Direct Instruction: The Tools to Teach Students to Read
Pam Judge has experienced the benefits of DI, many times over. Having first been introduced to Reading Mastery Fast Cycle while teaching Year 2 and 3 students in a mid-west Western Australian country town in the 1980s. Pam detailed her experience in an article for the Bulletin published by the Learning Difficulties Australia in October 2014, titled ‘A personal reflection on teaching practice.’ In this personal account, Pam spoke about her initial trepidation towards starting the program that quickly vanished after receiving some PD, the enjoyment she experienced teaching the program, and primarily “…the amount of progress I could see students who’d found reading difficult were making.”
Pam’s experience led her back to the city. Equipped with the knowledge of teaching and seeing the success of DI, Pam was eventually able to introduce DI reading classes to an inner-city school “… with huge social problems and not a great reputation for academic performance.” The results, she found, spoke for themselves:
“I purchased SRA Corrective Reading materials and we ran DI reading classes throughout the school from Year 3 upwards. We employed Corrective Reading Decoding and Comprehension and Thinking Basics. We spent a lot of time, money and effort on this. Over the next five years, we were thrilled with what we achieved. Our local high school informed us we were sending them the best students out of four other primary schools, we had teachers come to observe classes, I had phone calls from parents out of our area asking me if their kids could attend our reading classes if they moved into our area.”
In her reflection, Pam spoke candidly of how her experience teaching DI was sometimes met with criticism from others in the school community, but that initial uncertainty was overshadowed once they realised the progress the students had made. That is what DI is all about – the progress each student makes.
“When I look back over the years, I remember many of the quiet little kids who turned up to classes barely able to read a sentence or two. I remember the kids who were initially loud and outspoken who found it really hard not to try and chat to me all the way through the lesson. The chronic fiddlers who wanted to play with pencil sharpeners shaped like crocodiles and rubbers with fluffy bits on them, instead of concentrating on the task in hand. The one thing that ties them all together is the progress that they all made and the fact that they all became readers. And that is what I am so grateful for – the fact that I was given the tools to teach them to read.”
Pam Judge has been the Deputy Principal of a large Perth Primary School, the Principal of a WA Primary School situated in the Wheatbelt, and worked in Hong Kong for many years.
The full article was published in the Bulletin by Learning Difficulties Australia:
Judge, P 2014, ‘A personal reflection on teaching practice,’ Bulletin, Learning Difficulties Australia, vol. 46, no. 3, pp. 22-23. Read the full article here
See more on Corrective Reading and Reading Mastery.
Contact your Education Consultant to learn more about our DI products.