In this manner, tasks are broken down into small steps. Mastery is determined by the child moving out all letters, all strokes from A-Z in 90 seconds or less.
Probes are administered in conjunction with the Flippen Reading Connection methodology in order to measure the progress that students make.
- Administering feedback repeatedly
Students receive immediate feedback when the teacher says “please stop”. The teacher demonstrates what she would like for them to do or has the student do an activity that reinforces the correct way to read, write or spell the word, phrase or paragraph. If a student makes a mistake while writing the word, the teacher again says “please stop” and the student repeats an activity until mastery of the skill is acquired.
- Providing a pictorial or diagram presentation
Almost every activity has a word, phrase, or paragraph written on the board and the students number the syllables or phonographs: the pattern for “pasture” would be 1123333 indicating that there are 3 phonographs in the word “pasture”, with 2 letters in the 1st phonograph, 1 letter in the 2nd phonograph, and 4 letters in the 3rd phonograph.
- Allowing independent practice and individually paced instruction
Students practice reading skills independently and practice the skills at his or her own pace. For instance, while one student may still need practice moving out all strokes of a word, a second student, may be ready to do an activity called “break down, build back” in which he must identify each phonograph, move it out, and then build it back.
- Breaking the instruction down into simpler phases
As with the first criteria of breaking the instruction down into smaller steps, instruction with the Flippen Reading Connection is broken down into simpler phases. A group of small steps are grouped into a phase. Once the student masters the first phase, he or she is given the next set of steps that constitute the second phase. Once all phases are mastered, the student demonstrates mastery of the entire skill.
- Instructing in a small group
Activities within the Flippen Reading Connection are often accomplished with small groups of students while others are watching and participating from their desks. Another group of students may have mastered the activity being demonstrated and can be doing an associated reading activity.
In the reading program, each skill unit builds on the previous skill unit and each skill within that unit builds on each other. The teacher models the skill for the student to demonstrate what the skill looks like. Please see the first criteria “Breaking down a task into small steps” for more in depth discussion of how a teacher models skills for the students.
- Providing set materials at a rapid pace
Students are definitely challenged. The regular classroom reading materials are used even with students with reading disabilities. The Flippen Reading Connection is the methodology by which reading is taught.
- Providing individual child instruction
The teacher provides individual instruction and meets the reading needs of every child at all reading levels. For instance, for every two difficult activities, students are given one easy one such that students are challenged, but are also encouraged as they see that they are making progress.
The teacher asks numerous questions throughout the activities presented in the Flippen Reading Connection.
- Teacher presenting the new (novel) materials
All new material is introduced by the teacher by demonstration or dialogue.
Strategy Instruction
Strategy instruction focuses primarily on the rules and the processes or global skills necessary to learn the desired material.
Swanson’s (Swanson, 2001) seven criteria associated with Strategy Instruction are listed below. If any three of these criteria are present within the lesson, the teacher is using Strategy Instruction. Often, students who are at risk or who have a disability are poor problem-solvers. strategy instruction helps them in this area because it shows them how the internal thought processes work.
Instruction provided by the Flippen Reading Connection meets all of the following criteria for strategy instruction:
- Modeling from teachers (verbal modeling, questioning, and demonstration from teachers)
The teacher constantly models a reading skill prior to having the students do an activity, and checks for understanding prior to moving on with the lesson.
- Reminders to use certain strategies or procedures (cues to use taught strategies, tactics, or procedures)
When students are introduced to a word or reviewing a previously taught word or phoneme students are reminded to “study” a word, which means they identify the number of phonographs or sounds in the word, as well as the number of letters in each phonograph or sound.
- Step-by-step prompts or multi-process instructions
Students receive prompts if they make a mistake. The teacher says “please stop” and then demonstrates the skill again. The teacher always goes back to the point where students can be successful, and then pushes them toward the next skill level.
- Dialogue (teacher and student talk back and forth)
Particularly in vocabulary development, much dialogue takes place between the teacher and student. The goal is to get the student to say the word in order to put it into the speech center of the brain.
The teacher asks questions throughout the learning process.
- Teacher provides only necessary assistance
The teacher provides initial instruction and demonstration, and then intervenes anytime there is a mistake made.
Purpose of Combining Direct Instruction (DI) with Strategy Instruction (SI)
Direct instruction focuses on helping students learn basic skills and information. Strategy instruction teaches students how to learn information and then retrieve that information when it is needed. Learning strategies are taught during strategy instruction to help students organize information so that it can be retrieved.
These types of instruction could and should be found in the same lesson because they complement one another, and because the activities associated with direct instruction and strategy instruction overlap.
What the Research Says: Combined DI + SI Model
In his research synthesis, Swanson (2001) first considered more than 900 reading studies (employing an experimental study design), and then narrowed the scope of review to 180 high quality reading studies in order to identify the principles underlying instructional techniques that are effective with learning disabled students.
His analysis determined that an effective model of instruction combining components of both direct instruction and strategy instruction supersedes other instructional models (DI or SI alone) for remediating learning disabilities. Furthermore, he determined that the effect size (M = .84) of the combined DI and SI instructional model meets Cohen’s (1988) criterion of 0.80 for a substantial finding. The magnitude of the effect sizes for the DI and SI models were .68 and .72, respectively. Therefore, although the DI alone and SI alone models are viable approaches for teaching students with learning disabilities, the effects size of these approaches were smaller than that of the combined DI + SI model.
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