Hi Gina, Congratulations on your new job. I have read about the Strategic Instruction Model but have never used it. I am impressed with much of Deschler's work from Kansas. My district uses the NWEA so we also use lexiles. I find that at the elementary grades, lexiles are not as reliable as either guided reading or DRA levels. I believe that lexiles are based on sentence complexity and vocabulary so they can be misleading (how much you need to inference is not a factor). However, where I have found them to be very helpful is at the middle and high schools. Many of our middle and high school teachers had no idea of the level of some of the text that they were assigning. It was an eye opener to realize that a student's lexile level was 650 but the text he was assigned was a 950!
We started a bookroom this year so I leveled the books by both lexile and Guided reading level. There was quite a bit of discrepancy. I did make a simple chart for my teachers with the approximate correlations between grade, lexile, DRA, and guided reading levels. If you'd like a copy I can send you one. Good luck, Linda On Jul 4, 2008, at 3:05 PM, gina nunley wrote: > I too have just accepted a new job, working as a Literacy > Specialist for the state. I'll travel to different districts with > my focus being the use of the Strategic Instruction Model (out of > University of Kansas). > > My biggest sadness and concern is leaving the classroom and KIDS. > Everything we do boils down to how kids react to what we do, and I > am more than a little concerned about losing that direct contact, > though I will have lots of opportunities for coaching in the > classroom. I'll be all the more passionate about coming here to > listen to teachers in the classroom > > Right away I have a topic to research and I wondered what > understandings some of you may have. How many of you use lexile > levels in your reading program? I did but have to admit they never > totally made sense to me. The ranges were difficult to understand > and hard to correlate to other programs. Basically I used them to > determine who to give a QRI to. > > Can anyone share their thoughts on lexiles? I apologize if this is > off the list topics. I am thinking though that in all our strategy > comprehension work we're very concerned about matching kids to the > right book, and always looking for a good way to measure that. > _________________________________________________________________ > Making the world a better place one message at a time. > http://www.imtalkathon.com/?source=EML_WLH_Talkathon_BetterPlace > _______________________________________________ > Mosaic mailing list > Mosaic@literacyworkshop.org > To unsubscribe or modify your membership please go to > http://literacyworkshop.org/mailman/options/ > mosaic_literacyworkshop.org. > > Search the MOSAIC archives at http://snipurl.com/MosaicArchive. _______________________________________________ Mosaic mailing list Mosaic@literacyworkshop.org To unsubscribe or modify your membership please go to http://literacyworkshop.org/mailman/options/mosaic_literacyworkshop.org. Search the MOSAIC archives at http://snipurl.com/MosaicArchive.
