Welcome!

We are exploring research-based interventions for reading (comprehension, decoding and phonemic awareness) at the elementary level.  Our main text will be:

Karla Bisco 

I am a fifth and sixth grade teacher at New City Charter School in Northeast Minneapolis.  At New City, we use the Responsive Classroom approach to meet the social and academic needs of our students.  My goal this year is to explicitly teach reading strategies that will help my students think deeply about what they are reading.  The research questions I will explore are: Which strategies will help my students think deeply about what they are reading?  What scaffolding do I need to put in place for students to use these strategies independently?

Debi Krengel

I work as a special education teacher at Concord Elementary School in Edina, Minnesota.  Many of the students on my caseload struggle with reading comprehension, and I'd like to explore specific, explicit strategies they can use to more effectively access the curriculum in their classrooms.  The research questions I intend to explore over the course of this school year include: What are the most effective comprehension strategies for students with learning disabilities?  How can I incorporate those effective strategies into my work with students in a planful, deliberate manner?

Kelsey Wolf

I teach kindergarten at Normandale French Immersion School in Edina, Minnesota.  My goal is to speak exclusively in French with my students so that they can begin to speak, read and write in the language by the end of their kindergarten year.  Each year, three to four students in my class struggle to begin to read and write in French, and I would like to fine-tune the strategies I use to help these struggling readers and writers.  The research questions I plan to explore are: How can Interactive Writing and Shared Writing be used to improve student writing?  How can I work with individual students to improve their ability to recognize and name letters?

These are a few sub-questions that we may address along the way...

Which comprehension strategies are emphasized in the regular education curriculum? 

What role does vocabulary development play in reading comprehension?

Should interventions target vocabulary development?

How do we help students decide what is most relevant when reading?

How can we trick kids into rereading?

What strategy will help students the most across all genres?

Is working with students individually more effective than working with small groups?

How do teachers structure their classrooms to provide individual and small group instruction and assess students?

How do we get reluctant readers to read more? 

What materials motivate reluctant readers?