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I just wanted to share some great teaching tips for dealing with At-Risk students.

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This article was very interesting to me. I teach reading in an urban district so 'Delivering What Urban Readers Need' caught my eye. The article talks about the reading difficulty in schools that are predominately minority and economically disadvantaged. This article contains information on: 'An Acute Problem', 'Strategies for Urban Readers', 'Provide Balanced Reading Instruction', 'Identify Those At Risk', 'Provide Supplemental Instruction', 'Encourage Active Student Responding', 'Teach Within Small Groups', 'Monitor Student Learning', 'Create Peer-Mediated Learning Environments', ' Practice Nonexclusionary Classroom Management', 'Help Parents Reinforce Learning', and 'Offering Learners Their Best Chance'. I found the section on providing a balanced reading instruction to be the most relative and intriguing to me. After reading this article, I feel more confident then ever that all students need repitition! "Good reading instruction is explicit, intensive, and systematic. Such instruction is beneficial for all learners, but it is nonnegotiable for students at risk for reading failure." This article is important for teachers in urban districts or even if you have 'at risk' students...truly worth a look.

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This website text is about teachers learning to motivating students during this new era of standards. Student's psychological needs are some of the most important aspects of education. We want to understand why some students come to school prepared to learn while others are not. Why are our dropout rates at the rate they are? With standards on the rise and all of the other factors associated with a student's education coming into play we can be leaving our students at a great risk. Knowing what their needs are can help ease this risk. With this knowing how to motivate students, their need for competence, need for belonging, need for feelings of usefulness, satisfying the need to build optimism, and need for feeling potency can help not only students but schools overall. They are all part of the CBUPO Theory. This is not easy to achieve but it is possible.

The ideas about engagement and motivation and their place in encouraging at-risk students to read was incredibly interesting to me.  I wonder in which district in Michigan the study was done.

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Lyons, W. & Thompson, S.A. (2011, October). Guided Reading in Inclusive Middle Years Classrooms. Intervention in School and Clinic, 47: 158. Retrieved January 27, 2012, from http://isc.sagepub.com.huaryu.kl.oakland.edu/content/47/3/158.full.pdf This study was interesting, because it focuses on something that I am sure so many teachers struggle with - how to teach students who demonstrate a wide variety/range of ability and needs. This study took a really "rough" socioeconomic level of 4th -8th graders and their teachers, and using guided reading as their main method of instruction DID see an 80% of students advance at least one, if not more levels. This was attributed to the fact that in small guided reading groups teachers could spend more time with small groups of students, targeting individual needs. That was the warm fuzzy. Of course, the part that this article mentions in the end, and would stop most teachers in their tracks before attempting to duplicate this, is that each classroom was equipped with several teachers and teacher assistants to make this work. Additionally, there were many times where the rest of the class NOT consisting of the 3 to 5 students in the guided reading group were supposed to work independently. All in all, every study has its flaws - the interesting thing here is that despite them, students still improved overall.

oops...ok I edited my post and stuck the citation in it...thanks!

Interesting to note some of the different terms used in the Canadian Schools, such as "families living in vulnerable circumstances" and "enhanced funding." Probably akin to our use of "at-risk" and "Title I." You are right, most teachers would "stop in their tracks" with regard to the two teachers. This article refers to an inclusion setting, in which the special ed teacher "pushes in" with the special ed students and co-teaches with the gen ed teacher. I did a NCA QAR visit last spring in a school with 4 or 5 teachers in a grade, and 4 paras in the school. It was either 2nd or 3rd grade. Every day at the designated time, all the paras would go into that pod of the school, and the students would move around to different teachers or paras and everyone got guided reading every day. It requires a shift in thinking and lots of collaboration and cooperation, but it can be done.

Literacy