The MOST model is designed to give at risk students a visual connection to the text. Many of the at risk students have a limited background knowledge to relate to the concepts being taught at school. This proves to be a tremendous deficit for young readers, and consequently becomes a huge stumbling block to their overall education and learning.
This model would be a good companion to the teaching concepts put forth by Ruby Payne who wrote the book “A Framework for Understanding Poverty.” In her book she explains that children from poverty come to school with very different tools for understanding than children from middle class homes. The MOST model would help teachers provide a rich environment full of pictures, sounds, and action to explain the meaning of the text and provide at least a virtual experience for those students who have never been exposed to the cultural variety of experiences that their middle class peers have. At risk students may be more comfortable with the multimedia framework, would be engaged immediately, and may be less likely to act out and get in trouble while learning with this model.
This is a great teaching concept and one that I have used without knowing a name for it. It is time consuming to create the modules, but with good organization and filing, the modules can be used over and over again. Over time a teacher could create quite a library of modules, but working in collaboration with other teachers, the library can quickly be created and utilized.
