Many students have difficulty in literacy skills, particularly comprehension, vocabulary, and spelling skills. Therefore, research in improving literacy skills is essential in finding strategies that may enable students to perform better in reading and writing. Struggling students need different teaching approaches to improve their literacy skills, particularly students from minority ethnic groups. Various programs exist for enhancing literacy skills in struggling students, making it difficult to choose the most effective one. Among the programs is the Team Read approach to improving literacy skills in elementary students in Seattle District. Therefore, this paper discusses several studies which prove the effectiveness of the Team Read program in improving the literacy skills of struggling students.
Team read is a program developed by Craig McCaw and his wife and effected by John Stanford, a Superintendent in Seattle Schools. The program includes tutoring struggling students through out-of-school extra lessons to improve their literacy skills. The team read program involves extensive one-on-one teaching (Frechtling, 2007). The tasks include reading the alphabet, word games, writing, and introducing new learning materials for literacy skills. The program’s selection of struggling students includes elementary students from the third to the fifth grade who perform below the grade level. The criteria for selecting students for the program consist of teachers’ recommendations according to students’ performance and students scoring below the grade level in district literacy skills tests.
Students attending the team read program have common characteristics that provide the basis for noticing and recording improvements. Brokamp et al. (2019) state that a link exists between students with similarities in literacy skills which promotes competition among peers and sets the pace of learning. Learners with significant differences in learning skills tend to quit when the struggle becomes unbearable, hence grouping students according to their learning pace during literacy practice. Giving free meals to needy students builds trust and commitment, motivating learners to improve their literacy skills. Gejl (2021) emphasizes that motivating students ensure good attendance and participation in learning activities.
The program categorizes teaching materials according to the difficulty levels in literacy skills by using different colors to represent each difficulty level. Grouping the materials enable learners to work harder towards the next levels, contributing to quick improvements in literacy skills. For example, specialists in literacy training (Vanden, 2016; Kumsa et al., 2020, Gall, 2015, & Rossi, 2004) consider the grouping of teaching materials according to difficulty levels as the most effective strategy for familiarizing students with new vocabularies and enables the quick grasping of contents. Students are more likely to compete aggressively towards moving to the next level, promoting literacy skills. According to (Brink & Nel, 2019), the selected learning materials should begin with simple alphabets and vocabularies to complex comprehensions to test the learner’s programs.
Selecting intelligent coaches and training them ensures quality service delivery. Additionally, offering stipends to selected coaches promotes commitment toward positive outcomes in the teaching process. Motivation is key to efficiency and positive results in every institution (Reizer et al., 2019). Motivated employees show the most dedication in attending lessons and participating in the activities that enable learners to improve their literacy skills. Students who show literacy improvement during the program can leave since they have already achieved its objective. According to (Martin & Ebrahim, 2016), students who leave a program after improving literacy skills need monitoring and follow-ups by their schoolroom teachers for continuous support, enabling them to maintain the acquired skills.
Struggling students need extra support to improve their literacy skills according to the grade level, which demands the help of learning programs that focus on individual needs to improve their skills. One-on-one teaching practices effectively instruct struggling students because they need more attention to grasping the alphabet and vocabulary of the difficult language. Schools, parents, and the community should work with literacy-improving programs in growing the necessary literacy skills in struggling students to enable them to catch up to their peers. The Team Read program effectively improves literacy skills, although the number of students selected is very minimal.
References
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