formal but they can be flexible too. For example, if a particular program isn’t helping a student, the school may change it. Or the school may use a stronger intervention.
This might mean increasing the amount of time a student receives reading support each week. Or it might mean getting more intense support—such as moving from small-group to one-on-one help.
An Intervention Is More Than a Strategy
People sometimes confuse strategies with interventions. But there are important differences.
A strategy is a set of methods or activities to teach your child something. An intervention may include strategies. But not all strategies are interventions. The main difference is that an intervention is formal, aimed at a known need and monitored. A strategy, by contrast, can be informal and is not always tracked.
Here’s an example of an instructional strategy:
Ms. Tomlin’s year 2 class includes many kids with attention issues. To keep her entire class engaged, Ms. Tomlin often uses movement to teach math. She’ll assign each child a number or a plus or equal sign. Then she’ll have the students move around to form equations.
An Intervention Is Not an Accommodation
Interventions are also sometimes confused with accommodations. These aren’t the same thing.
An accommodation is a change to the environment that gives your child equal access to learning. For instance, let’s say your child has trouble reading. One accommodation could be text-to-speech software that reads aloud to your child. This might not improve your child’s reading, but it will help her access the content in books.
Sometimes the distinctions aren’t clear. You may see interventions combined with accommodations.
Differentiated Instruction: What You Need to Know
In any general education classroom, there are students with various learning styles. Some learn best by reading and writing. Others prefer to watch a video, listen to a recording, or dig into hands-on activities. Differentiated instruction is a way of teaching that matches a variety of learning styles.
What Is Differentiated Instruction?
Teachers who use differentiated instruction tailor their teaching approach to match their students’ learning styles. All the students have the same learning goal. But the teaching approach varies depending on how students prefer to learn.
Instead of using a one-size-fits-all approach, a teacher uses a variety of methods to teach. This can include teaching students in small groups or in one-on-one sessions. Carol Ann Tomlinson, an educator who has done some of the most innovative work in this area, says there are four areas where teachers can differentiate instruction.
- Content: Figuring out what a student needs to learn and which resources will help him do so
- Process: Activities that help students make sense of what they learn
- Projects: A way for students to “show what they know”
- Learning environment: How the classroom “feels” and how the class works together
Differentiated instruction “shakes up” the traditional classroom, says Tomlinson. Students have “multiple options for taking in information, making sense of ideas, and expressing what they learn,” she explains.
Forty years ago, Tomlinson says, the focus was on individualized instruction. But teachers discovered that creating an individual learning plan for each student in a class wasn’t realistic. Differentiated instruction, on the other hand, uses several learning approaches. But it doesn’t require an individual approach for each student. All students have access to the curriculum in a variety of ways. This makes the whole learning experience more effective.
How Differentiated Instruction Works
Differentiated instruction can play out differently from one classroom to the next—and from one school to the next. However, the key features of this approach are:
- Small work groups: The students in each group rotate in and out. This gives them a chance to participate in many different groups. A group can include a pair of students or a larger group. But in all cases, it’s an opportunity for students to learn from each other.
- Reciprocal learning: Sometimes the student becomes the teacher, sharing what he’s learned and asking questions of his peers.
- Continual assessment: Teachers regularly monitor students’ strengths and weaknesses (in both formal and informal ways) to make sure they’re progressing well in their knowledge and mastery of schoolwork.
A teacher uses differentiated instruction to give every student multiple paths to learning. That includes students who have Individualized Education Programs (IEPs). It doesn’t replace the goals and objectives in a child’s IEP, instead, the teacher personalises her teaching to help the student meet those goals and objectives.
What to Watch Out For
Critics say differentiated instruction doesn’t work in every classroom. If there are too many students in a class, or if the teacher isn’t experienced with this approach, the classroom can become distracting and chaotic.
Learn more about teaching strategies and techniques that help struggling learners. And find out more about the difference between individualised instruction and differentiated instruction.
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