The teacher that I observed in the resource classroom gave each student the same book to follow along with, which helped to strengthen their iconic memory, and she had each student take turns reading the book, which helped to strengthen their echoic memory in their sensory memory. Both of these techniques worked together to build each student's perception and helped with dual-coding by allowing them to experience both audio and visual images. The book that they read took several sessions to complete, so the teacher used distributed practice by spacing their study of the book throughout a few days. She helped the students to encode the information the students learned to working memory through elaborative rehearsal by asking the students to relate things the already knew to the text they were reading.
The students in the resource classroom were there for reading instruction. When a student struggled to read a word, another student would jump in and help read the word. It was nice to see them help each other, but I would have liked to see how a wait time would benefit the struggling student. By being 'rescued,' the student didn't need to sound the word out, or even look at the word for any significant amount of time, so there was less of an opportunity to use dual-coding, chunking, or iconic memory, to help encode the information into their working memory.
When I taught mu mini lesson, I was aware of the problems that each student struggled with, and I did my best to incorporate a wait time into the students' reading opportunities. It was difficult to change a pattern that had already been set by the teacher, but I gently asked the other students not to respond as quickly as they were used to. Then the struggling student had a better chance to use chunking to read the word, which allowed for more focused attention on the word being read. I believe that by utilizing a wait time, the students were better able to encode the information into their working memory.
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