Intervention Is Underrated as a Key to Early Reading Success
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder discusses why targeted reading intervention in the early grades is one of the most impactful things schools can do.
Key Takeaways
- Early intervention is critical - Catching reading difficulties in K-2 is far more effective than trying to remediate in later grades
- Intervention needs dedicated resources - Effective programs require trained interventionists with structured curricula, not just classroom teachers pulling double duty
- This is the highest-leverage investment - Money spent on early reading intervention produces the greatest return in student outcomes
Transcript
I think having an interventionist is one of the underrated keys to making sure that all kids learn how to read.
And since Soul to Story came out, I'm glad that curriculum is getting the attention it needs.
Like, we do need to be teaching all kids with explicit phonics instruction, right?
Not all kids will need explicit phonics instruction.
Like, some kids will learn to read without it.
But enough kids need it that we might as well be providing explicit phonics instruction to everyone.
So, like, I'm glad we're realizing that.
When I was a principal more than a decade ago, we didn't know what we know today.
And we were kind of at the height of balanced literacy.
We used a lot of the Heinemann curriculum that Sold a Story talks about as being kind of bad, balanced literacy, Fountas and Pinnell, Lucy Calkins, all that.
And I think we got good results from that, but it did leave the gap around phonics.
And that gap was closed by a fantastic interventionist, by someone who would sit down with each and every student in kindergarten, first grade, and if anybody needed it still in second grade, and go through and make sure every kid had every letter and every sound.
And they would practice until that student could read.
And we monitored reading with dibbles and with other assessments to make sure that kids were on track.
And I think in a lot of places, intervention is seen as kind of an icky thing.
It's seen as kind of a thing that you shouldn't do if you have good tier one instruction.
I don't know that that really reflects reality though.
I think we're always going to need tier two and tier three for some kids, you know, and less so if we do have good curriculum.
So like part of the situation was we didn't have great curriculum that explicitly taught phonics to everybody the way we now know that we should, but it was always possible to close those gaps with some intervention.
And I think as we learn more about how to meet every student's needs and Intervention should not be something that we feel bad about, even though it doesn't feel great to us as adults.
It doesn't look great.
It's not a fun kind of lesson to sit through.
But if you have a person who loves kids, a person who likes working with kids and makes it fun for them, even if you would call that kind of instruction drill and kill, like it's a lot of like flashcards and saying things out loud, a choral response and reading decodable books that don't have much of a plot.
It is so important though to teach kids how to read, even if how the sausage is made is a little, you know, kind of grating to us as adults.
So like, please do not shy back from doing what needs to be done to teach every kid to learn how to read.
Because if we don't, like there's no coming back from that.
Like if you reach high school or even middle school without knowing your letters and sounds, like it just puts students so far behind.
And this is a solvable problem now that we have good curriculum.
But even before then, we knew the power of intervention.
Let me know what you think about intervention.