Early Intervention & Prevention: “Catch ‘em BEFORE they fall!!”
What we thought: reading instruction, including direct instruction of
early literacy skills should be delayed until students are “developmentally
What we now know: delayed instruction fosters increased failure.
Direct teaching of phonemic awareness,print concepts, & related early
literacy skills improve reading outcomes in the primary grades
(Foorman et al., 1997, Good, 1998).
Early reading failure is fundamentally preventable… we can choose
to eradicate school failure or allow it to continue… what we can not do is pretend we don’t have a choice. - Robert Slavin