Intermediate Ferris teachers collaborate closely to strengthen students’ decoding skills using text features, guided by Adrienne Gear’s Reading Power strategies. After administering and reviewing formative reading assessments, teachers meet to identify specific areas where intermediate learners need support—such as interpreting diagrams, using subheadings to predict content, or connecting bolded terminology to meaning. With this data, teams design lessons that explicitly teach students how to use these features as decoding tools, modeling the thinking process and embedding shared vocabulary across classrooms to ensure consistency.

In their ongoing collaboration, intermediate teachers use assessment results to form flexible groups, adjust levels of scaffolding, and track progress over time. They plan targeted mini-lessons, co-create anchor charts, and share effective instructional routines that help students move from guided practice to independent application. Through this data-driven and unified approach, intermediate teachers ensure that students not only understand text features but use them strategically to decode, make meaning, and read with greater confidence.