What is the best regular ed reading program that covers the skills in the NRP? HOw do I find out which schools are using something besides the major textbook companies?
Our principal talks a lot of guided reading. Thanks for pointing out the difference between that and guided oral reading. It is hard to sift through all the terminology and figure out what is really covered.
Re: More questions...
Good news and bad news:
Most reading programs can be taught either well or badly.
If you add a low-cost supplementary program in systematic synthetic phonics, such as the workbooks I keep recommending, if you teach reading and writing and spelling as a unified system with the phonetic code as a unifying concept, if you actually teach spelling and handwriting in an organized systematic way, then the great majority of reading programs can be used effectively in a general classroom.
On the other hand, if you teach by pure memorizatrion, if you encourage kids to recite and call it “reading”, if you spend the majority of teaching time asking about the pictures, if you skip even the minimal phonics in the program because it is “difficult” or “boring”, if you tell kids to ignore spelling and punctuation because it isn’t important, well, even the best programs can be taught ineffectively.
In other words, it’s not so much the books you buy as what you do with them. And teachers need to buy into the philosophy behind the program, or at least not undercut it.
You can buy a “complete” program that has the various strands (supposedly) all built in, or you can put together a program out of separate pieces, getting the best of each type. I have actually found a good complete program in French but have never seen one in English, so I go for putting together the parts. This has the added advantage that if you have already invested in a lot of expensive books, say for example a series of literature-based readers, you don’t need to replace them at high cost but can upgrade the program easily by buying (and using!!) some relatively inexpensive supplements. The only real difficulty occurs in the very early reading stages (K and the first part of Grade 1) where a disorganized reading book can confuse the child and set him back — but a set of better-designed supplementary readers for just this level can cover the problem.
I have never used it, but some people support Open Court as a prescriptive program that does teach skills. Unfortunately it is very prescriptive and many people find it too restrictive.
If you can get it through to the school administration that a good program actually costs less in both the short run and the long run (*much* less than reteaching, replacing the program again, and intensive special ed) then this is a selling point for doing low-tech moderate cost changes rather than buying a whole new ineffective system and all its addenda every five years.
Sorry - I meant for these questions to go on the previous thread.