The Power of Quick and Frequent Practice by Tammy Mulligan
Published Dec. 2024
Routledge
166 Pages
Paperback
Professional Book-Literacy Instruction
What can students really accomplish when they practice something for just a few minutes a day? Quite a lot, as Tammy Mulligan illustrates in The Power of Quick and Frequent Practice: Joyful Small Moves with Big Impacts on Elementary Literacy.
Come along as we follow classroom teacher Tammy Mulligan’s journey to plan and facilitate small but powerful moments of practice that help students grow as readers, writers, and community members. Chapter by chapter, Mulligan explores how to bring different categories of quick and frequent practice to life in the classroom including:
● Quick and Frequent Phonics Moves
● Quick and Frequent Fluency Moves
● Quick and Frequent Comprehension Moves
● Quick and Frequent Moves To Help Readers Lead
● Quick and Frequent Moves to Connect with Families
Written with the practical lens of a teacher, The Power of Quick and Frequent Practice outlines how to make these practice moves a part of daily and weekly instructional routines, utilize simple tools you already have in your classroom, and weave moments of student leadership throughout the practice times to help children celebrate their growth. Mulligan shares strategies, routines, and tips for planning, managing, and implementing the kind of engaging and meaningful literacy practice that learners need.
The Power of Quick and Frequent Practice illustrates that small moves can have a big impact on children's literacy learning!
My Thoughts
Tammy Mulligan is a seasoned educator with decades of experience as a literacy consultant and classroom teacher with a deep understanding of literacy development and the cycle of assessment-driven research-based instruction. In this book she demonstrates how she uses formal and informal assessment to identify specific needs, set goals, plan and deliver brief, but frequent interventions for striving readers and writers. She walks readers through one school year and how she used powerful, yet straightforward, approaches to help her students to develop literacy skills and to see themselves as capable learners.
As educators, we all struggle with finding enough time to help all of our students. Tammy shows exactly how we can find and use small moments throughout our days to give students some brief instruction and practice. Then she provides the instructional approaches she uses and how she enlists and organizes the help of colleagues and volunteers to help.
All educators will get ideas from this book whether you are a classroom teacher, special educator, or interventionalist. It is full of schedules, checklists, student work, and resource ideas, including specific texts, and websites. I found myself rereading the section about how she prepares students to have student-led discussions and thinking about how I could modify my discussion work in the library. The section focusing on reader's theater includes specific texts and websites that she uses to find engaging reader's theater resources for her students. I found myself thinking about how I could incorporate this powerful instructional strategy into my library work.
One thing that sets Quick and Frequent Practice apart from other texts about intervention are the chapters about finding ways to Help Readers Lead and Connect with Families. Her whole-child approach allows students to learn about themselves, to see the results of their consistent work, and to help them feel confident in their abilities.
