Abstract of

Reading Coaches: Adapting an Intervention Model for Upper Elementary and Middle School Readers

Stephanie Bacon

Students in the middle grades need the skills not only to read independently but also to make decisions, so that interest in text and thorough comprehension will be promoted. This article describes integrated techniques and activities that the author used to develop these sophisticated skills in a one-on-one setting in her regular classroom with 30 students. The students acted as reading coaches for one another and learned to prompt, question, and probe their peers' thinking, in much the same manner as a reading specialist does. The author asserts that due to the appropriateness of this approach in relation to the developmental characteristics of adolescence, her students made dramatic improvements in word identification, comprehension, discussion, and decision making. She includes an overview of the reading intervention model used to develop the reading coaches design, a narrative of how she developed cooperation with her students, a description of minilessons used to train the students to be coaches, and a transcript of student coaches in action. The purpose of the article is to provide enough practical information so that teachers can integrate some or all aspects of the reading coach design in their own curricula.

Abstract from Bacon, S. (2005, February). Reading Coaches: Adapting an Intervention Model for Upper Elementary and Middle School Readers. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 48(5), 416–427. doi: 10.1598/JAAL.48.5.5