Great Leaps

I don’t have this program yet but am asking for it for Christmas. I just took a fabulous course on phonological awareness and fluency and the instructor highly recommended Great Leaps. She says it really helps fluency and the kids love it -

Where did you take the course? I also took one and have ordered it since then.

I am using it with three students. One student improved very quickly from 30 wpm to 60. He is not improving at this time. Another has not improved at all in almost a year, a third is not improving.

Yes, the program is fine, it is just that there is not always a ready “cure” for the fluency issues LD students may have. Sorry for the negativity, but we do need to be realistic.

In the journal, Learning Disabilities Research and Practice, you can read about research with middle school learning disabled students. It is in the last issue of the year 2000. Typical LD students gain substantially more than one year per year of intervention when Great Leaps has been the only intervention. Great Leaps has proven successful with Dr. Eileen Marzola’s work in NYC, Dr. Cecil Mercer’s work at U FL, Dr. Deborah Slaton’s work at U KY, Dr. Betty Beacham’s work at ECU, Steve Swim’s work at Moorehead SU, Dr. Beth Tulbert at U UT, Dr. Candice Bray’s work in ME, Dr. Addison Watanabe’s work at SFSU, and more. Obviously, there is no one answer for all children. Yet, given the research base behind Great Leaps with its track record, it certainly has helped more than one-third of the learning disabled children with whom it has been employed.

As the author and developer of Great Leaps and hopefully a friend of LD Online, I do not wish to turn this site into an advertising vehicle. I will however answer questions and respond to comments concerning my life’s work. Do not hesitate to contact me, Ken Campbell

I have read Ken’s posts on LDOnline most of this past year and he is clearly intelligent, knowledgeable, and a good and concerned teacher.
That said, I take issue with his fundamental basis for Great Leaps. The idea is, as I read it, to increase fluency by a stress on reading speed, with no specific training in skills.
IF a student has been taught good reading skills and just is in the habit of reading slowly and not putting his full attention to the job, this approach of intensive training can help.
On the other hand, if the student lacks fundamental reading skills, a stress on speed will be counter-productive, leading to bad habits, stress, and a rejection of reading. The usual pattern is for students to make some progress and then plateau out, and later often regress. This is exactly what Anitya is describing in her experience. Unfortunately short-term studies will only see the first part, apparent progress.

Great Leaps has always been advertised as a supplemental program. Next, when a considerable learning disability exists (often called dyslexia) a considerable amount of intervention is called for - Great Leaps being a fluency component in these cases. (The Great Leaps K-2 program is different and not what I am addressing in this post.)

Re:” if the student lacks fundamental reading skills, a stress on speed will be counter-productive…”
Our stress on “speed” and I must add “accuracy” is based upon human processing rates, well established in the literature through “precision assessment”. The speeds required are well within the windows of human performance for a vast majority of students having significant reading difficulties. To me it is obvious that there is no such thing, nor will there ever be such a thing, as a cure-all intervention for all students with learning disabilities. To force higher speeds than one would be capable of would not only be poor teaching but torture. One of the reasons we use a ratio chart for progress allows a tutor to see when a student has plateaued so that a change is required.

“…leading to bad habits, stress, and a rejection of reading…” It would be my contention that repeated failure and lack of progress in reading leads to frustration and rejection - the early successes in Great Leaps’ behavioral approach would do (and have done) exactly the opposite - allowing growth rather than inhibiting the such. Again, in the hundreds of children now studied at North Marion Middle School and later Howard Middle School (Ocala, Florida - under the auspices of Fran DeFalco) we are seeing behavioral increases in reading generalizations in the regular environment. The positive behavioral reading gains (over time, I might add), have been inherent in districts using Great Leaps. Realizing this is a learning disabilities bulletin board, I well realize that more than 50% of the children we have studied do not have learning disabilities - even if so labelled - Great Leaps should remain however a strong piece in interventions for dyslexic students.

“…The usual pattern is for students to make some progress and then plateau out, and later often regress…” I must take strong issue with this statement. This has most certainly been not a usual pattern with students having reading concerns - it is a pattern noted in this board with what I would guess to be students with considerable reading problems (again, what are popularly called the dyslexic). There is a long anecdotal history in the world of precision assessment showing that when a student reaches the 3-4th grade of reading level, instruction becomes less relevent (the teachers’ job being more motivational) with the environment “takeing over” and reading gains continuing. Long term re-evaluations of the children in the published study seem to substantiate this trend. (Boy, would I like to see university research at this level - I am only one person with my present focus being on increasing fluency and comprehension past the 4th grade reading level.) Students who do not achieve an independent reading level (another study I would like to see) invariably regress - be the intervention Great Leaps, Reading Recovery, etc.

“…Unfortunately short-term studies will only see the first part, apparent progress….” Our work has involved children in three to five years of study! By no means have we been using the short-term growths as the main evidence for the validity of the Great Leaps’ interventions! There is something signficant about the early progress, though - and that is the motivation which comes from the early successes - motivations the skilled tutor can take advantage of to further growth.

“….apparent progress…” Charted progress which maintains itself over time is progress - and it is extremely measurable and therefore extremely reliable. Regression may also be “apparent” and if encountered must be attacked with a variety of strategies. For the dyslexic student, Great Leaps is (once more) a piece in a more complex intervention process.

(Summing all this up) It is my opinion that a vast majority of students with reading problems have those problems for what I would call environmental (rather than personal) issues. They can be easily and inexpensively remediated. The first step in their growth is taking them to an “independent” reading level. At such a level, the student continues to grow without formal reading instruction. Much of this growth being dependent upon the environment and capabilities (intellectually and culturally) of the student. This bulletin board attracts parents, teachers, tutors, etc. with a signficantly more impaired population of dysfunctional readers - quite obviously requiring a more sophisticated intervention set of strategies.

(It being dawn and my just having returned home to Florida from Kentucky - I hope my thoughts have been conveyed clearly. I also hope no emotional content is “read” into the post as known is intended. I am responding to a critique.

Ken Campbell, author-developer, Great Leaps Reading

Ken — let me first of all repeat that from everything I have seen you are a good teacher, knowledgeable, and probably very effective. Nothing I write is intended to be a personal or professional slur.

I wrote a thoughtful and serious reply to your long post, and aol timed me out and lost all the work just as I was reaching the conclusion. If some of my posts seem choppy and unsupported, blame aol and the crazy timeout system, not my intentions.

Also tell all your friends not to use aol — it’s designed for people with so few ideas in their heads that they never think for more than ten minutes.

Two short things:

Read the Article “How Fast Are The World’s Best Readers?” It is very illuminating (and funny, a real feat in a scholarly research article). I found this article while researching reading between 1987 - 1990, and I found it on ERIC. Sorry I can’t give more details, but my copy is still in an unopened moving box. Anyway, this article is a very good investigation of “speed reading” and reading speed(s). It is especially informative to note the variable reading speeds, and the fact that formal training in speed was the least effective method in developing the best readers.

Anyway, we are talking apples and oranges here. This board is specifically for people who work with dyslexia and/or other learning disabilities. The typical situation in this group is for the kid to be not reading (often hidden by guessing game programs) until age 8 or 10 or even later. The kid then learns to read by some sort of phonics tutoring, but is obviously behind and lacking in skils and practice. Then he has three or four years of work to catch up. This is a double whammy; he has a sensory deficit that makes him process words and/or visual input more slowly than the average, but to catch up he has to work five times as fast. He is already stressed out and has all sorts of self-esteem problems and expectations of failure. To put an emphasis on speed here is extremely counter-productive.

I question speed training in general — please see above — but in particular for kids with LD, it is, as you said, a form of torture.

Yes, I’m also on AOL - so always must write in small chunks.

Fluency training and “speed” reading are also apples and oranges. Great Leaps is - above all else in design - a “behavioral reading program.” To the best of my ability all forms of punishers have been removed. Proponents of other programs are pairing theirs with Great Leaps to exponentially have their readers grow.

Because we have set fluency “speeds”, because many of our kids read so interminably slow their reading makes no sense, some got the idea we were promoting speed reading. If I were so doing, I would’ve set the goals at 400 wpm (I’m not kidding.) In working with my own (non-disabled readers) children, my 4th grader’s oral reading goal will be 400+ and we will easily achieve this. This will allow his silent reading to approach 700-1000 so eventually he will quit forming each word in his mind and will be able to really fly. Obviously, I don’t read great novels at such speeds - but I can read other things thus. Such goals remain inappropriate for my 1st grader - who remains an emergent reader.

Children with signficant reading problems - whatever the cause - need a coordinated program of attack - often involving more than one perspective. Fluency has been the neglected component.

Better send before my time is up. Regards, Ken