Changing your School's Kriah

Changing your School's Kriah for the better:

A step by step guide! 

How many times has it happend: The rebbeim in the older grades complain about the talmidim struggling to read and they blame the rebbeim in the lower grades. The morahs or rebbeim in the younger grades try harder but no one really knows what the exact issues are or how they can create effective school-wide change. If you are a resource room rebbe, a learning center director or a menahel you CAN create changes to your school's approach to kriah. Many schools have followed these simple guidelines and have seen improved kriah school-wide!

Assess 3 times a year using foundation mastery benchmarks
Run kriah assessments three times a year. You can run these assessments by using the benchmarks in the kriah benchmarks section of this site. The main benchmarks we are looking for are the foundation milestones, which unfortunately are often ignored, of aleph-beis and open sounds mastery. Words per minute (WPM) is a good kriah measure but wpm is often not at the root of kriah issues. Even if you stop right here and don’t utilize the assessment data, the assessments alone are an effective tool.

Why is it helpful to run kriah assessments 3 times a year?
You incentivize every rebbe to spend more time on kriah! Just the awareness that there will be assessments and the students' scores reviewed is a powerful motivator and most rebbeim will, even if not consciously, be more consistent and deliberate in their kriah instructions.  

The assessment data empowers you to help effect change. Having the concrete evidence of kriah performance (or lack of performance)  - see the guideline below- makes it clearer to demonstrate to others that change is needed. As a menahel, the data can be used to justify the expenses that change may incur. As a rebbe, this evidence that be presented to your menahel or learning center director to advocate for changes.

If less than 75% of the class is hitting benchmark level (in a class of 25, this 19 students), you can question with confidence if your schoolwide kriah instruction is being implemented properly.

Think about what type of changes might be needed
Change might take multiple forms depending on your school’s circumstances and needs:

• • • Professional Development The individuals who are doing the direct kriah instruction might need hands on professional development– whether in the area of kriah itself or in general classroom management and instructional control.

    • Kriah Curriculum With Scope and Sequence Maybe you need to implement a new kriah curriculum that has a scope and sequence that everyone can follow. This ensures that skills are introduced within a timeline and that there is a natural progression to the material and skills taught instead of overlapping expectations and materials across grades.

    • More (better!) Time It is possible that more time in the day needs to be dedicated towards the kriah instruction and review. Sometimes it isn’t a factor of more time just time better utilized! Pointless redundant aleph-beis activities can be replaced with work that focuses instead of actual mastery. For example, some classes spend a lot of time on aleph-beis coloring sheets and songs after the students already have the exposure instead of emphasizing letter recognition mastery.

    • Sheva Rules Are Overrated! Instead of spending so much effort at the beginning to focus on all the specific sheva rules, the focus should be on reaching automaticity. When a student has automaticity, decoding takes up only 5% of their RAM, leaving 95% free to focus on the sheva rules and critical thinking. Once there is automaticity of reading, the rules can be mastered intuitively with a little but not tons of direction. Setting benchmarks for words per minute will help ensure students are reaching automaticity. Once the class is up to par with regards to WPM, often sheva rules can be taught is a few short lessons.

    • Target Remediation Having the assessment data helps you flag your struggling students. The students who struggle the most might need specialized support that likely can’t be provided in the regular school environment. Use assessment data in parent communication to convince those parents not to push off getting that urgently needed independent support. This will enable you to more effectively allocate your available resources to help students for whom the available level of support CAN make the difference they need to master kriah! Please see the section on this site for kriah remediation for more information on how to effectively allocate your resources for maximum impact.

These guidelines, when implemented thoughtfully, can effect real school-wide change and esure every student achieves kriah mastery!