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Partnering with the Global South: Why Early Numeracy Skills Deserve an Equal Role in Early Grade Literacy Interventions - Part I

Tue, March 27, 3:00 to 4:30pm, Hilton Reforma, Floor: 1st Floor, Business Center Room 6

Group Submission Type: Panel Session

Proposal

The purpose of this panel is to examine a commonly-used instructional model, the gradual release of responsibility model, and its applicability to early grade teaching of math and reading. Teaching children how to read and learn math are foundational to education worldwide. Despite great progress in increasing the number of children who attend school, quality learning remains a challenge with an estimated 250 million children worldwide who are currently failing to acquire basic literacy skills (UNESCO, 2017).
Effective research-based methodologies for teaching reading are readily available and among the most effective approaches are direct or explicit instruction (McKinsey Report, 2017; Hattie, 2015), often the gradual release model, “I do, we do, you do.” The purpose of this model is to directly teach young children the discrete or constrained skills that must be taught directly, such as letter names or sounds. The approach includes teachers modeling a new skill, guiding students in the initial practice of the skill, then having students work together to practice the new skill to automaticity. But this approach is not recommended as the only approach that is included in effective reading programs. There needs to be opportunities for children to also engage in inquiry-based learning and other instructional models appropriate to the students and the tasks they must learn.
In this panel, we aim to provide participants with a clear description of the explicit gradual release model and when and how it can be used to teach beginning reading skills effectively versus when another model might be useful, and examine two cases of effective instructional models to teach foundational mathematics skills. In the first presentation, we use an example from a recent USAID early grade reading program in Kenya to better understand when and how explicit instruction is used, and present results from a pilot study in Grade 3 which focused on higher-order skill such as vocabulary, comprehension, and writing. The second and third presentations both take up the question of whether the direct instruction model is appropriate to teach early mathematics. In the second presentation, we present data from two projects which used very different instructional models for early mathematics, the Tayari Early Childhood Project in Kenya and the Liberia Teacher Training Project (LTTP2), and through these studies we examine the applicability of the explicit instructional model for teaching foundational math skills. The second presentation focuses on a pilot project conducted with teachers in Ghana, where the intervention engaged teachers in authentic problem-solving. This activity was an effort to target teachers’ beliefs and attitudes about math instruction as a means to support the implementation of new instructional models for mathematics. In Part II of this panel, we explore relationships between reading and mathematics skills.

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