Exemplary Center for Reading Instruction (ECRI)
Designed as a practical guide to teach reading/language skills to children in grades K-12
Eight Critical Behaviors
The Exemplary Center for Reading Instruction (ECRI) with U.S. Department of Education grants found the following eight critical teaching behaviors necessary for student mastery. These can be used by both parents and teachers to ensure student success.
1. Elicit responses from students during instruction and as they practice. Provide hands-on learning and connect learning tasks to relevant, day-to-day uses. (Learning should be authentic and not contrived. Students learn to do by “doing” and “saying.”)
2. Identify students’ prior knowledge. Eliminate the risk of students failing or revealing a significant lack of ability or knowledge.
3. Increase the rate of student responses—especially of those students who have been least rapid; expect slower responding pupils to complete a task in less time than faster students.
4. Expect every pupil to master at high (83-100%) levels of accuracy at his/her instructional level with rate as another criterion. Believe all can learn.
5. Model for students during instruction so they make fewer errors as they learn, and hence are able to discriminate fine differences in their work when compared to others; prompt students as they learn and practice. Then, gradually fade the prompts until students respond correctly without assistance.
6. Re-teach when students fail to learn.
7. Focus on the student’s strengths. Reinforce correct responses and reteach if students make incorrect responses or do not respond.
8. Integrate instruction to increase the number and types of student responses (e.g., writing and spelling that which the pupil reads, writing and reading in math, reading standards of music when performing, practicing rules of sports while playing, following directions in science, building models in history and creating time-lines, etc). Emphasize the development of the skills of expressing ideas (speaking, writing, and performing tasks) as well as those of understanding ideas (listening and reading).