What are the overall essential components of a program for struggling readers and writers?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

The essential components of an effective intervention program include the following:
• Goals and Objectives: Objectives flow from goals.
• Curriculum: Coordinated with the school's language arts and content-area curriculum and should reflect the school's philosophy of reading, goals or standards, the nature of the program, and the students' needs.
• Instructional Approaches: Refers to how skills and strategies will be taught, reinforced, and applied. 
• Role of Test Preparation: A well-planned intervention program works best. However, students need to be taught how to respond to test questions and also should be familiar with test format and how to use word processing if test is to be taken on an electronic device. 
• Instructional Schedule: Number of sessions will vary depending on the severity of the difficulty.
• Typical Intervention Session: 30-50 minutes. A session might include review of past material, introduction or extension of a skill or strategy, reading of a new selection, discussion and extension of the selection, and writing, if time allows.
• Pacing: Accelerate progress but don't push students.
• Selecting Students: Use more than one procedure. 
• Discontinuing Students: Should be able to meet the demands of the classroom. Continue to check on student's progress. Might need some follow-up.
• Organizational Patterns: One-on-one or small group depending on resources and severity of difficulty.
• Monitoring: Monitor progress. Alter program as necessary.
• Need for an Extended Program: As students pass through the grades and the demands of reading change, different types of reading and writing difficulties may surface.
• Catching Up: Provision, such as summer school, after school, Saturdays, extra sessions, needs to be made for enabling students to catch up.
• Retention. Generally retention is not effective.
• Voluntary Reading. Voluntary reading is required for applying skills and catching up.
• Tutors: Volunteer tutors are not as effective as professionals but can be relatively effective if well chosen, caring, and well trained and supervised. Peer tutoring can also result in gains for student tutoring and student being tutored. 
• Professional Development: Quality of instruction is the key element in intervention programs.
• Leadership: Support from the administration is essential.
• Involving Parents: Parents need to understand the nature of their child's difficulty and ways in which they can support their child.
• Evaluation: The intervention program and each student in the program needs to be evaluated in terms of the goals that have been established. Program needs to be adjusted based on the evaluation.