Question for elementary resource teachers in low SES schools
Tl;dr- How much of your day is spent teaching comprehension vs. decoding? What does scheduling/instruction look like?
Not sure how many of us there are out there, but I thought I'd throw out the question. I'm in a heavily SOR-based school, and the kids that end up being referred for sped are those that aren't learning to read in the first place. We have a high percentage of kids who just need thousands upon thousands of repetitions to learn just how to get text off the page. Most of my students have lower IQs, and I work primarily in the primary grades. The great majority of my lessons are focused on PA, decoding, encoding, dictation, "heart words," maybe some fluency for groups who are further along in their skills, etc. For my younger grades, I do a read aloud at the end of each lesson, but it's only a couple of minutes/pages and obviously not our main focus. The more intermediate grades do a very small amount of comprehension things with their decodable text, but again, it is not our main focus.
But, it seems that every year we get more and more kids who are on the Autism spectrum. I am the first to admit this is not my area of expertise- I have extensive training in dyslexia, but nothing for ASD beyond what my very pro-full inclusion college classes taught. We're getting more kids who can do any PA skill, read any word, remember all of the spelling patterns, etc. but they have EXTREME difficulties with very basic comprehension. They can read the text no problem, but can't answer the most basic of "right there in the text" questions about it. They have very low language skills overall. They're getting language services from an SLP, but it's literally 30 minutes per week, and because "it's comprehension" everybody looks to me as the "academic person" to fix it.
So, if you're in a similar set up, how much do you actually teach comprehension? I am guessing that my schedule next year will be K-4 reading and K-2 math; I typically have about 30 students total. I do not have extra time in my day to create random "comprehension only" groups. If I put these kids in my regular reading groups, 95% of the lesson (all of the dyslexia focused parts that most kids need) will not apply to them. I do have some para time that is a bit more flexible, but I'm not even sure what would be most beneficial to assign the para to do with the students. There is also part of me that wants to push back a little on the idea that this is really an academic issue- is it even appropriate for me to be remediating what is really a language issue?
This is specific to low SES schools. I have family members/friends who teach in high SES schools, and it's a whole different ballgame. Their day is the opposite of mine- their kids come in reading and they teach almost nothing but comprehension.