Intervention: Building Confidence While Making an Impact— Spotlight on Kristen Large

If a child lives with encouragement, he learns confidence — author unknown

I had the privilege of meeting Kristen at an intervention workshop that she was presenting at. I was so impressed by her message and practical tips that I had to invite her to be a featured speaker on the Learning For Life summit. Here are a few highlights from our conversation. Enjoy!

Kristen Large is in her 25th year of teaching and has spent the last 18 years focused on struggling readers. While attaining her master’s in special reading, she developed an intervention model focused on diagnostically assessing student needs in order to target those areas while still teaching students to love literature.

What successful intervention looks like

Meeting students where they’re at and understanding that any gaps or holes that they might have is not due to lack of their mental capability. It is a lack of instruction. Teachers do an amazing job, but assumptions are often made about student ability or knowledge. Kristen assesses students and shows students what they are good at as well as showing them what they need to tackle this missing items. Over time, Kristen tracks progress to show students how they are improving. No struggling reader wants to be a struggling reader. When we can encourage them to do that and show the little successes, we get that buy in. And it’s amazing what can happen with those students.

Tackling the challenges to student progress

Doing a diagnostic assessment, and progress monitoring is going to ensure that you’re hitting that target all the time for them. That is going to decrease the amount of intervention time hopefully for them as well. Progress monitoring tools should be tools that you use to guide your own instruction. Every school is going to have what they require you to do for progress monitoring, but there are so many progress monitoring tools that can be used quickly and in a game format where the kids just think they’re playing games, but you can gain so much information that can then change your instruction. Progress monitoring gets that bad word or term because it takes time. If you are progress monitoring students for yourself, it doesn’t take time. It’s meaningful, and it’s purposeful.

Partnering with parents leads to success

I think the largest challenge sometimes is getting parents to buy in, because we do talk about the game style format. The parents don’t see the purpose. They think that they’re playing games, what’s the point? And that’s why communication with parents is so critical. It all comes back to that diagnostic assessment. That is when I can say, You’re right, we do play a lot of games. And I love that your kiddo comes home and says, Oh, we had so much fun in there. We were playing games. Let me show you the growth. Let me show you where they were diagnostically assessed at the beginning of the year, and where are they now. I can show that percentage in that growth. And then it’s kind of an eye opener, especially at the upper level, parents just see you need to read more. And I think, unfortunately, like some teachers think that especially with struggling readers, it’s like, well, we just need more. And I always think about the cartoon of the guy holding the ladder, and the ladder is out to the site. And he’s trying to walk through the door and he keeps banging it. And he keeps turning it this way, and that way. And he can’t get through the door. I think sometimes we just have to think about turning things and thinking outside the box, looking at things a different way. Sometimes focusing on those foundational skills have a huge impact even on their comprehension. That’s an eye opener for many people, educators and parents alike. As the teacher, if we have the knowledge of what they need, we’re not planning lessons blindly. We are looking at what the student knows and doesn’t know so that we can target what they need.

To hear the rest of the interview with Kristen, join us for the second Learning For Life Virtual Summit, March 31st and April 1st. Please take a moment to click this link to sign up for your FREE ticket to the Learning For Life Summit. Can’t wait to see you there!

“Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.”

― Frederick Douglass

The joy is in the journey!

Blessings and Peace,

Mary