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What Really Matters in Response to Intervention: Research-based Designs
The Response to Intervention initiative has risen to the top of today’s instructional agenda and yet it is a process that is unfamiliar terrain for many teachers. To help teachers acquire a fuller understanding of the complexity of response to intervention designs, literacy researcher and best-selling author Dick Allington offers clear recommendations to guide classroom teachers in designing response to instruction (RtI) programs such that struggling readers will develop their reading proficiencies to match those of their achieving peers. Unlike any other book on the topic, Dick Allington provides a research-base that supports closing the reading achievement gap along with implications this has for designing RTI programs. In addition, Dick provides a comprehensive discussion of the factors that inhibit poor, disabled, and second-language learners from achieving and offers a number of research-based instructional strategies and routines for turning struggling readers into achieving readers. Teachers will be inspired and confident to design response to instruction programs! Take a look inside...
208 pages, Paperback
First published August 25, 2008
9 people are currently reading
130 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews
June 12, 2012
I am a fan of almost anything Allington writes. In looking at teaching reading intervention next year, a friend recommended this book and I am so grateful she did. Some information was new here but a lot of what I believe in my heart about teaching reading, to struggling readers or advanced readers, was confirmed. Love this.
June 25, 2009
I rarely review professional books that I read, but this one was so down to earth, and common sense, that I did. Instead of focusing on what is tier one, two etc, Allington focuses on good teaching that allows struggling readers to make accelerated progress to catch up. Full of research based practices, a must read for policymakers, administrators, interventionists and classroom teachers.
August 10, 2009
Very basic information. I didn't really learn anything new!
December 29, 2012
Seemed like he briefly touched on research, but didn't delve in enough. More a report on what does not work.
September 27, 2016
The author is a big proponent of reading recovery and does not support skills-based interventions that do not involve a great amount of reading. (I ordered an RTI book from the literacy project and I can’t wait to read it and see what the thoughts are in that book. I am guessing they will be different, due to what this book says versus what we’ve been learning in the literacy project.) This book is based on a large study done by Kaplan et al. I looked up the study to see if the book was representing it correctly, and it was. Reading Recovery was the only program that was shown to be effective for beginning reading students in all four domains: alphabetics, fluency, comprehension, and general reading achievement. Most of the other programs that we have on campus, such as vowac and Barton, did not have enough research to justify any findings. LindaMood had a small positive effect size.
The author states that students with low reading skills can’t be remediated in less than 30 minutes each day for first grade and 45 minutes or more daily for older students, up to an hour of intense intervention each day for fourth grade and beyond. His ideal model for a 30-minute intervention is 5 minutes of phonics, 20 minutes of reading books at the student’s current instructional level (not grade level books), and 5 minutes of comprehension. (He also believes that below-level students should not spend the rest of their days in classrooms in which the books are higher than their reading level.) He also points to research that shows that 1 is the ideal group size for the most progress, and more than 3 leads to no progress at all.
He compares skill-based interventions that don’t have enough reading as trying to teach somebody to ride a bicycle by repeatedly going over the parts of the bicycle without letting them ride the bicycle. He says, “Unfortunately, small group interventions are too often designed [the opposite of his model] with 20 minutes of teaching and 10 minutes of reading. I think it’s because reading teachers and special education teachers feel the need to teach the kids everything they are not understanding, but the kids end up being taught all the time and are never allowed the necessary amount of practice, and most of them are not going to practice at home” (p. 67).
One interesting fact that the author points out is related to the issue of learned helplessness. Many of us know from experience that many students who go to pull-out programs, such as title and special education, oftentimes demonstrate learned helplessness. They put forth little metacognitive effort in doing the work; they just wait until the teacher tells them the answer. I always assumed that this is because they have spent so much time in classes in which the work was too hard for them. But this author points to the teachers in the pull-out programs themselves as causing the learned helplessness problem: “Perhaps this is because these close encounters with struggling readers allow us to interfere more often while they read” (141). The author encourages teaching students to use metacognitive strategies and then helping them use them.
He talks about the positive research on training students to use personal questioning strategies while reading and offers these: “Questions that foster discussion: What were you thinking about right after you finished reading this text? Are there topics you need more information about to better understand this text? Think about the questions you had as you read this text. Tell us about one of those questions. Did this text remind you of other books you’ve read?” (p. 133).
He shares information from Ellin Keene, who has written about how the wording of questions matters. On page 135, he shares her findings that asking, “See if you can think of a question about the story,” will yield fewer and poorer responses than, “Think about all the questions you have and then pick one or two that you think will help us understand the story.”
The author shares these on page 136—
“Useful Strategies for Struggling Readers’ Intervention Lessons
Summarization: Teach struggling readers strategies for summarizing texts of different sorts.
Story grammar/Graphic organizers: Show struggling readers how to use story grammar or other sorts of graphic organizers (e.g. Venn diagram, timeline) to identify important themes in a text.
Question generating/Answering: Develop struggling readers’ ability to generate useful and powerful questions as they read a text and how to answer those questions.
Prior knowledge/Prediction: Demonstrate how you activate your background knowledge before you begin reading and how you generate predictions about the text.
Imagery: Visualization is one of those useful strategies we all use when reading. We imagine (visualize) what characters look like and how they are dressed. We create mental images of the settings including the rural environment on the plains where the little house on the prairie stood all those years ago.”
A questionable part was at the end when the author questioned the reality of dyslexia. He stated that, if those diagnosed with dyslexia would have gotten basic instruction but at an older age than their peers, they would not have dyslexia as adults. Based on what I’ve heard and read, that does not seem to be accurate.
The author states that students with low reading skills can’t be remediated in less than 30 minutes each day for first grade and 45 minutes or more daily for older students, up to an hour of intense intervention each day for fourth grade and beyond. His ideal model for a 30-minute intervention is 5 minutes of phonics, 20 minutes of reading books at the student’s current instructional level (not grade level books), and 5 minutes of comprehension. (He also believes that below-level students should not spend the rest of their days in classrooms in which the books are higher than their reading level.) He also points to research that shows that 1 is the ideal group size for the most progress, and more than 3 leads to no progress at all.
He compares skill-based interventions that don’t have enough reading as trying to teach somebody to ride a bicycle by repeatedly going over the parts of the bicycle without letting them ride the bicycle. He says, “Unfortunately, small group interventions are too often designed [the opposite of his model] with 20 minutes of teaching and 10 minutes of reading. I think it’s because reading teachers and special education teachers feel the need to teach the kids everything they are not understanding, but the kids end up being taught all the time and are never allowed the necessary amount of practice, and most of them are not going to practice at home” (p. 67).
One interesting fact that the author points out is related to the issue of learned helplessness. Many of us know from experience that many students who go to pull-out programs, such as title and special education, oftentimes demonstrate learned helplessness. They put forth little metacognitive effort in doing the work; they just wait until the teacher tells them the answer. I always assumed that this is because they have spent so much time in classes in which the work was too hard for them. But this author points to the teachers in the pull-out programs themselves as causing the learned helplessness problem: “Perhaps this is because these close encounters with struggling readers allow us to interfere more often while they read” (141). The author encourages teaching students to use metacognitive strategies and then helping them use them.
He talks about the positive research on training students to use personal questioning strategies while reading and offers these: “Questions that foster discussion: What were you thinking about right after you finished reading this text? Are there topics you need more information about to better understand this text? Think about the questions you had as you read this text. Tell us about one of those questions. Did this text remind you of other books you’ve read?” (p. 133).
He shares information from Ellin Keene, who has written about how the wording of questions matters. On page 135, he shares her findings that asking, “See if you can think of a question about the story,” will yield fewer and poorer responses than, “Think about all the questions you have and then pick one or two that you think will help us understand the story.”
The author shares these on page 136—
“Useful Strategies for Struggling Readers’ Intervention Lessons
Summarization: Teach struggling readers strategies for summarizing texts of different sorts.
Story grammar/Graphic organizers: Show struggling readers how to use story grammar or other sorts of graphic organizers (e.g. Venn diagram, timeline) to identify important themes in a text.
Question generating/Answering: Develop struggling readers’ ability to generate useful and powerful questions as they read a text and how to answer those questions.
Prior knowledge/Prediction: Demonstrate how you activate your background knowledge before you begin reading and how you generate predictions about the text.
Imagery: Visualization is one of those useful strategies we all use when reading. We imagine (visualize) what characters look like and how they are dressed. We create mental images of the settings including the rural environment on the plains where the little house on the prairie stood all those years ago.”
A questionable part was at the end when the author questioned the reality of dyslexia. He stated that, if those diagnosed with dyslexia would have gotten basic instruction but at an older age than their peers, they would not have dyslexia as adults. Based on what I’ve heard and read, that does not seem to be accurate.
November 8, 2019
Oh my heart. "My closing comment is this: If you have children who have been labeled dyslexic, ignore the label and provide intensive, expert reading instructions for as long as it takes to catch those children up to level.". I love my job, I get to fight for kids who are defeated, frustrated, and overwhelmed. My greatest joy is giving kids successes so they keep seeking successes. This book has been enlightening and is going to help me give struggling readers the expert instruction they deserve.
Read
July 14, 202516 years after publication, this book contains a sensible and research supported platform for effective RTI. 16 years later, schools still aren't doing this "right". It is frustrating to see it spelled out and very little attention paid to "what works".
July 28, 2017
The only person to listen to when it comes to reading intervention research...
April 19, 2018
Read this book about reading interventions again . . . Still informative and eye-opening as ever! I always wonder why we don't teach reading this way in our schools.
March 7, 2010
Review I wrote for IRCJ -
In this book for teachers and administrators, Richard Allington, past President of the International Reading Association, addresses issues educators need to address when implementing a Response to Intervention plan. Summarizing the research on struggling readers, Allington argues that students are not given enough time to read accessible texts. Students need regular access to texts where they recognize 98% of the words. Allington describes schools where most of the texts are written at struggling readers’ frustration level and, as a result, these students spend most of their day not reading. With feasibility in mind, he makes recommendations for how administrators and teachers can assess the availability of easier texts in each classroom and steps that can be taken to increase the time spent reading these texts.
Addressing another important issue, Allington advocates for alignment of all support for students. The reading specialist’s goal should be to help the child read successfully in the regular education classroom; with this in mind, the reading specialist should align objectives for teaching with those of the classroom teacher. Challenging educators to assess the existence of research-based principles, Allington includes easy-to-understand rubrics for assessing the quality of different types of support available to students including materials, access to expert teachers, and alignment of objectives. He recommends plans for instruction and on-going assessment that create a cohesive approach to helping our struggling readers.
Allington’s text is reader-friendly and makes what may seem like a daunting task – implementing Response to Intervention as required by the Illinois State Board of Education - a reasonable and doable endeavor.
In this book for teachers and administrators, Richard Allington, past President of the International Reading Association, addresses issues educators need to address when implementing a Response to Intervention plan. Summarizing the research on struggling readers, Allington argues that students are not given enough time to read accessible texts. Students need regular access to texts where they recognize 98% of the words. Allington describes schools where most of the texts are written at struggling readers’ frustration level and, as a result, these students spend most of their day not reading. With feasibility in mind, he makes recommendations for how administrators and teachers can assess the availability of easier texts in each classroom and steps that can be taken to increase the time spent reading these texts.
Addressing another important issue, Allington advocates for alignment of all support for students. The reading specialist’s goal should be to help the child read successfully in the regular education classroom; with this in mind, the reading specialist should align objectives for teaching with those of the classroom teacher. Challenging educators to assess the existence of research-based principles, Allington includes easy-to-understand rubrics for assessing the quality of different types of support available to students including materials, access to expert teachers, and alignment of objectives. He recommends plans for instruction and on-going assessment that create a cohesive approach to helping our struggling readers.
Allington’s text is reader-friendly and makes what may seem like a daunting task – implementing Response to Intervention as required by the Illinois State Board of Education - a reasonable and doable endeavor.
August 7, 2016
Excellent review of what really matters in reading instruction...MORE time to read, knowledgable teachers, very small numbers when intervention is needed, appropriate leveled text, coordination between regular classroom and interventionists, focus on comprehension, and books that interest kids.
One change I noted is that the independent level on inventories has creeped up slightly over the years. Allington now recommends 99% (no more than one new word every 100 words). When I finished my reading degree it was closer to 97%.
Also, one other thing stood out for me. At times I get weary of all the series books that have come out for kids because often they get stuck and have a hard time finding books outside of the series (and I get bored with them). But, the author reminded me of a good point. Kids love series books because the text is familiar and therefore easier to read and at their independent level. It made me appreciate all the good series books that are out there and the upside of reading them back to back to back....
One change I noted is that the independent level on inventories has creeped up slightly over the years. Allington now recommends 99% (no more than one new word every 100 words). When I finished my reading degree it was closer to 97%.
Also, one other thing stood out for me. At times I get weary of all the series books that have come out for kids because often they get stuck and have a hard time finding books outside of the series (and I get bored with them). But, the author reminded me of a good point. Kids love series books because the text is familiar and therefore easier to read and at their independent level. It made me appreciate all the good series books that are out there and the upside of reading them back to back to back....
February 6, 2017
Really interesting starting point for thinking about what reading intervention should look like for struggling readers. The book is mainly written for and based on elementary practices, which normally I mind (as a high school teacher). I appreciated that he pointed out and explained why high school struggling readers are a much bigger beast to tackle and I feel like his advice is still applicable. I would've appreciated an explanation of some of the research. A lot is cited, but a more detailed description of some of the research he repeatedly refers to or spends a lot of time highlighting would've been great. As is, there are definitely some studies I want to look into as my school continues thinking about how to help our struggling readers the most.
April 4, 2016
I wish I would have read this book when I started as an instructional coach 3 years ago. Research-based, step-by-step intervention design. I really thought chapter 6 was appropriate because it discusses the importance of coordinating the intervention with the core instruction. So many times teachers don't know what is going on intervention and vice versa. It takes all of us to make it successful. It did feel good to know we had many pieces in place correctly. Even if you are not in Reading intervention, there are lessons to be learned regardless.
October 19, 2009
I don't agree with everything Dick Allington says but, WOW, this is an informative, insightful book that is a must-read for every teacher in America. I think Allington makes some extremely valid points about instruction, the amount of time devoted to struggling readers, and the resources that we use (or should use but don't) in our efforts to help struggling readers. Every teacher needs to know about RTI and I think this is a great place to start.
May 15, 2014
This book gives a basic overview of RTI - but the majority of the text is spent complaining about education and causing the state of things to seem so very impossible without actually getting into any sort of method for coping with the problem. I about lost it when the author tried to prove fairness by saying "Congress mandates ...." as if that makes the point???
Allington is a big name in the business and usually a somewhat worthwhile read - I really don't know what went wrong with this book.
Allington is a big name in the business and usually a somewhat worthwhile read - I really don't know what went wrong with this book.
December 17, 2010
Thus far, this book mostly addresses RTI in elementary schools. Still, I think it will be useful for me in understanding RTI at the high school level. Besides, Allington is a rockstar writer/researcher, one of those people who makes me feel a bit like a slacker.
I'm done; I highly recommend this book to teachers.
I'm done; I highly recommend this book to teachers.
August 2, 2011
Richard Allington is the guru of reading research and his name and work are internationally known. This book is exceptional in regards to the straight forward, easy to read manner in which he presents recent research findings, implications, and ideas for any interventionist or classroom teacher to implement with their struggling readers as well as good practices for all students.
December 14, 2015
One of the best education books I have read recently. Would highly recommend it for teachers who want to help their struggling students, and prevent them from falling further and further behind. Filled with practical and useful strategies and methods to help students learn how to read and master reading skills.
May 7, 2009
Good book. Read it for a 1 credit book club class in teaching. It made a lot of sense and I was pleased to know I was already doing some of the things it was proposing. I was happy to see the emphasis placed on early childhood education and leveled texts at all grade levels.
July 14, 2013
Practical, informative, and honest look at what has to happen fot RtI to be successful. Looked back on my past practices with both pride and chagrin. Looking forward to sharing and implementing what I've learned.
March 17, 2014
Allington always challenges you to really think about what you're doing, how you're doing it, and why! This is a good one for anyone that is teaching reading, or making decisions about the way students receive reading instruction.
February 3, 2009
Outstanding resource for those struggling with creating a school model to support struggling readers based on most current research.
October 25, 2009
This is an easy read that serves as a literature review of reading intervention programs. This book is a good tool if you need to go to your administration with ideas.
October 5, 2011
Truly a MUST READ for teachers, administrators, coaches, and even parents. Practical, research based advice on how we can meet the needs of every student!!
February 24, 2013
If you're a teacher, you need to read this book, especially if you don't think it's your responsibility to teach your students to read and navigate texts.
July 26, 2014
A good text on RTI for LITERACY, but nothing is mentioned about math or behavior. The cover is misleading in that sense. The book also gets very repetitive.
October 26, 2014
I wish all teachers would read this book!
June 27, 2015
Lots of overlap with What Really Matters for Struggling Readers but also has its share of unique, helpful ideas. Loved the analogy of reading and bike reading.
June 19, 2018
Read for a graduate course, Allington draws upon decades of research to forcefully and effectively invite teachers and schools to replace ineffective practices with research-tested ones.
Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews