The U. of C. way
It starts with a reading skills test, developed by the U. of C., before school even opens, to see if kids are at grade level.
The school uses the results to target help. Kids furthest behind get more services -- tutoring, mentoring, more in-depth reading instruction and, if necessary, smaller class sizes.
'Guided reading' for all grades is key to this approach. It is Donoghue's core reading instruction, and it consumed much of the morning in Natalie Brady's third-grade room.
In September, kids were broken into groups of five according to ability. The five groups met with Brady several times a week. When not with Brady, kids worked at "literacy centers" around the room, reading along with books on tape, assembling words from different suffixes and prefixes or reading independently.
During guided reading, Brady worked on improving comprehension and fluency, using books at the group's reading level. The kids also took the books home to read 30 minutes each night. In January, Brady's lowest reading group also starting meeting with a literacy coach several times a week.
Donoghue kids were tested three more times during the school year to check progress.
In April, when Brady's class size dropped from 25 to 16, she and her co-teacher met with each guided reading group daily and dived more intensely into nonfiction books.
The literacy centers also were replaced. Instead, kids read on their own, after a lesson on a reading strategy. Topics included defining a book's genre and connecting with a character in a book. Kids also worked on assignments from guided reading, such as listing a chapter's main events or describing how certain characters in a book felt.
The more traditional approach to reading instruction targets the whole group, and all students read from the same basal reader.
U. of C. does not have a comparable test to gauge math skills. It uses a somewhat controversial curriculum developed by the university called Everyday Math that emphasizes problem solving and daily applications over rote learning.
It also stresses multiple ways to solve the same problem. For example, students must think of different ways to produce the number 10: 5 plus 5, 15 minus 5, 2 times 5. Or, instead of adding a column of numbers that equals 100, Everyday Math might ask kids to look up newspaper ads and find enough items to equal $100.