Individualizing Literacy Instruction in Co-Taught Classrooms Through a Station Teaching Model

Abstract

The Project CALI (Content Area Literacy Instruction) instructional framework is designed to enhance reading comprehension for all students, those with disabilities as well as their typically developing peers, in inclusive co-taught middle school content-area classrooms. For students with and at-risk for disabilities, even well-designed, research-based, and whole-class instruction often leads to inadequate improvement in reading comprehension and thus learning of content material. In CALI, teachers use student data to determine which students need more support and targeted, individualized instruction, and by contrast, which students may benefit from opportunities to extend their learning with more challenging texts and student-managed work. This article provides guidance for designing and implementing customizable lessons using station-teaching to individualize instruction. The Project CALI student support model is the final instructional piece of the CALI instructional framework.

Supporting Main Idea Identification and Text Summarization in Middle School Co-Taught Classes

“…After the lesson, co-teachers review students’ individual gist statements, joint gist statements (after associate gist), and text summaries to determine students’ areas of need and provide intensified instruction during the next lesson. For example, students may benefit from using a sentence-level get the gist strategy during a differentiated lesson to identify main ideas throughout a text (see Lyon et al, 2021; Pollack et al, 2021).…”

Preparing to Implement Evidence-Based Literacy Practices in the Co-taught Classroom

“…Spending time setting clear expectations is also important. For example, in the fourth article in this special issue (i.e., Lyon et al, 2021), the authors describe how co-teachers can implement station teaching student support lessons as part of the CALI IF. Along with station teaching comes expectations for students to rotate groups and work on their own in independent stations.…”

“…In another lesson, the same co-teachers might choose to implement the lesson using one-teach-one-assist in which one teacher is leading the lesson and one teacher is assisting in some way. In fact, the only prescribed co-teaching model for a CALI instructional framework lesson is for co-teachers to use station teaching when implementing student support lessons (see Lyon et al, 2021). The CALI lesson plan template allows co-teachers to record which co-teaching model they plan to use during each lesson and who will implement each component within the model.…”

Sentence-Level Gist: Literacy Instruction for Students With Learning Disabilities in Co-Taught Classrooms

“…Sentence-level gist is an intensive reading comprehension strategy developed as a part of the CALI instructional framework, which demonstrated positive outcomes for co-teachers and students with LD (Wexler et al, 2020). Within the CALI instructional framework, co-teachers introduce SLG during the student support phase (see Lyon et al, this issue). The student support phase requires co-teachers to use data to place students in homogeneous groups (i.e., review, practice, extend) and provide students with individualized instruction and support using station activities.…”

“…Although SLG was designed for special education teachers to implement during the student support phase of the CALI instructional framework (see Lyon et al, 2021 for more information), students can apply the SLG strategy outside of the CALI instructional framework as well. This strategy might be particularly useful for students who have demonstrated a need for more intensive intervention in reading comprehension; more specifically, those who would benefit from support (a) identifying pronouns and their referents, (b) discriminating between important and unimportant words within a sentence, and (c) synthesizing important information across sentences.…”