Blast from the Past: This blog was first posted on June 10, 2014; and reposted May 13, 2023. When it first appeared, it was the fourth in a sequence (just type “How to Organize Daily Literacy Instruction” into the search engine to find the others). A teacher had queried me about, Daily 5, a popular organizational plan. I was critical of it because it emphasized classroom activities rather than learning. I wrote about my own framework that had been successful in supporting efforts to improve reading achievement. That scheme calls for 2-3 hours per day of reading and writing instruction (the greater the challenge, the greater the amount of time). That instructional time is divided equally into word knowledge (decoding, morphology, etc.); text reading fluency; comprehension (written language, strategies, etc.), and writing (transcription, composition, etc.). This entry explains the flexibility such an approach provides – it supports a wider range of teaching activities, keeps the focus on learning, and allows teachers to be more supple in their response to children’s learning needs.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been explaining an organizational plan that is a better alternative than Daily 5. Although I appreciate an approach (like Daily 5) that structures time for teachers, I believe it’s better to organize around outcomes rather than the teaching activities. Teachers need activities, of course, but they also must keep focused on what they are trying to accomplish, on what they are using those activities towards. Teachers can get too bogged down in methods, activities, approaches, and the like, and lose sight of the purpose of those actions. That is true of many other professionals, too, I’m told. The trick is to set time for certain goals and then to select the best materials and activities to accomplish those goals (there are usually multiple ways to do that).
Won’t it get tedious if I structure the day in the same way every day?
Perhaps, but that isn’t what I’ve recommended. You can use my scheme in a repetitive manner and there are both benefits and drawbacks to that. A clear routine can be efficient, but it can also become boring. However, the issue isn’t so much the sequence in which the components are addressed, but whether you’re spending enough time focused on the right goals. How you organize that in a day is up to you as a professional. If you plan on spending 45 minutes on words in your first grade, that doesn’t mean you must teach words from 9:00AM-9:45AM every morning. You could vary this day to day, and you also could divide this time into smaller chunks.
Shouldn’t I integrate instruction?
There are two basic ideas of integration. The first refers to the integration of the instruction of these components. That is basically accomplished by making a text or set of texts the center of instruction -- the source of vocbulary, the topic of writing, the texts that one works to fluency, the text that is the focus of comprehension work. The other has to do with the connection of literacy instruction with social studies or science. Again, text is central. There is no reason why students can't do voabulary, fluency, comprehension, and writing work with texts from other subject areas or in pursuit of projects from those subject areas.
What kind of flexibility is possible?
Again, perhaps, but because the boundaries are not firm across these categories, it’s possible to be very flexible. A fifth-grade teacher might decide that she needs more than 30 minutes to teach a good comprehension lesson—because of the lengths of texts the students are reading. She could teach reading comprehension every other day, instead of every day, allowing an hour for such a lesson (she could swap writing with reading comprehension on alternative days). Or, what if the teacher was teaching comprehension, but found out—right in the middle of the lesson—that more vocabulary work was needed? The teacher could provide that instruction and even out later, by trading with one of the other categories.
My school requires that we all teach reading at the same time (in a 90-minute block at the beginning of the day), so I can’t do this.
You could use the required block and add additional time later in your school day. However, I’m not a big fan of your school’s approach. It makes it more difficult to provide intervention services to the struggling readers. If everyone teaches reading at the same time, either fewer students can get Tier 2 services or kids are pulled out of reading to get what should be extra help.
I'm a secondary teacher and we don’t have a reading class. I don’t see how this can work in my situation.
Many secondary schools have taken this plan on successfully. It requires cooperation among the various departments, however. Typically, we work on a weekly basis. That would mean that we need to provide 10 hours per week of literacy work (2.5 hours of vocabulary/morphology, 2.5 hours of reading comprehension, 2.5 hours of writing, and up to 2.5 hours of oral reading fluency—depending on the students’ fluency levels). Each department agrees to provide some portion of this weekly regimen and then some horse-trading is done to ensure that there is sufficient time for everything. All of this work is done with the texts and contents of each class.
My school requires that we all teach reading at the same time (in a 90-minute block at the beginning of the day), so I can’t do this.
You could use the required block and add additional time later in your school day. However, I’m not a big fan of your school’s approach. It makes it more difficult to provide intervention services to the struggling readers (if everyone teaches reading at the same time, then if a student is pulled out during that time, he/she gets less reading instruction).
We are required to implement our core program with fidelity. I don’t see how I can do that if I follow this scheme.
I very much like the idea of following core programs with some kind of fidelity, but this isn’t always possible because of time considerations. Typically, core programs offer more instructional activity than fits in a 90-minute block or (even in a 2-hour space). They do this because of they recognize the diversity of the kids that you are teaching and the need to vary instruction accordingly. Teachers in such cases may follow with fidelity the parts of the program that they teach, but what about the parts they must omit? This plan helps teachers to make the decisions of what to keep and what to drop. If there is too little instruction, of course, then the teacher could follow that with fidelity, but then would need to supplement.
I find myself agreeing with your approach, but I still love the activities that my students have been doing through Daily 5. Isn’t there a way to compromise?
Like you, there are activities that I want to have in my classroom. For example, as a primary grade teacher, I read to my students every day. I did this, not to teach them to read, but as a tone setter for my classroom and as a way of exposing students to cultural artifacts (I loved reading Charlotte’s Web to them, for instance). If I were teaching in the primary grades today, I would still read to my students, I just wouldn’t count it as reading instruction and wouldn’t let it take the place of instruction in decoding, vocabulary, fluency, comprehension, or writing. Isabel Beck and Moddy McKeown have certainly shown how I could translate that kind of teacher read aloud into an effective vocabulary lesson for the younger kids, so I could perhaps count it that way, but I might not make that choice either. That’s the real benefit of this approach—it keeps you focused on learning outcomes, and it keeps you in control of the choices.
What about Common Core or the other state standards?
Those standards establish learning goals; the goals that your instruction should focus on. All that I’ve done is to categorize these goals into sets and matched them with time expenditures. For example, many primary grade teachers look at the standards and conclude that they are supposed to teach more comprehension than decoding. My plan allows the teacher to protect enough time to make it possible for students to learn to decode proficiently. Just distribute the various goals across the four categories that I set.
I’m a pull-out reading teacher. Should I use this plan in my teaching?
I expect interventions to either be especially targeted (like a pull-out fluency program only for students lagging in fluency) or individualized. My scheme requires the teacher to balance literacy instruction in his/her classroom, but an intervention teacher should be aimed at balancing the child. If Hector is strong in decoding and fluency, then the intervention teacher should aim at comprehension. If Sylvia is weak at decoding, then the intervention should be aimed at strengthening this weakness. This plan makes sense if a student is low in everything, but if there are stronger and weaker patterns of skills, try to even the child out by building the weak spots up (that isn’t a good way to go in a classroom, because the teacher simply has too many kids often with greatly different needs. That’s why in the classroom addressing all of the needs equally is the surest way to higher achievement for the most kids.
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