Success for All emphasizes prevention, early, intensive intervention for students beginning to have academic difficulties, and extensive professional development throughout the elementary grades. An active family support program engages parents and community members in support of children's success. During reading periods, students are regrouped across age lines for 90 minutes so that each reading class contains students reading at one level. This eliminates the need to have reading groups within the class and increases the amount of time for direct instruction. Also, use of tutors as reading teachers during reading time reduces the size of most reading classes.
Students become fluent as they read and reread to one another in pairs.
This program emphasizes cooperative learning activities built around partner reading, identification of characters, settings, and problem solutions in narratives, story summarization, writing, and direct instruction in reading comprehension skills. At all levels, students read books of their choice for twenty minutes each evening as homework. Classroom libraries of books are developed for this purpose. Writing is emphasized throughout the grades. Writing instruction uses a writer's workshop format in which students plan, draft, revise, edit, and publish compositions with feedback at each stage from teachers and peers.