Reading and inquiring in an afterschool tutoring program: Working to re-imagine the reading intervention paradigm

Abstract

In this article, we discuss tensions that emerged as we collaborated with teachers to iteratively design and refine an afterschool reading intervention approach that emphasizes inquiry and disciplinary learning for upper elementary readers positioned as struggling in school. Our findings are organized around four design tensions that help us consider what it takes to re-imagine the ‘ofcourseness’ that dominates traditional approaches to tiered intervention in schools. These design tensions are: (1) competing priorities in student learning; (2) compromised forms of inquiry-based instruction; (3) negotiating how texts are chosen; and (4) complexities of responsiveness. These tensions underscore the messy challenges that must be addressed in school reform efforts related to reading intervention for older elementary readers.

Keywords

Afterschool tutoring inquiry-based instruction reading instruction reading intervention university reading center upper-elementary

There have been many advances in the field’s knowledge of how educators can support children who have difficulty with school literacy. In the United States and many other places, it is common for schools to provide intervention support to children who are not meeting grade-level benchmarks using a Response to Intervention (RTI) strategy (Gersten et al., 2008). This strategy establishes three tiers of support. Tier 1 instruction is provided to all students as part of regular classroom time during the literacy block. Tier 2 is supplemental instruction provided to students who are not progressing as expected, often provided to small groups during a designated intervention block in the school schedule. Tier 3 is highly intensified intervention for students for whom Tier 2 is not sufficient.

Effective methods of intensified instruction have been designed for responding to students’ needs within these tiers (e.g. Jaeger, 2016; Mokhtari et al., 2010; Spear-Swerling, 2016). However, it remains the case that schools are often better equipped to intervene in constrained, code-based aspects of reading. Many teachers who work with readers in the upper-elementary grades find themselves in a situation in which many of their students face difficulties with unconstrained, knowledge-based aspects of text comprehension, and they are not sure how to best intervene.

Literacy scholars often characterize literacy skills along a continuum of constraint (Paris, 2005). Constrained skills are those that can be parsed into discrete lists of mastery criteria and have developmental endpoints that most learners can reach relatively quickly (e.g. learning the 26 letters in the English alphabet and the sounds they represent). Constrained skills are not always easy, and many children require intensive intervention before mastering them. Nonetheless, compared to unconstrained skills, constrained skills are more straightforward to measure and align more readily with the RTI process. Unconstrained skills are messier. They develop over many years, sometimes across the entire lifespan. Vocabulary and other higher-level skills related to reading comprehension are highly unconstrained. Unlike code-based skills in reading, comprehension does not lend itself to clear lists of skills with a linear trajectory of development. Furthermore, reading comprehension ability is not stable across contexts. It depends heavily on the text, the activity pursued with the text, and the social context surrounding that activity (Davis et al., 2015; RAND Reading Study Group, 2002).

Reading comprehension is challenging within the traditional intervention paradigm in part because it depends heavily on readers’ development of conceptual understandings of the topics and experiences encountered in text (Cartwright & Duke, 2019; Davis, Huang, et al., 2017). Scientific models of reading comprehension place language and content/world knowledge as essential components of literacy needed for lifelong success (Van den Broek & Kendeou, 2017). Yet many children who experience difficulties in reading are removed from opportunities to build new knowledge in order to receive remedial support that may address some of their difficulties, but can also diminish their chances to see full literacy practice in action (Allington, 2013; Dudley-Marling & Murphy, 1997). Full literacy practice, in this case, refers to skills that readers need for lifelong participation in democratic society, including being able to engage with complex texts and media in informed and discerning ways.

Research purpose

As a result of fragilities in the intervention paradigm, readers in the upper-elementary grades (typically, grades 3–5 or 6 in the United States) who experience reading difficulties find themselves in a problematic situation. They increasingly encounter complex texts that they have difficulty reading on their own, they may be taught by teachers who have not had opportunities to receive specialized preparation in reading intervention, and the intervention resources available in their schools may not be appropriate for accelerating their growth in text comprehension. In the present study, we address this problem by designing and revising one approach to intensified reading instruction in an afterschool tutoring setting that is part of a partnership between an elementary school and a university reading center.

Like many university reading centers, our center is both a resource for children who need supplemental literacy instruction outside of school hours and a space for teachers to engage in professional learning. Prior research has detailed the importance of practicum experiences in teacher professional learning. Much of this work has focused on preservice teacher education (Wetzel et al., 2012), but professional standards also emphasize the importance of these experiences for inservice and graduate-level preparation in literacy. Practicum experiences allow teachers to learn how to design instruction based on students’ individual needs while receiving feedback from university-based faculty (Carr, 2003; Dunston, 2007; Hoffman et al., 2016; Morris, 2011). As such, these experiences can serve as a bridge between the familiar practices that teachers are accustomed to implementing when readers struggle in school, and newly imagined practices that can address a fuller range of students’ literacy needs.

Over the past few years, we have sought to re-imagine the reading intervention approach offered through our graduate literacy program. We have challenged ourselves and our teacher-collaborators to question the notions about intervention that have become common sense within the intervention paradigm. In this paper, we describe our recent efforts to grapple with these challenges as part of our attempt to design an intervention that foregrounds knowledge-building without sacrificing opportunities for students to build foundational skills in reading.

Theoretical framework

This study is informed by a critical sociocultural perspective that attends to how identity and power impact school literacy opportunities (Moje & Lewis, 2007). This perspective has problematized the ideologies related to normative understandings of reading attainment and assessment (Sleeter, 2010) and also raises important questions about the identification of reading difficulties and the deficit-oriented positioning of children who experience difficulties (Dudley-Marling, 2004; Dyson, 2015; Greenleaf & Hinchman, 2009; Hikida, 2018).

This lens is particularly helpful for examining the intervention practices endorsed within a university reading center that prepares literacy specialists who will take on leadership roles in their schools to select and implement tiered reading interventions. The preparation of literacy specialists has been referred to as a ‘sore spot in teacher education’ (Shannon, 2018, p. 159). It is challenging and complex work. University programs have a dual obligation to prepare specialists who are ‘competent in the negotiations of the way things are currently’ but who are also ‘imaginative concerning how reading education could be. . .’ (Shannon, 2018, p. 159).

With these competing purposes in mind, we focused on uncovering and interrogating ideas that have, over time, become taken for granted within the intervention paradigm. We used the concept of ‘ofcourseness’ (Perry et al., 2018) to describe notions related to literacy intervention that are imbued with so much power and authority that they are rarely questioned. This concept framed our thinking about the ways in which certain ideas hold power over our abilities to imagine other ways of supporting readers who have difficulties. Using the concept of ofcourseness as a starting point, we chose to seek out areas of tension, ‘forces pulling in opposite directions that, on the surface, seem bent on outdoing each other’ (Hong et al., 2017, p. 21). We focused on the tensions that emerged between the conventional practices expected of teachers (the ‘ofcoursenesses’ that affect their practice) and our commitment to supporting readers with foundational skills without diminishing their opportunities for using texts to develop, communicate, and critique new knowledge and experiences.

Methods

We used formative design methods to design, revise, and implement a reading intervention that would meet the needs of children and teachers in our literacy specialist program. In this methodology, an educational innovation is designed and studied through repeated iterations (Cobb et al., 2014; Reinking & Bradley, 2008). Revisions are based on careful analysis of process data, paying particular attention to how the teaching helps learners move closer to specific learning goals.

Integrating this methodology with a critical theoretical lens proved to be relatively straightforward. Design-based research aligned well with our emphasis on uncovering tensions that can stand in the way of learning goals for both teachers and students. We enacted the following steps in the current project, informed by recent design-based work in classroom literacy instruction (e.g. Howell et al., 2017): (1) establishing a pedagogical goal; (2) conceptualizing essential features of the approach that can meet the goal; (3) implementing the approach; and (4) using data to revise for subsequent iterations.

We chose to focus on the following pedagogical goal: our intervention approach will develop students’ foundational reading skills and their knowledge of compelling topics while engaging them in inquiry practices. This goal was developed to correspond with our purpose of re-imagining what reading intervention can entail and to counter some of the ofcourseness solidified in common intervention approaches.

Overview of the approach

The intervention approach consists of topically organized modules for small-group or individual Tier 2 reading instruction (although in our first iteration, all instruction was provided one-to-one). It blends elements of inquiry-based teaching (Coiro et al., 2016) with evidence-based practices for supporting readers who have difficulties in school (Gersten et al., 2008). We emphasized supporting readers in complex aspects of language and reading comprehension, areas that are often under-emphasized in tiered intervention programs in many elementary schools (Dougherty-Stahl, 2016; Jaeger, 2016).

Based on the pedagogical goal, we identified the essential features necessary within the intervention approach. These included the following:

A compelling topic on which the reader builds expertise

Multiple texts on the topic

Inclusion of high-quality, engaging literature, covering a variety of modes, genres, and complexities

Effective use of appropriate scaffolds to maximize student success and independence

Frequent opportunities for discussion, synthesis, and sharing of new content knowledge

Explicit and systematic instruction that is responsive to student’ strengths and needs.

Inquiry topics were developed based on student input. Our goal was to create opportunities for learning about rich socioscientific and sociohistorical topics relevant to students’ lives (see Table 1). During the intervention, students read multiple texts on their chosen topic. They prepare an inquiry presentation to teach their acquired expertise to families, teachers, and peers.

Table 1.

Description of inquiry topics.

In search of a new place

Imagine if you had to leave everything behind and go on a long and difficult journey to a new place. How would you feel? What would you take with you? What would you hope to find in your new community? This is a situation faced by many people around the world. Sometimes people have to leave their homes and even their countries to escape violence, poverty, and other difficult situations. Sometimes people seek out a new home to find new opportunities for their families. The search for a new place can be difficult for many people, especially if they arrive in a place where people are not welcoming and helpful. In this collection, you will read and learn about the experiences of different people (including children and families) who have had to leave their homes to search for new places. You will learn about their journeys, their struggles, and how they stay hopeful when situations are difficult.

Overcoming bullying

Have you ever seen someone bully someone else? Have you ever bullied someone? Have you ever been bullied? Bullying is a common problem that many children experience in school or in their communities. Bullies make people feel unsafe and uncomfortable. Bullying is a difficult problem to solve. If you have ever experienced bullying, you know it can be tough to figure out a solution. Should you tell a teacher? Ignore it? Talk to a friend? Find ways to avoid the person? These are important questions that children should think about so they can make a difference in their communities to help everyone feel safe and respected. In this collection, you will read and learn about how children have confronted bullying, different ideas for why bullies choose to bully, and strategies for how to make your community a bully-free zone.

Space junk

Imagine what would happen if everyday you just threw your garbage out the window and left it there. What a mess! That’s exactly what has happened in space as a result of years and years of human space travel. Did you know that humans have left tons of trash in space during space flights? Did you know this trash is still circling the earth, and scientists are not sure how to remove it? This space junk includes old parts of rockets, satellites, and tiny pieces of paint and water. Some of it is large. Some of it is tiny. But it is all very dangerous for astronauts. Some people think we might one day have so much space junk that it will no longer be possible to travel to space. In this collection, you will read and learn about the space junk problem, how it got so bad, and what scientists are doing to solve it.

Standing up to injustice

Have you ever been in a situation where you thought something was unfair or unjust? What did you do to help solve the problem? Did you stand up for what you thought was right? All across the world, people (including children like you!) have stood up for justice to make the world a better place. For example, did you hear about the young girl in Pakistan who was attacked just because she and other girls were trying to attend school? Or perhaps you have heard about the children who participated in marches to protest racism in the United States in the 1960s. There are many examples of people fighting to make the world a better place for everyone. In this unit, you will read and learn about examples of how people have stood up for justice to improve the world.

Weird animals

Imagine the weirdest animal you have ever seen. Why does it look that way? Why does it have such unusual features? There are many strange animals in the world. For example, have you ever seen a flying frog? Believe it or not, scientists have discovered a species of frog that spreads out its toes when it jumps to help it glide from tree to tree. Have you ever seen a frog with skin so clear you can see its heart through its chest? Yes, this crazy animal also exists. In this unit, you will read and learn about weird animals, how scientists study them, and what scientists know about how their weird features help them survive.

The instructional segments included in the approach are shown in Figure 1. Across the five segments in the figure, teachers help readers learn specific letter-sound patterns in a logical order with sufficient repetition to optimize mastery. They also help them build new vocabulary and increase vocabulary depth and word recognition through analysis of morphologically complex words. Students gain fluency through repeated readings of topic-relevant texts. Through reading, discussion, and writing, students also learn to construct coherent mental representations of texts by monitoring comprehension, selectively attending to main ideas, and asking and answering questions that help them inferentially connect ideas across sentences and larger segments of texts. All of this occurs in the context of pursuing new knowledge about the inquiry topic.

Figure 1.

Description of five instructional segments used in the intervention.

Context

We conceptualize our university reading center as a hub for innovation that can extend beyond the university setting by helping teachers learn important practices they can use within Tier 2 and Tier 3 school-based intervention. As part of the programming of the center, we implemented our inquiry-based intervention approach during afterschool tutoring at an elementary school, located outside of a large city in the southeastern United States. We partnered with the school to provide additional language and literacy support for upper elementary children. The program took place two evenings weekly for 10 weeks (20 hours of one-to-one instruction).

Participants

The partner school administration selected 10 children for the program. The readers were in grades 3-5, all identified as Latinx, and all met school criteria as English learners (emergent bilinguals). They were selected based on their histories of difficulty in reaching grade-level norms in reading comprehension, as determined by teachers in the partner school. All 10 of the children participated in the tutoring program, and six participated in this study (five males and one female). One male student moved to a new school before data collection was completed.

Ten teachers participated in this study. All were enrolled in a graduate literacy specialist program and served as tutors as part of their coursework. Their years of teaching experience ranged between three and more than 20 years. The tutoring corresponded with their last year of a 30-hour graduate program that included coursework in diagnostic assessment, evidence-based methods for reading intervention, and incorporating digital media and technology into literacy instruction.

Data sources and analyses

Three data sources informed the current study.

Teacher interviews

The teachers who served as tutors during the initial iterations of the approach were interviewed twice, using semi-structured interview techniques (Rubin & Rubin, 2005). Interviews lasted between 20 and 60 minutes. Teachers answered questions about implementing the instructional segments, materials used, the impact on their knowledge of intervention, how students responded to the components, and recommended revisions. The interviews were analyzed using constant comparative analysis (Strauss & Corbin, 1998) to identify patterns in implementation difficulty, teacher learning, and recommended module revisions. Although inductive analyses like this have traditionally focused on theme development, in this study, we looked for areas of discomfort in the data to identify tensions that are relevant for pushing our design work forward. This form of analysis aligned with the critical framework used in this study and helped us examine the ways in which teachers experienced challenges to the ofcourseness of reading intervention work.

Student data

As part of the tutoring approach, students completed assessments before and after tutoring. These included informal reading inventories, diagnostic assessments of decoding and spelling, and audio samples of oral reading fluency. These data informed the design process by helping us evaluate the extent to which children in the program benefited from the instruction in the targeted areas. While these forms of assessment are potentially incompatible with the critical sociocultural framework guiding this study, we recognize that our efforts to understand how to best design and implement our intervention approach are only relevant if the approach is effective for helping students develop as readers in ways that are recognizable within their current school contexts.

Observations of tutoring lessons

A total of 23 lessons were observed and audiorecorded. These data allowed us to identify implementation challenges, benefits of the intervention format, and feedback for future revisions. Fieldnotes and recordings helped us identify places where conflicts between competing discourses were playing out in the teachers’ instruction.

Findings

Our analyses focused on identifying the questions/tensions related to implementation of an intervention approach that integrates explicit opportunities for inquiry-focused knowledge building and systematic instruction in letter-sound correspondence, word reading, and fluency. Four tensions, detailed below, influence our thinking about how to effectively design instruction in order to maximize learning opportunities for teachers and provide students with quality instruction to meet their literacy needs. We begin, however, with a summary of student progress during the 10-week tutoring session.

Overview of student growth

Out of the five student participants who completed the post-tutoring assessments, four increased at least one reading level as measured on the Analytical Reading Inventory (Woods & Moe, 2015). In regards to fluency, four students demonstrated growth in expressive and accurate oral reading as evidenced on the Multidimensional Fluency Scale (Zutell & Rasinski, 1991). With grade-level text, three students increased in word reading accuracy and two increased in comprehension accuracy. Overall, four students showed growth in accuracy, comprehension, and fluency. Finally, all students mastered targeted sound-spelling patterns as evidenced on a decoding inventory (Walpole et al., 2011) and spelling inventory (Bear et al., 2016).

The students also exhibited growth in their content knowledge of their inquiry topics as demonstrated by their culminating presentations. For example, one student who studied Weird Animals presented photographs and interesting facts about adaptations that help animals survive. Another student who studied the Overcoming Bullying topic shared information about bullying prevention tips. We recognize that student growth cannot be exclusively attributed to our intervention due to the limitations of our design, but the patterns in growth help us continue thinking about future iterations in our design-based work.

Tensions in intervention design

Each tension is represented in Figure 2 as a continuum of possible instructional design decisions. Although seemingly irreconcilable, the competing ends of these continua require treatment as both/and rather than either/or. A key tenet in the critical sociocultural framework that informs this study is that there is value in bringing competing perspectives into dialog with each other. These juxtapositions can reveal differences in authority and community identity associated with each perspective. In practical terms, these tensions represent thorny issues that can arise when teachers engage in learning to implement new intervention supports for readers who have difficulties, and therefore, have to be addressed in the design of curriculum and professional development.

Figure 2.

Tensions that impacted the design and implementation of the intervention.

Competing priorities in student learning

Interview and observational data revealed the ways in which teachers wrestled with the question: What learning goals should be prioritized for readers who struggle? Our commitment to helping children build foundational skills while also engaging in knowledge construction and inquiry practices poses challenges within the traditional intervention paradigm. When discussing how our approach could be implemented in other settings, teachers felt they would have to justify why they were focusing on ‘high-level’ standards rather than exclusively focusing on code-based skills and explicit comprehension strategies.

While these aspects of evidence-based intervention are certainly important, and we are not neglecting them in our approach, we also stand firm in our conviction that complex language- and knowledge-based literacy experiences are not luxuries that can be withheld until children are ready for them. Indeed, they are required in educational standards and should be made available to all readers, including those who are emerging in their literacy proficiency. Access to the full range of competencies needed for literacy development is a right afforded to all children, and any effort that violates this right is a threat to social justice.

The intervention we designed helped teachers learn the benefits of providing instruction that emphasizes coherent knowledge- and language-building opportunities. One tutor shared,

I learned that it’s important to [use] content areas to focus your reading because it captures the children’s interest. And then you can still integrate every area into that. I’m an instructional coach so I have the children for a little bit of time and I have certain skills I have to really hit on. And so that was just a reminder that yes, I can still use good literature and do all the things I need to do. I’ve done a lot of self-reflection (DA, interview 2, December 12, 2017).

The teachers recognized the benefits of providing students with texts intended to build their knowledge as an important aspect of comprehension development. Additionally, another teacher explained the importance of using texts focusing on what she referred to as ‘heavy’ topics that sparked conversations relevant to current societal issues (BY, interview 2, December 12, 2017). For this teacher, it was illuminating to engage collaboratively with her student using texts focused on communities who immigrate across national borders in search of a new home. This form of teaching was especially important for children in our program who had transnational immigration experiences. Their development of language and comprehension skills was accelerated by their ability to see themselves and their communities represented in the texts they read.

While the inquiry-focused work was a central feature of the approach, there was also a high value placed on systematic instruction in foundational reading skills. Many upper-elementary readers need support not only in word reading, but also in comprehension monitoring, activating word meanings, making inferences, and awareness of sentence-level and text-level structures. Commonly accepted theories of reading comprehension acknowledge the importance and interdependence of skills in these areas (Oakhill et al., 2015; Van den Broek & Kendeou, 2017). Teachers found ways to help students build foundational reading skills within their inquiry-focused reading.

For example, in one tutoring session, the student read a text about asteroids. He encountered difficulty with the word astounding and read the word as asteroid. Using code-based scaffolds, the teacher helped him break the word apart, relying on knowledge of common spelling patterns, to read the word accurately. Then, she steered the student to consider the meaning of the word to ensure he understood what he was reading, in relation to his ongoing inquiry topic related to space pollution.

Teachers also demonstrated understanding that these moments of scaffolding are not enough for children who have word reading difficulties. In addition to incidental opportunities for word recognition support, tutoring lessons also included systematic instruction in reading morphologically complex words, using word lists (drawn from the inquiry-based text sets) that exemplify common syllable types and affixes.

A compromised inquiry process

Teachers in our study also grappled with questions around how to genuinely engage in inquiry-based teaching, which is a time and resource-intensive approach to instruction. Our commitment to provide students opportunities to exercise their curiosity, pose questions, and seek out answers using a variety of resources, was complicated by a need for teachers to have coherent materials available that readers could access and engage with successfully. Despite our well-intended efforts, the best version of inquiry-based teaching that we were able to implement was ‘inquiry-lite’. Students read coherent text sets on a topic of their choice (from sample text sets we developed) in order to prepare their inquiry projects. This version of inquiry-based tutoring satisfied a need for helping children build knowledge with coherent text sets and helped our collaborating teachers begin to disrupt the false dichotomy between learning to read and reading to learn (Cervetti & Hiebert, 2019).

For example, students who chose to focus their inquiry project on experiences of people who stood up for justice worked with their teachers to read high-quality titles such as Separate is Never Equal (by Duncan Tonatiuh), The Other Side (Jacqueline Woodson), Drum Dream Girl (Margarita Engle), and Game Changer: John McLendon and the Secret Game (John Coy). Across these books, students benefited from repeated opportunities to examine shared vocabulary and concepts related to segregation, civil rights, equity, and strategies to advance social justice. Teachers helped them leverage their new conceptual expertise to make inferences and engage in discussion to support new learning.

Teachers were pleased with the text collections, in part because they removed the need for them to compile a new text set for every child (given limited time and resources to do so). One teacher explained that allowing students to choose their own topics would lead to increased motivation but would make it difficult to create all the necessary materials aligned with students’ chosen topics. The teacher further explained how our approach could be more authentically grounded in inquiry:

I think it would be really cool if – going forward – is to really take a PBL [project based learning] approach, and I know like that’s what we’re supposed to be doing. But really posing a problem and really posing a question. Like adding maybe a student [visitor] from some organization or something, posing questions to students at the beginning, so they’re really able to work towards solving a problem. (BY, interview 2, December 13, 2017)

Negotiating the texts that are read

Our analyses revealed complications related to the complexity and challenge of the texts that should be incorporated into intervention instruction. Teachers had to consider the question: At what level of challenge should students be reading during intervention instruction? They found it difficult to provide meaningful opportunities for readers to build new knowledge with authentic texts while also providing high-accuracy reading experience thought to be supportive of reading development (Rodgers et al., 2018).

Like others in the field (e.g. Hoffman, 2017), we have attempted with our approach to problematize the ways levels (of both texts and readers) have been used to delimit the learning opportunities offered to elementary children. Rather than withholding complex texts from the students’ experiences, we have chosen to help teachers learn to flexibly and responsively adjust their forms of scaffolding when reading texts that might not match their reader’s traditional instructional levels.

Teachers’ comments showed ways in which this approach to text selection differed ideologically from the forms of intervention expected in their schools. For instance, one teacher contrasted the learning opportunities available in the approach with the leveled reading norms in traditional practice:

‘Specifically for my student who is an older student but is reading on a significantly lower level, but with my support he was able to gain knowledge from each book. I mean that was important to me. And not say to him, “Well you are only a level D and can only read these kind of books.” With our support he learned a lot from that and he was so proud of his final product’. (DA, interview 2, December 13, 2017)

At the same time, though, we recognize that readers in our afterschool program need opportunities to experience accurate, closer-to-independent reading. Our solution has been to create short topic-relevant texts to accompany the complex books in each inquiry set, each emphasizing an important concept that recurs in the text set. These texts are used for repeated reading fluency practice. For example, students reading books about overcoming bullying also read short researcher-created texts on concepts such as cyberbullying, being a bystander, asking others for help when they are bullied, and examples of bullying behavior. In more recent iterations of the approach, we adopted what we call a ‘stacking’ approach for these texts. Each one is written at four different levels. As students read, discuss, and respond to teacher feedback in each text, they move through the stack, with each successive version slightly more semantically and syntactically complex than the previous one.

In addition to providing fluency practice, these texts help extend the students’ conceptual knowledge of the topics they are exploring. One teacher explained the importance of the alignment in the following quote:

I liked how the fluency [instruction] always connected with whatever the main reading was. That way it didn’t seem so disjointed and our student was able to use information from the fluency text when he was doing the actual text reading. He would remember things. . . . To be able to show other people, I think he was like ‘Oh wow, I do know a lot of information!’ (CE, interview 2, December 12, 2017)

Challenges to responsiveness

How can intervention be uniform enough to be useable in many settings and by many teachers, while also allowing for customization for specific students’ needs? Our desire to provide systematic intervention support responsive to students’ specific needs was complicated because the readers in our program possess many overlapping needs that are often hard to disentangle, even with detailed diagnostic assessments. For example, all five readers in this study demonstrated a need for support in decoding and word recognition, fluency, spelling, and inferential text comprehension (i.e. they demonstrated mixed reading difficulties; Spear-Swerling, 2016). In addition, the graduate student teachers needed opportunities to practice a wide range of instructional methods relevant for supplemental and intervention settings in order to fulfill their learning goals and meet professional standards. As a result, our design-based work has focused on the development of materials and protocols that include multiple segments in each lesson (see Figure 1).

During our observations of lessons, we became concerned that our intervention could be enacted as a ‘smorgasbord approach’ if not implemented properly, offering a broad buffet of options to every child rather than properly centering their most fundamental difficulties. This is a common problem with uniform Tier 2 intervention protocols in school settings (Jaeger, 2016). In an effort to ensure that any configuration of need can be addressed across the various segments of the approach, our design work has inadvertently privileged breadth and uniformity over depth and responsiveness. Our teachers grappled with this tension, which played out in their decision-making and willingness to customize the tutoring protocol to be responsive to student needs. One teacher explained:

I understand that they [the segments] are each essential. I understand the value in each of them. Unfortunately, we have had to cut some of them out because of time but also kind of letting the student lead. You know if word work is taking a little bit longer but the student is still a little bit into it, then we would kind of let it go a little bit over. Letting the student guide the hour with a plan in mind. (CE, interview 1, November 6, 2017)

The teacher further explained the difficulty with addressing all components of the lesson within the allotted time. Consequently, often the most needed element for her student – using writing to communicate new learning – did not occur during intervention sessions. Therefore, the student did not experience sufficient opportunities to discuss and share new knowledge with teachers and classmates.

Our awareness of this tension has led us to be more intentional in the models and explanations we provide to help teachers understand the approach and how it can be customized. The segments are meant to be flexible and interchangeable, which allows teachers to amplify, minimize, or remove segments in response to student need (as evidenced in assessment data). In this way, students can receive intensive intervention in areas where they need the most support. For instance, one third-grade student’s lessons included the following components during each meeting: systematic decoding instruction (on specific sound-spelling patterns); repeated reading of high-accuracy topic-relevant texts; vocabulary previewing; scaffolded reading and discussion of text on his topic; and structured writing to communicate new learning. Other students, however, participated in lesson protocols that included different configurations of these segments, including additional time on decoding and letter-sound knowledge, analysis of multisyllabic and morphologically complex words, reading and spelling high-frequency words, and sentence building/combining.

Discussion and implications

This research has provided useful directions for subsequent iterations of the inquiry-based approach to intervention. These include: new topic and text suggestions (from both children and teachers), new ideas for integrating technology tools for synthesizing and sharing knowledge, and guidance for developing clearer guidelines for the scaffolding and discussion routines used in our instructional segments. Beyond our immediate setting, the findings are useful for researchers and educators wrestling with similar tensions in intervention design.

As is common in design-based research, we have used our findings to develop three pedagogical assertions. Collectively, these assertions represent a pedagogical theory that provides guidance for solving problems in practice in reading intervention and for informing future research. Educators who are engaged in the improvement of intervention programs in schools can use these assertions to inform their process. As explained below, these assertions are:

(1) If a school wants to radically improve their intervention programs for children who need supplemental support in reading, teachers and school leaders will need to directly and proactively engage with tensions inherent in the intervention paradigm.

(2) Schools should be prepared to help teachers access tangible resources and models of intervention that promote professional learning and fit within the constraints of existing school structures.

(3) Radical transformations in intervention practice will require identifying and disrupting the ofcoursenesses that prevent educators from imagining new ways of helping children develop as readers.

Engaging with tensions

Teachers who wish to make radical improvements in literacy intervention can benefit from earnest engagement with the messiness involved in figuring out what it takes to build and implement intervention approaches that support the full range of students’ needs, strengths, and interests. Having candid discussions about how they might address the four tensions in Figure 1 can be a good starting point for planning new intervention structures and routines.

Reading intervention is a contested area, particularly among scholars who are knowledgeable about the science of reading but also recognize that the extant literature provides only limited guidance for how to translate that knowledge into large-scale practice. Historically, the reading intervention paradigm has failed to address systemic factors that produce learning difficulties, thus reifying the idea that difficulties reside only in individuals (Dudley-Marling & Murphy, 1997). In addition to this historical challenge, more recently, it has become clear that many policies and practices related to reading difficulties are framed through an authoritative discourse that resists interrogation or challenge (Worthy et al., 2018).

Although we do not claim to have resolved these long-standing debates, the tensions that we have described can help the field re-imagine intervening on behalf of (and in solidarity with) readers who experience difficulties with school literacy. We suspect that others who are working to design and implement reading intervention approaches might benefit from scrutinizing how these tensions play out in their contexts.

Access to educative, usable resources

The second assertion that emerges from this work is that teachers need access to resources and models of intervention practice that are educative with respect to how their new learning can be implemented within the constraints of their schools. An educative curriculum promotes both student and teacher learning (Davis, Palincsar, et al., 2017). Research on educative curricula suggests possible features that can be embedded in teaching materials to promote teacher learning. These features include narrative examples of how a lesson can be taught, concept maps showing how the ideas in the curriculum interrelate, and rationales for each component of the curriculum (Arias et al., 2016). School leaders and professional development providers should take great care to help teachers access tangible high-quality resources, not just generic principles of teaching, if they hope to engage in genuine intervention reform efforts.

This implication also applies to teacher learning in university settings. As university teacher educators, our goal is to help teachers hone their expertise in versatile intervention practices that will be useable and generative in their current and future professional roles. To accomplish this goal, we will need to attend more closely to the kinds of educative features that are included within the instructional materials, including more varied examples based on real-life cases of readers and clearer rationales for how and why the approach differs from traditional intervention practice.

In order for intervention resources to be made more educative for teachers, significant advances are needed in the literature to guide how to optimize genuine inquiry with children for whom opportunities for full participation in literacy are often withheld. The field has long been concerned that many instructional methods do not adequately prepare readers for the changing nature of complex texts/media and disciplinary inquiry practices needed for lifelong success (Elish-Piper, 2016; Leu & Maykel, 2016; O’Brien et al., 2009). The literature suggests that schooling experiences that sideline the complex literacy practices required for inquiry and problem-solving run the risk of reproducing inequities in literacy achievement. This includes practices like posing questions, locating online information, critically evaluating texts and sources, and synthesizing information across multiple texts (Leu et al., 2015). The fragile nature of inquiry in our emerging approach underscores the need for this line of research to extend into intervention settings.

Imagining new possibilities

Finally, we conjecture that teachers, schools, and the broader public have been asked to accept (and refrain from questioning) several ofcoursenesses about intervention. As implied in our findings, these ofcoursenesses include: privileging skills that are constrained and amenable to tidy, frequent measurement; a sharp distinction between learning to read and reading to learn; and using uniform intervention protocols for all students. The ofcourseness that was most salient to our design process was the assumption that children in need of intervention should only be given texts that are highly controlled in terms of decodability or complexity. This is perhaps the thorniest issue that has emerged in our ongoing work.

There is not consensus in the literature regarding the optimal level of challenge that readers should be exposed to in the texts that they read (Rodgers et al., 2018). For readers in the beginning of elementary school who are just learning about the writing system, there is evidence that access to highly controlled decodable texts is important (Castles et al., 2018). For older readers who are nearing a transition to middle school, there has been a historical tendency to assume that ‘just right’ leveled texts, matched to readers’ ability, are most appropriate. However, some scholars have argued that access to challenging texts is essential for critical inquiry (Hoffman, 2017) and to support the conceptual learning needed for future reading (Cervetti & Hiebert, 2018). Text leveling is merely one tool or form of scaffolding among many that teachers might use to support students to meet their reading goals. The tensions revealed in our design process highlight the challenges involved in providing opportunities for engaging with complex texts without sacrificing the benefits of having children experience high-accuracy reading.

To be clear, we are not arguing against the usefulness of systematic and explicit instruction in the hands of highly skilled and responsive educators. Indeed, the crux of our approach is to help teachers gain expertise in evidence-based aspects of reading instruction. It would be irresponsible and unjust to do otherwise. Our emphasis on exposing children to complex texts and compelling content is firmly grounded in current scientific understandings of the important role of knowledge-based competencies in comprehension processes and reading development for older readers (Castles et al., 2018; Lesaux, 2012; Kamil et al., 2008). Recently, there has been an exciting wave of comprehension research that solidifies the notion that reading and knowledge-building (with texts) are complementary processes interwoven across the childhood years (Pearson et al., 2020), thus underscoring the need for expanding the competencies that should matter in the intervention paradigm. Unfortunately, the design tensions identified in this study suggest that some tendencies in intervention have gained such ofcourseness that they make it challenging to imagine these new knowledge-oriented possibilities even if they are theoretically and empirically reasonable.

For example, it is reasonable that if upper-elementary children are going to be reading texts with teacher scaffolding and feedback during their intervention time, these texts should, to the extent possible, be coherently connected to each other and expand opportunities for learning about interesting topics they will encounter elsewhere in the curriculum. It also seems reasonable that children should have rich and engaging language experiences while working with their teachers to learn new concepts, words, and language structures from complex texts. Finally, it seems reasonable to provide readers a chance to share the expertise they gain during intervention lessons by communicating their new knowledge to others. Our hope is that as a field we will succeed in imagining ways to embed these features into the intervention paradigm and help teachers learn how and when they might be appropriately implemented.

Conclusion

In this design-based study, we identified four tensions that complicate the implementation of effective reading interventions for upper elementary readers. When interventions are designed to address the full range of language and literacy difficulties that older readers may experience, there can be competing priorities in terms of what students should be learning, compromised forms of inquiry, difficulties in selecting the appropriate levels and kinds of texts that readers will encounter, and challenges associated with customizing the intervention for individual needs.

Schools should proactively address these tensions when planning for reforms in reading intervention to ensure that all students have access to effective, and empowering, literacy experiences.

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