A veteran reading teacher shares takeaways from her ‘Teachers as Readers’ learning group. What teachers need: enough time to teach language arts, well-stocked classroom libraries, student input, and meaningful professional development.
Curriculum-Based Measurement (CBM), which teachers use on an ongoing basis to track students’ progress toward annual goals, offers a number of benefits to parents and students, as well as teachers.
Learn the benefits of getting your child evaluated, who does the evaluation, what happens during an evaluation, what to do with the results, and more. You can also view a video to get an inside look at a dyslexia evaluation.
Parents who have a child they suspect has a disability are likely to have many questions about special education. Find answers to commonly asked questions about special education eligibility, IEP’s, and re-evaluation in this guide for parents.
Improve instruction and help all students achieve at high levels by making these research-based adjustments to your balanced literacy program. This guidance outlines some of the most common challenges of a balanced literacy model, how they can impede students’ learning, and how you can adapt your reading program to better serve students.
Children who struggle with reading often need extra help. This help usually comes from the school, but some parents choose to look outside the school for professionals who can assess, diagnose, tutor, or provide other education services.
Healthy hearing is critical to a child’s speech and language development, communication, learning, and social development. Children who do not hear well are at an increased risk of becoming struggling readers. Here are some signals that may indicate a hearing problem.
Students must pass high stakes tests to graduate high school. These tests are a major barrier for students with learning disabilities who often do not test well. Accommodations can help. Learn how to help children with learning disabilities do well on these tests.
Parents who suspect their children have special needs can take several steps to make sure they get the support they need to help their children succeed. Find out some of these steps in these tips for parents.
Standardized testing is one form of assessment used in schools. Find out about standardized tests, how and why schools use them, and how you can support your child.
Find out how you can support your child before and after taking a standardized test, as well as ways you can support your child’s learning habits on a daily basis so that test day is not so stressful.
Some kids, especially those having difficulty in school, dread report card time. Here are some suggestions for making report card time a little less scary and a little more productive.
The IEP team at school decides which assistive technology tools each student needs. Many teams make these decisions using something called the SETT Framework. Learn how the overall process works.
If you think your child might have a learning disability, this article will help. Dr. Larry Silver tells parents the clues to look for in pre-school and elementary school children. Then the article talks about how to get a “psychoeducational evaluation” to find out for sure.
Four strategies and practices are common to effective reading instruction programs: multi-tiered systems of support; universal screening, progress monitoring, and collaboration between special education and general education. This article provides links to tools that support implementation in each area.
These six short video clips give you the chance to watch and learn effective classroom-based assessment strategies. The video clips are from the Reading Rockets PBS television series, Launching Young Readers.
The following are sample charts you can use when assessing students informally in the classroom. Most of the assessments here should be given one-on-one.
An informal assessment of reading inventory, including what the assessment measures, when is should be assessed, examples of questions, and the age or grade at which the assessment should be mastered.
Is your school planning to implement student progress monitoring (SPM)? Are you thinking of using it in your classroom? If so, consider a number of factors to make SPM an integral part of classroom activities, rather than a series of isolated assessments unconnected to other parts of the learning experience. This brief offers some suggestions on how to use SPM in an integrated way.
Learn about the RISE reading program at the Johnson School in Charlottesville, Virginia. RISE features extended instructional time for all students in small groups, team teaching and staff collaboration, the use of a broad range of authentic texts, and a set of research-based instructional procedures. The program carefully monitors student achievement and supports teachers with extensive professional development.
The Lead for Literacy initiative is a series of one-page memos for policymakers and early literacy leaders on how to improve young children’s literacy, birth to age 9. Using evidence from research, these briefs are designed to help leaders avoid common mistakes and present solutions and strategies for scalability and impact.
For English language learners, proper identification of learning disabilities can be crucial to success. The author offers practical tips for identifying learning disabilities and developing appropriate accommodations.
An informal assessment of letter/sound recognition, including what the assessment measures, when is should be assessed, examples of questions, and the age or grade at which the assessment should be mastered.
Standardized testing is one form of assessment used in schools. Find out about standardized tests, how and why schools use them, and how you can support your child in this article for parents.
