Personal Introduction and Philosophy on Reading

Hello!

My name is Steven Malm and I am a graduate student of School Psychology currently pursuing my doctoral degree at Ball State University. Through my various applied experiences and practica in the schools, I have had the opportunity to help develop and implement a number of academic interventions using evidence-based intervention methods as required by IDEA. I also realize the need for ongoing investigations of interventions and will be learning more throughout this blogging process. I have started this blog as part of a project for a class on teaching reading to elementary school students.

In this blog, I will share my growing knowledge of interventions to help educators know what to do when reading goes wrong! What I mean by that is that I will share several resources that may be helpful in making decisions about how to intervene when a student is struggling in reading and (to a lesser extent) writing.

To briefly preview the kind of information that will be posted on this blog in the coming weeks, I will present my ideas and the ideas discussed in the literature regarding the Response to Intervention (RtI) structure, identification and assessment of students in need of intervention, and how to conduct progress monitoring. I will also be describing several evidence-based interventions that can be used relatively easily in a school setting to address difficulty with skills such as phonemic awareness, sight-word identification, reading comprehension, reading fluency, and writing. These descriptions will include steps, materials needed, as well as an investigation of the literature in support of the various interventions.

Philosophy on Reading Instruction and Intervention
Before I dive into other topics, I feel that it is important for me to describe my theoretical approach to reading instruction.  My personal philosophy of reading could best be described as a bottom-up, cognitive-behavioral orientation. 

To begin to elaborate, I believe in the bottom-up approach. Specifically, I believe that learning to read follows a very important progression of skills: from letter naming --> letter/sound identification --> sight-word reading and phonemic awareness --> comprehension and fluency. Students who cannot sound out or read words accurately cannot hope to understand what they have read nor could they be expected to read efficiently. I acknowledge that this may not necessarily be in agreement with others' beliefs regarding reading. There are instances in which reading occurred through interpreting pictures, modeling, etc. While this may work and form adequate connections for some students, I am more interested in how to go about instructing students when reading goes wrong. In that case, it is my belief that intervention must follow the progression from basic skills to more advanced skills. Therefore, when students are showing difficulty with reading, their mastery of basic skills must be determined before instruction can work on more complex comprehension/fluency skills.

Furthermore, I have included the cognitive-behavioral perspective to my personal literacy philosophy. From the behavioral perspective, I believe that the single best way to teach reading is through repetition and practice. With more basic skills, this could be accomplished through flashcard drills to over-teach concepts through repeated exposure. However, going beyond the behavioral perspective, I cannot understate the importance of personal interest and motivation in teaching reading. For students to learn to read, they have to want to learn - they have to want to pay attention (since attention is a critical cognitive aspect of learning as well). One thing I know is that you can only learn what you are paying attention to. Motivation can be achieved to a degree behaviorally through verbal or tangible contingency management, but it can also be achieved through allowing students to have opportunities to select their own reading materials. This also has the added benefit of allowing the students' unique background knowledge and interests make the act of reading easier, which makes the required practice less effortful and potentially more enjoyable. 

I suppose this leads me to my definition of Balanced Literacy: Balanced Literacy is an approach to reading instruction that provides students with strong foundational reading skills and then moves into refining these skills using a combination of teacher-selected readings aimed at practicing specific skills and student-selected readings aimed at providing fun and interesting practice and fostering a joy of reading. 


And there you have it. Today I have presented a little about me and my approach to reading interventions. I have also previewed a little bit about what you all can expect from my blog in the future. I hope you find my posts both stimulating and helpful. Until next time!