Explicit Instruction
ONE Strategy

Explicit instruction in a specific strategy or skill is vital in all grades and in all content areas. All literacy strategies (e.g., summarizing important points from a text or use of planning processes in writing) and literacy skills (e.g., spelling generalizations or use of commas to set off an appositive) can be taught using this explicit approach. However, it is very effective when the teacher identifies ONE strategy or skill that students need to learn and plans lessons that address this specific need over time.


For many students, transfer and consistent use of a given strategy or skill will not be accomplished in a single lesson, but rather will require ongoing monitoring and feedback from teachers. Furthermore, struggling students may require more time and more opportunities for practice than typically achieving students to acquire a new strategy or skill. Therefore the special education teacher has already introduced this strategy to some of the students and will provide them additional practice.



Release of Ownership

The teacher releases ownership using the Gradual Release of Responsibility Model (Pearson & Gallagher, 1983):

 Modeling. The teacher demonstrates how to use the strategy, talking aloud through the steps

 Guided Practice: The teacher provides guided practice with students working with partners or teams to try out that same strategy while the teacher provides feedback and adapting instruction as needed.

 Repetition: Repeated opportunities to practice and repeated modeling with various pieces of text are offered. As students demonstrate that they understand the strategy and how to use it, the teacher gradually releases to students the responsibility for strategy use.

 Independent use: The teacher designs activities or assignments that require students to independently apply the strategy.

 Reinforcement: The teacher offers reinforcement on the parts of the strategies done well.

 Monitoring: More opportunities for independent use are offered with the teacher checking for correct application. Throughout this process, the teacher provides scaffolding to meet individual learning needs of students. Scaffolding means the teacher provides various levels of support to the learner through dialogue, questioning, and non-verbal modeling.

 Feedback: The teacher provides additional corrective feedback and reinforcement.



Guided Practice

Provide guided practice with easier text: It is important that the students who are learning a new strategy to support reading comprehension, have text that is easier to read in the vocabulary, decoding, and/or sentence complexity. This allows the student to focus their mental energies have text that is easier to read in the vocabulary, decoding, and/or sentence complexity. This allows the student to focus their mental energies on learning the steps of the strategy.

Provide guided practice with lifted text: It is important that the students who are learning a new strategy see the text being referenced by the teacher separate from the surrounding text. This way the teacher and the student can be sure they are attending to the right portion of text.

Assist in identifying when to apply it: It is important that the students who are learning a new strategy have guidance to when it can be applied in new reading situations over time.

Coordinate general and special education efforts: Why not maximize our efforts? The special educator provides more explicit practice, guidance, and modeling for the SAME strategy being emphasized by the general education teacher and using some of the same text.



Example

At the middle school level, a science teacher might determine that students need instruction in using the strategy of summarizing. Before introducing the science selection the teacher would explain why summarizing is an excellent tool for understand science materials, and explain and model how she creates a summary. While she does this she refers to a photocopy of the text (lifts the text) that isolates the parts of the text on which she wants the students to focus, highlighting the parts as she thinks through the task.

Then the teacher has students work in small groups reading a piece of text on their topic in science but several reading/grade levels easier (easier text), and asks the students to work together to create a summary of this easier text. Independent practice could use class reading materials, newspaper editorials, articles from magazines or primary documents.

In each example, the teacher identifies why summarizing is useful, uses appropriate materials as examples, and then plans systematic transfer of the strategy or skill to daily work. the special education teacher has already introduced this strategy to some of the students and will provide them additional practice. Over the next several lessons, additional opportunities to practice this strategy will be offered. Instruction may take place in whole class, small group or individual settings.



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