Rti for Diverse Learners: More Than 200 Instructional Interventions Book

My sister and I read this as part of our informal book club. We read books that connect to our work: tutoring kids and particularly kids who have difficulties with, and different ways of, learning. We're going to be seeing Berninger and Wolf make a presentation this weekend.

I had difficulties reading 'Teaching Students,' but there are many good reasons to do so and I will undoubtedly be returning to it as a resource. I've been interested in Berninger's work for a while, especially her investigation into handwriting and its possible importance in literacy. She and Wolf are respected and well known in their field.

'Teaching Students' contains many bits of information and insight which furthered my own knowledge or crystallized my thinking. For example, Berninger and Wolf clearly frame the central thesis of Venezky's 'The American Way of Spelling,' a book I struggled to get through.

My own framing of that thesis had been a little murky and now I can proudly tell you that Venezky's main idea is that our spelling represents our speech and because of that is predictable, although not at a single-letter level and not with one-to-one sound-to-symbol relationships, 'but rather alternations.' (I love that word!) A beautiful distillation.

Another jewel of vocabulary used by Beringer and Wolf that made sense to me was 'habituate,' in the psychological sense of reducing response through repetition. How often educators label a lack of response as learning laziness or inattention, rather than examining the teaching and following the principle Berninger and Wolf lay out: that 'short duration, constant change that introduces novelty, and predictable routine across lessons can help students attend, engage, and self-regulate their learning.'

The Venn-diagram, three-circle graphic for the processes involved in learning to read and write, that Berninger supplies from her 'Process Assessment of the Learner' is a wonderful model to which I know I will return. I also like the pyramid hierarchy for three levels of diagnosis (dysgraphia, dyslexia and oral and written language learning disability, or OWL LD) for reading and writing problems.

I got a ton of ideas for my work from the chapter called 'Teaching Oral Language,' and because of this work, I'm about to read Roald Dahl's 'The Vicar of Nibbleswicke,' and there are a number of other books referenced in 'Teaching Students' that I'm sure to read in the future.

Even with all of those bright spots, reading 'Teaching Students' is like slogging up an unnecessarily muddy road. The authors use a stilted tone (they refer to themselves as 'the first author' and 'the second author') and I found myself habituating as I trudged through convoluted passages filled with academic hot air and repetition. One chapter begins:

'Teaching is what teachers do--what they say and write verbally and communicate nonverbally and how they structure learning activities and situations for teacher-directed explicit instruction and student-guided learning and discovery. Learning is what students do....'

And so on. Empty verbiage.

I find myself frustrated with a convention used by many of the people who write about teaching reading and writing to children that Berninger and Wolf employ over and over again--making a supposed scientific research-based statement of accepted theory (often starting with the words, 'Research shows...') followed by a parenthetical laundry-listing of sources and dates. I long for works that would really get into that research as books about neuroscience do.

For that matter, Richard Nesbit in his 'Intelligence and How to Get It' posits that much of what is called 'research' in education is shoddy and sloppy. But there seems to be little crossover between investigations of teaching by educators I respect, like Berninger and Wolf, Marcia Henry and Louisa Moats, and the new wave of neuroscience researchers led by people like Nesbit, Antonio Damasio, and even entrepreneurs like FastForWord's Michael Merzenich. How come?

Overall, too much work for too few results.