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 Laura
Bush highlights KU reading program
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First lady Laura Bush greets Don
Deshler, professor of education and director of
KU's Center for Research on Learning.
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A Florida school visit by first lady Laura
Bush the day after her husband's State of the Union
speech put the spotlight on a KU-developed reading program
with a solid record of success nationwide.
Bush visited the Discovery Middle School in Orlando,
Fla., to highlight its improving reading scores and
promote the president's Striving Readers Initiative
to provide $100 million for grants aimed at exposing
teens to well-researched reading programs. The school
credits the Strategic Instruction Model (SIM) method,
developed by researchers and teachers at the KU Center
for Research on Learning, for its reading achievements.
More than 400,000 educators and 3,500 school districts
have adopted SIM components, and several states-including
California, Connecticut, Florida, Iowa, Louisiana, Michigan,
Minnesota, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Vermont-have
implemented SIM statewide.
Don Deshler, professor of education and director of
KU's Center for Research on Learning, accompanied the
president's wife and took part in a roundtable discussion
with Bush and other education researchers and teachers.
SIM is an approach to teaching adolescents who struggle
to become good readers, writers and learners. It is
based on the reality that for adolescents to meet high
standards, they must be able to read and understand
large volumes of complex, difficult reading materials.
In addition, they must be able to express themselves
in writing.
SIM includes instruction in visual imagery, paraphrasing,
vocabulary, and strategies to learn sentence writing,
paragraph writing and theme writing.
To help bring the research findings into classrooms,
the center has developed a 1,500-member International
Professional Development Network that provides in-depth
training to teachers and administrators on how to use
the teaching methods developed by the center.
For more information about SIM, visit http://www.kucrl.org
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