Reading Approach

The hallmark of the reading approach at Eagle Hill is our ability to understand each student’s learning profile and to completely customize each student’s program. As teachers of reading, we believe that a full understanding of a student’s strengths and challenges in reading is an essential foundation for designing effective instruction. Students at Eagle Hill decode and comprehend text with varying degrees of proficiency, respond to a variety of instructional approaches differently, and develop their reading along different trajectories. Our Reading Department builds each student’s schedule with a full understanding of these elements as the starting point.
 
A student working on decoding skills might be placed in an intensive reading tutorial class using one or another—or elements of several—instructional approaches. A student whose primary need is to strengthen comprehension might begin by taking a class called Reading for Academic Purposes or explore her ability to create mental images when reading narrative text in a course called Comprehension Imagery. While all courses in the Reading Department attend to the complex range of skills and practices necessary for reading, individual courses are designed to target specific elements. The flexibility of our nine-term schedule allows students to take multiple reading and literature classes concurrently.
 
At Eagle Hill, we also know that the teacher-student relationship is fundamental to a student’s success. Being placed not only in the proper class but also with the correct teacher is another key consideration. Our reading teachers are professionally trained and allow us to offer an array of approaches, which include the following: 

• Structured Word Inquiry (SWI)
• Orton-Gillingham (Wilson, Spire, and Barton)
• Lindamood Bell (LIPs, Visualizing and Verbalizing, Seeing Stars)
• Notice and Note
• Project Read

When we design a student’s schedule at Eagle Hill, we consider the student’s profile, the corresponding fit of various instructional approaches, and the makeup of the cohort of students we are creating in the classroom.