DIARY OF AN ENGLISH TEACHER #4 (Geared towards a Systematic Intervention Program)

RONA ANDREA N. TAMAYO

I have always been challenged on waiting for the results of the remediation I would usually conduct near the end of every quarter. When I was with high spirits to propose a well-defined program of how teachers in our department should be conducting remediation, I felt laughed at and ignorant. Perhaps, an idealist’s thoughts made me stuck on its enticing nature and I failed to recognize the obvious. Why would a teacher conduct remediation without having identified the students who failed the subject? I insisted, “I don’t need to wait for FAILURE. I want to carefully plan and systematically conduct remediation to prevent it.”Thinking about remediation alone would not suffice for me to identify learning difficulties among my young high school learners. In turn, I had to devise a more rigid plan. I never felt burdened by it but I realized that I would see light at the end of the tunnel.

Surprisingly, I happened to form a plan out of the plan. Teachers always check their students’progress whether on a daily or weekly basis. All the observed behavior, changes and modifications on instructional decisions are equally valuable. I used the word ‘intervention’when I had to look for acceptable MOVs (Means of Verification) while drafting my customized evaluation tool. I had to research more on how intervention is being done in various middle and junior high schools around the globe. Then, I formed thoughts into ideas. How do I understand intervention to identify learning difficulties and eventually help prevent high percentage of failure among learners?

Intervention is used to investigate the hinders for learners to master concepts, process big chunks of knowledge and analyze how those concepts operate simply on their day to day learning acquisition. If passing through level 1 is completely complicated for some learners, I believe that remediation would be 99.99% ineffective. Remediation is used in reteaching least mastered concepts. What would happen if concepts being taught in remediation classes were not really learned at all? It is in that same point when it came to me the power of intervention and doing it in a systematic way would clearly ease educators of frustration which resulted from the failure of the remediation program. Many language teachers are aware that some young students in junior high school cannot read well and many of them still need assistance on how to phonologically arrange symbols into word units or sounds. It is somewhat frustrating, and we are clearly aware that remediation classes would not suffice for those kinds of learners. In devising an intervention plan, I focused on these areas: (1) syntax and morphology (2) semantics and vocabulary (3) phonological awareness and metalinguistics (4) language processing (5) pragmatics and discourse, while modifying instructional levels of each area. I pledge to never stop looking for ways on improving the reading intervention program of our school to meet the individual needs and preferences of learners.

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The author is Teacher III at Rafael L. Lazatin Memorial High School