Turning struggles into success is the goal of Reading Recovery teachers in Effingham County.
Sherri Walsh and Zoe Forbes have teamed up to provide that vital early intervention program to first-graders at Rincon Elementary.
Walsh and Forbes are two of 20 teachers system-wide specially trained in the program that started in 1996 to help first graders who are having difficulty learning to read. Training leader for RR teachers is Jennifer Peavy. Peavy also teaches RR and is based at Guyton Elementary.
“The program has two goals, Peavy said. “One is to have the child reading at grade level and second to identify those children who may need more and advocate for further intervention.”
Identifying — and helping — students who are having reading problems early on can mean the difference between a children having success or failure in the classroom.
“Lots of kids don’t have the desire to read because they are struggling,” Walsh said.
Classroom teachers welcome the help for their students.
“You are building skills that transfer to the classroom,” Walsh said.
“It teaches them how to learn,” Forbes said.
RR teachers work closely with classroom teachers on scheduling to avoid the student missing class time in areas other than reading.
At the start of the new school year a minimum of 25 percent of students are tested to identify those in need.
Each child has 30 minutes of one-on-one instruction per day with a reading recovery teacher for 12-20 weeks.
“Each teacher has four students per day and two or three rounds of students each year,” Walsh said.
These teachers also spend half of their school day working with students from kindergarten to third grade in the Comprehensive Intervention Model (CIM). CIM is used for small groups of students.
“We’ve served many kindergarten students in the past that after being served, they no longer needed RR in first grade. On the flip side of that, the RR students that don’t make enough progress in the 20 week span of RR, and need further intervention, can go into a CIM group for extended help from the specially trained RR teachers,” Peavy said.
Peavy said part of the program’s success is teachers bring the reading to the level the student can handle.
“We’ve had children say they can only read “our” books,” Peavy said. “That’s just because we read at their level.”
Peavy said research indicates students who are poor readers in the first grade are likely to remain a poor reader at the end of the fourth grade.
“Another study suggested that efforts to correct reading problems after grade three are largely unsuccessful,” Peavy said. “It is vitally important that we help as many struggling readers in first grade as possible.”
For Walsh and Forbes helping these students brings great rewards.
“It’s knowing you are taking a child who is struggling and building their skills, picking them up and building their self-esteem,” Walsh said. Walsh has been teaching for 14 years. This is her seventh year as a reading recovery teacher.
Teachers are required to spend a year training on the job for the program and take night classes once a week through Georgia State College.
Forbes is in training as a RR teacher and has almost three decades of teaching experience.
Forbes said classroom experiences led her to decide to join the program.
“I saw fourth grade students struggling with reading and I wanted to be part of catching them before they reach that point,” Forbes said.
The Reading Recovery program was not fully staffed last year, but now is being fully implemented with 20 teachers. It’s happening thanks to the local board of education, Peavy said.
“We couldn’t have asked for better support from the board,” Peavy said. “The nice thing about being able to serve all the students in RR, is that if a student moves from one school to another within the county we can usually pick that student up in RR and continue his/her RR program.”
The Effingham County school system is one of about five in the state that use the program.
The program doesn’t help some students as much as the teachers would like.
“The hardest thing is the student we just can’t quite figure out how to help,” Peavy said. “Some need more than we can provide.”
The good outcomes outweigh the disappointing ones, however, this group of dedicated teachers said.
“With a bit of reading success students get excited and go home and start reading to their parents,” Walsh said. “You are building life-long readers and learners.”
Seeing a child who was having so much difficulty succeed makes all the work worthwhile, these teachers said.
“A child’s eyes light up when they realize they can read and write,” Peavy said. “You know you’ve made a difference in a child’s life.”
Last year, with only 14 RR teachers, Effingham County served a total of 459 students. (121 RR students and 338 students in CIM interventions.) Many more students will be served this year because of the additional teachers being trained.
What are the outcomes of Reading Recovery as an early intervention?
Data on more than 2 million children served by Reading Recovery in the United States have been collected, analyzed, and reported by the IDEC.
• Since 1984, when Reading Recovery began in North America, approximately 75% of the students who completed the full intervention met grade-level expectations in reading and writing.
• The students with complete interventions who do not reach grade-level literacy expectations have made progress and are evaluated to determine the need for future support (e.g., classroom support, Title I, LD referral).
• Children who do not have enough lessons to complete the intervention because the school year ends make important gains on all six measures of the Observation Survey.
• Follow-up studies indicate that most Reading Recovery students do well on standardized and state assessments in subsequent years.
Source: readingrecovery.org