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Marie Clay: A Personal Reflection on an Unparalleled Professional Career

2023-02-08T17:56:32-05:00October 28th, 2022|Latest News|

By P. David Pearson, UC Berkeley
Evelyn Lois Corey Emeritus Professor of Instructional Science

A note to the reader: I wrote the initial draft of this essay soon after Marie Clay’s death in 2007, but I failed to finish it in time for inclusion in a publication honoring her contributions to the field. And it has rested in a comfortable sinecure in the cloud since that time. About a week ago, I happened on an American Public Media podcast by Emily Hanford, one that cast doubt on the professional contributions of Marie Clay. Essentially, Hanford blamed Dame Clay for America’s dismal reading performance when Clay offered teachers an approach to promoting reading development that, at least according to Hanford, is just plain wrong. And it is wrong, Hanford added, because it is at odds with what we know because of recent advances in the science of reading. Time to right that wrong by restoring phonics first and fast to the top slot in our reading curriculum.

I was appalled and angered by this indictment for two reasons: (a) it is based on a limited portrayal of scientific reading research (dare I say, just plain wrong?), and (b) it was directed at a scholar who has left us a rich, perhaps unparalleled, legacy of understandings about the nature of reading acquisition, one to be celebrated not denigrated. At the height of my rage, I remembered this unfinished tribute. Thanks to the search affordances of our digital age, I found it—as I said, resting comfortably in the cloud. So, I got to work and finished it for this occasion (Finally met the deadline! Thanks for your patience, Marie). Today, I’ll forego a point-by-point counter to Hanford’s outrageous claims in favor of an argument for celebrating Professor Clay’s legacy.

 

Marie Clay: A Personal Reflection on an Unparalleled Professional Career

I met Marie early in my career, in the early 1970s, thanks to an introduction from Ken and Yetta Goodman at an International Reading (now Literacy) Association Convention. We hit it off because we discovered a common alma mater—the University of Minnesota. Marie had studied language acquisition as a Fulbright Scholar with Mildred Templin at the Institute of Child Development in the 1950s; I did my PhD in reading education at Minnesota in the late 1960s. Go gophers!!! She was always on my list of “folks I hoped I would run into at IRA” (by the way, she later became IRA’s first international— non-North American—president) so that I could learn more about the progress of her then-emerging Reading Recovery program. In the late 1980s/early 1990s, I got to know her more closely during her regular visits to the University of Illinois, when she served as the George A. Miller Visiting Scholar at the Center for the Study of Reading. During those years, as the dean of the College of Education, I had the privilege of supporting the establishment of an active Reading Recovery University Training Center. When Marie came to town, it was always a feast, both intellectually and gastronomically. Finally, I got to visit with Marie when I was invited to participate in Reading Recovery conferences nationally and internationally.

There is no question in anyone’s mind, including mine, that Reading Recovery will always be regarded as Marie’s signature contribution to the field of literacy education. That is as it should be because Reading Recovery, in addition to rescuing tens of thousands of students from a career of school failure, helped us understand what it took to help vulnerable students build a repertoire of robust tools for maintaining stamina and self-efficacy in the face of daunting reading challenges. Not so well known, but equally important, are her contributions to our understanding of emergent literacy, formative assessment, scaffolding, and teacher education.

Emergent literacy. Marie coined the term, emergent literacy in her PhD thesis; more importantly, she enhanced our understanding of it enormously, both in Reading Recovery and her assessment work. When we utter the term, we usually mean to emphasize the idea that no matter how young, inexperienced, or novice you are as a reader and writer, there is a level at which, there is a task in which, you can demonstrate your emerging literacy competence. But I also like, as did Marie, the other end of the continuum— the idea that no matter how old, experienced, and expert you are as a reader or writer, there is always something more for you to learn—another book to read, another practice to master, another paper to write, or another word to learn. We are all emergent readers.

Assessment. If you look carefully at Marie’s enactment of assessment, both in the Observation Survey and in the daily enactment of Reading Recovery, you’ll discover that she was all about what became formative assessment. And she did all of this before we began using that term to describe the sort of responsive assessment that guides teachers in three important tasks:

  1. getting a close reading of each individual student so they can determine the next pedagogical steps to take,
  2. asking oneself whether what the assessment data suggests that it is the teaching rather than the learning that may need modification, and
  3. how to engage learners in assessing their own progress.

Marie anticipated the formative assessment movement by a decade or two.

Scaffolding. One of my favorite features of Reading Recovery is the practice labeled, “roaming around the known.” In this practice, every day students spend some time reading texts that they had read before and are well within their zone of competence and confidence (Why? To consolidate and fine tune their skills, strategies, and knowledge). Daily students also spent some time reading texts that were at the edge of their competence and confidence (Why? To challenge and stretch their skills, strategies, and knowledge in moving to a new level). And daily, yesterday’s challenge texts became today’s known texts. An elegant approach to promoting gradual progress! And the key was the level of scaffolding that Reading Recovery teachers provided on the challenge texts. Interestingly, Marie and her colleagues did all of this in the same period (mid to late 1970s) in which Wood, Bruner, and Ross (the folks credited with coining the term, scaffolding, within the realm of learning) were doing their seminal work enacting Vygotsky’s notion of working in the Zone of Proximal Development. Yet another example of Marie’s uncanny ability to anticipate what would happen more broadly in the field before we even named the practice.

Teacher Education. In teacher education, we began, in the late 1970s and 80s, to champion the idea of the teacher as a reflective practitioner. Marie, in her famous “behind the glass” sessions—where a teacher in training and a teacher leader comment, in real time, on the lesson enacted by a second teacher in training—figured out how to operationalize moment-by-moment real-time reflection about practice long before researchers in teacher education got there. This did not go unnoticed by colleagues. During my tenure at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign), Dick Anderson, Bonnie Armbruster, and Jan Gaffney developed adaptations of that model for our pre-service teacher education program. We see models of professional development come and go, but that model in Reading Recovery stands the test of time. It endures because it is effective. Moreover, it addresses a perennial problem in teacher development: We tend to avoid the absolutely essential but also personally threatening task of evaluating the moment-by-moment flow of teaching. Marie taught us how to do this respectfully—and effectively.

Scholar of Practice to Theory. Finally, I want to pay tribute to Marie as a scholar of practice, one who understood that the knowledge that moves from practice to theory is as important as the knowledge that moves from theory to practice. Her scholarly disposition is deeply embedded in all her work. Her practices that are based on solid theories of language and literacy development and subjected to rigorous empirical validation—and modification. But nowhere is her disposition as a researcher more vividly portrayed than in the sweat equity that Marie—in concert with the cadre of New Zealand teachers who worked with her—put into the inch by inch, day by day, week by week continuous improvement process that led to the development of Reading Recovery in the 1960s and 1970s. We owe Marie and that group of teachers a great debt for the pedagogical tool kit and the professional development framework they gave us. Today, scholars in math and science education talk about design-based research, a process by which an intervention of some sort is constantly examined, modified, improved, and re-examined in the crucible of the classroom. Again, Marie was ahead of her time—doing design-based research before we had a name for it.

There is much to remember about this powerful colleague. There is much also to honor. We can best honor her life by keeping her legacy alive—by enacting the principles and practices she left to us in our own classrooms—and by paying that legacy forward to the next generation of readers and teachers.

P. David Pearson is an emeritus faculty member in the School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley, where he served as Dean from 2001-2010. His current research focuses on literacy history and policy. He also holds an appointment as a Professor of the Graduate School and is the Evelyn Lois Corey Emeritus Chair in Instructional Science.

 

 

Joint International Statement in Response to Hanford’s Sold a Story

2024-02-08T09:11:40-05:00October 26th, 2022|Latest News|

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In response to Sold A Story, a podcast by Emily Hanford

A Joint Statement from 

  • North American Trainers Group
  • Canadian Institute of Reading Recovery
  • Reading Recovery Europe
  • Reading Recovery New Zealand
  • Reading Recovery of Australia
  • International Reading Recovery Trainers Organization
  • Reading Recovery Council of North America

This joint statement is in response to the recent podcast presented by a journalist, Emily Hanford, who attempted to provide an historical summary of Marie Clay’s academic journey and an explanation of Marie Clay’s theory of literacy processing and instruction.  This podcast presented a misinterpretation of Clay’s body of scientific studies, a distortion of the facts, and quotes taken out of context.

The reporter’s explanations of Clay’s theory of how children learn to read and her assertion that Clay did not value the importance of word analysis skills and phonics in the teaching of reading and writing are an inaccurate representation of her theory.

Marie Clay was a prominent clinical child psychologist who spent her lifetime studying reading acquisition and ways to alleviate literacy difficulties in young children.  She spent at least forty years on work that has resulted in hundreds of thousands of initially struggling readers becoming successful readers and writers.  Her early literacy intervention, Reading Recovery, is found in English-speaking countries around the world and has been redeveloped in multiple languages.  Her other areas of study and significant contributions include oral language development and early writing.

Her awards are numerous and prestigious, given by foundations such as The Charles Dana Award for pioneering contributions to health and education.  She was identified by her research peers as being the most influential researcher over three decades and was described by Richard Anderson, Professor of Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, as one of the most remarkable educators and scholars of the 20th century.

Her excellence in scholarship was also recognized with awards from national and international associations of professionals, including the International Reading Association, the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science, the New Zealand Association for Research in Education, and the National Council for the Teaching of English.  She was named the First New Zealander, and she has received five honorary degrees.

Marie Clay was an impeccable researcher, a prolific prize-winning writer, and a continuous learner throughout her long professional life. This podcast fails in its portrayal of Marie Clay and incorrectly represents her thinking and contributions.

Fact Check: Three Things Hanford Got Wrong about Dr. Marie Clay

2024-02-08T09:08:37-05:00October 25th, 2022|Latest News|

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Emily Hanford, journalist and ‘science of reading’ advocate, posted a podcast specifically about Marie Clay’s theory and research.  The content is fraught with inaccuracies, misrepresentations, and cherry-picked quotes that cannot go without challenge.  The following information responds to several inaccuracies and provides a factual response.

Hanford stated that Marie Clay, ‘had an idea.’

Fact:  Marie Clay developed a theory of literacy processing based on scientific study.

Marie Clay was an ethical and meticulous researcher who studied beginning literacy over many years.   Her seminal research posed questions that no one had previously explored.  She sought an understanding of the development of initial literacy over an academic year rather than pursuing preconceived notions, or ideas, of learners and instruction.  Her goal was to document through scientific processes what occurs as young learners gain literacy skills and learn to read in the program offered by their schools.

This was groundbreaking work and involved the close observation of children reading and writing in their classrooms.  These students included a broad range of school entrants, not only struggling students.  Her study procedures included reliable, standardized measures to gather the evidence needed to describe reading skill development.  The results of this work allowed her to identify and substantiate the processing of these young readers and served as the basis of her theory of early reading and writing acquisition, a theory of reading and writing continuous texts.  Over many years, she conducted multiple studies to test her theory and to evaluate the implications of her discoveries for instruction.

One result of her extensive body of investigations is the early intervention designed to assist children struggling with initial literacy instruction, Reading Recovery.  From the initial trials of instruction designed for struggling readers, Marie Clay offered researched findings to support both her theory and her recommendations for instruction.

Both the quality and the scope of Clays’ research and work firmly established her reputation as a major contributor to the field of education, and more specifically to the field of early literacy. Marie Clay’s integrity, values, tentativeness, and commitment have been widely recognized and celebrated.  In fact, in 2000, the report of a survey of members of the prestigious National Reading Conference (the current Literacy Research Association) revealed that Marie Clay was the only scholar identified as a major influence across three decades (1970 – 1999). The academic community certainly recognized Clay’s three decades of research as more substantial than a mere “idea.”

Hanford stated, “Clay was describing the way poor readers read . . .and in schools all over the country, kids are actually being taught these strategies” and “look at some of the letters, make a good guess. That’s how Marie Clay described skilled reading.”

Fact:  Marie Clay’s definition of skilled reading accounts for perceptual and cognitive processing.

Marie Clay defined reading as a message-getting, problem-solving activity. Her definition acknowledges the directional constraints of written language, the verbal and perceptual behaviors that must be directed to identify sequences of information visually in text, and the expectation that meaning is the goal.   Her definition confirms that instruction must account for both perceptual (visual) and cognitive in-the-head processing as reading involves many working systems in the brain that search for and pick up verbal and perceptual information governed by directional rules; other systems which work on that information and make decisions, other systems which monitor and verify those decisions and systems which produce responses (Clay, 2001., p.1) .

Thus, Clay considered that progress in learning to read and write involves the development of a network of complex neural processing systems, perceptual and cognitive working systems, engaged in searching, monitoring, confirming, and self-correcting.  This definition of skilled reading, which absolutely includes the critical role of phonics, is complex.

In the first year of her seminal research, Clay looked at the behaviors of 100  children just learning to read and documented important evidence about how they were processing print.  The assessment tools developed by Clay allowed her to uncover what children knew, how they read, and how they were changing over time.  Studying the detailed accounts of the reading behaviors of the proficient readers in this study, she identified evidence “of the changes that may be expected over time, of the track that most children take, of the variability to be expected, and of different developmental paths” (Clay, 1998, p. 255).

Effective instruction must lead to more efficient literacy processing, including the visual decoding of words letter by letter, left to right.   She stated clearly that the child’s detailed control of print information, including phonological information, is an essential goal of early reading instruction and development (Clay, 2001), as detailed in the section below.

Briefly, Clay’s literacy processing theory is a theory of assembling a complex, in-the-head network of perceptual and cognitive working systems for reading or writing continuous text.  And, while phonics is clearly an essential focus, it is only a part of this complex system.  The key to the acquisition of an effective literacy processing system needs to include more than instruction in phonics.

Hanford stated that “Marie Clay did not believe in phonics instruction.”

Fact: Marie Clay believed phonics instruction is a critical aspect of learning to read proficiently.

Clay’s research and observations led to conclusions that emergent reading and writing share common ground, and both are strengthened by phonological and orthographic instruction.  Writing plays an important role in ensuring emergent learners attend closely to features of letters and sounds of letters as they write words.  Teaching strategies for emergent writers incorporate both phonological and orthographic practice and aligns with the research of Goswami and Bryant, Cazden, Pearson, and others.

Clay’s research and work in Reading Recovery acknowledge the importance of phonics knowledge as a component of reading and writing. Reading Recovery lessons incorporate phonics knowledge in isolation and in the context of reading and writing authentic texts daily.

Phonics skills are taught explicitly, often using multisensory techniques.  The focus of word analysis instruction is based upon close observation of what an individual reader knows and needs to learn next. Clay’s instructional recommendations include teaching:

  • Visual scanning of individual words, letter by letter, left to right
  • Recognition and discrimination of letters of the alphabet with increasing speed
  • Linking sounds to letters and letters to sounds
  • Developing phonemic awareness
  • Analyzing the sounds of words in writing
  • Hearing syllables and larger chunks (suffixes, prefixes)
  • Identifying a new word using analogy
  • Taking words apart during text reading
  • Identifying key sight vocabulary words.

Summary

Clay’s literacy processing theory requires careful study to understand and explain.  This response introduces concepts rudimentary to an erudite explanation.  One cannot gain a full understanding from excerpts taken out of context.  Without a complete and careful study of Clay’s full body of work, a journalist’s observations, assumptions, and conclusions lack credence.  The assumptions of Clay’s theory and research and the related implications offered in the podcast are faulty and do not lead to the conclusions offered by the journalist. Emily Hanford got it wrong.

References

Clay, M. M. (1998).  By different paths to common outcomes.  York, ME: Stenhouse.

Clay, M. M. (2001).  Change over time in children’s literacy development. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

The ‘science of reading’

2023-02-08T18:05:52-05:00October 21st, 2022|Latest News|

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By Paul Bowers

Originally published October 19, 2022. Republished with permission by Paul Bowers, author of the newsletter Brutal South https://brutalsouth.substack.com/p/the-science-of-reading-and-other

In May 2019 I attended the Education Writers Association conference in Baltimore and found myself seated at a banquet table with a public radio reporter who wanted to talk about literacy.

I was there on a scholarship to learn from veteran journalists, so I listened as the reporter, Emily Hanford, launched into a summary of her work. The reason why so many kids weren’t reading on grade level, she asserted, was that colleges of education, school districts, and individual teachers were stubbornly ignoring the science of reading, which indicated that kids needed explicit phonics instruction first and foremost.

This was my introduction to the “science of reading” movement, a media-driven push for more “scientific” approaches to reading instruction in schools — by which the proponents generally mean more phonics instruction. The problem is that the science is not as clear-cut as they say it is.

Here are a few headlines from the last 3 years, to give you an idea of where this is going:

  • “At a Loss for Words: How a flawed idea is teaching millions of kids to be poor readers” (American Public Media)
  • “States Should Recommend Better ‘Science of Reading’ Content, Report Says” (Education Week)
  • “Why Akron’s K-1 teachers are spending 60 hours learning about the science of reading” (Akron Beacon Journal)
  • “In Kentucky’s struggle against illiteracy, Oldham County moms fight for Science of Reading” (Louisville Courier-Journal)

In response to this wave of activism, the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado published a paper in September this year titled “The Science of Reading Movement: The Never-Ending Debate and the Need for a Different Approach to Reading Instruction.” The paper makes specific critiques of Hanford’s reporting, the wave of similar reports it inspired, and the small but vocal cadre of researchers who back her up. It seeks to unsettle public perception of what Hanford assured us was settled science.

Here’s a representative passage from the executive summary by Dr. Paul Thomas:

Educators and scholars have used the term “science of reading” as shorthand for the broad and nuanced body of research on how children learn to read and how best to teach reading. Since 2018, however, the phrase has been used in the media-based movement emphasizing phonics and in marketing phonics-oriented reading and literacy programs and services. Such media attention and associated advocacy have been extremely effective in lobbying for phonics-oriented legislation across most states in the U.S, with commercial vendors also contributing momentum.

The science-of-reading crowd is partly rehashing the “reading wars,” a pseudo-academic debate that engulfed the education press in the 1980s. At least in the public imagination, the debate at that time was between advocates of “whole language” and advocates of “phonics.” The whole-language camp emphasized a holistic approach to reading and comprehension, while the phonics camp pushed for students to learn the mechanics of language first.

But that was a false dichotomy, even in the ‘80s. The “whole language” crowd never said we should discard phonics instruction entirely; rather, they contended that students could learn phonics in part by reading texts. “Phonics” was never really a school of thought unto itself, but it was (and still is) a tool in teachers’ toolbelt. The balanced literacy approach taught in colleges of education nowadays acknowledges the need for a multiplicity of approaches including phonics, tailored to an individual student’s needs.

I was in no position to judge harshly. I had made the same mistake as Hanford just a few months earlier, in February 2019, in a middling article I had written for the Charleston Post and Courier about the proliferation of approaches to reading instruction in South Carolina public schools. The subject was fresh in my mind because several teachers and professors had reached out after the article was published and gently explained why I was either oversimplifying the research or, in some cases, flat-out wrong.

One of the people who reached out was Dr. Paul Thomas, a Furman University education professor who was one of my closest readers and sharpest critics at the time. He was right, and he’d sent me a stack of research papers to prove it (this turned out to be a small sample of the massive bibliography he would later assemble for the NEPC paper against the science-of-reading movement). I’d been reading the papers at night when I couldn’t sleep, and the more studies and meta-analyses I read, the less convinced I was that “phonics first” was a sound teaching practice.

At the EWA conference, after a friendly back-and-forth across the banquet table, Hanford assured me she’d been researching the subject in depth and I told her I looked forward to hearing her work. I was hardly an expert, and I figured that maybe she had read some definitive evidence that I hadn’t.

But when I got back to my hotel room and looked up her work, I found that Hanford had committed some of the same errors as I had, cherrypicking research papers and making policy prescriptions based on a 40-year-old pop-academic framework. Education journalism, like science journalism, has a bias for oversimplification.

One of Hanford’s best-known pieces for American Public Media is a September 2018 article and radio segment called “Hard Words: Why aren’t kids being taught to read?” It’s a well-told story focusing on the public school system in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and it’s proven to be widely influential in education news media and public policymaking. It’s an odd piece of reporting.

The segment leans heavily on anecdotal evidence, findings from a 2000 National Reading Panel that got us the ill-fated No Child Left Behind policy era, and commercial curricula like LETRS that are not backed up by peer-reviewed research. It makes some bold philosophical claims and mocks people with doctorate degrees in education for disagreeing. Here’s a passage to give you a flavor:

In a session of LETRS training for faculty in Jackson, Mississippi, in March 2018, the trainer, Antonio Fierro, passed out a quiz. The first question was: “True or false? Speaking is natural, reading and writing are not.” The answer is “true,” but the question was being asked because it’s not a given that the 37 people in this training, a mix of mostly tenured faculty and adjuncts, would know that.

But is the answer “true”? What is meant by “natural” here? Hanford never says.

The “science of reading” movement is already having effects in the classroom, as detailed in the NEPC report. Some states and school districts have enacted policies requiring teachers to use specific instructional practices such as systematic phonics, while other practices have been banned, such as the “three-cueing” approach from whole language. High-stakes testing in grade 3, coupled with third-grade retention policies, are boosting test scores in the short term while likely damaging students’ academic careers in the long run.

I would add that “science of reading” discourse is a convenient way to elide the labor realities of education. One of the policy proposals from Dr. Thomas’ paper is: “Provide students struggling to read and other at-risk students with certified, experienced teachers and low student-teacher ratios to support individualized and differentiated instruction” (emphasis mine).

As you’ve probably heard, certified, experienced teachers are quitting the profession in droves, citing low pay, untenable workloads, and a lack of autonomy among their reasons. Creating low student-teacher ratios would require the teacher workforce to grow faster than the student population. In a state like mine, where the legislature hasn’t even enforced classroom size caps since the self-imposed budget freefall of 2010, that seems like a fantasy.

Education reporters, like most journalists, are interlopers. During my time in the profession, I tried to exercise a little humility in the presence of teachers and researchers who had made education their life’s work. Fundamentally, it’s a labor beat.

Teacher working conditions are student learning conditions. I have a hard time imagining how more micromanagement to enforce “science of reading” policies will improve conditions for anyone.

***

Editing note: After publishing, I had a little heartburn about the headline and changed it to remove the phrase “and other nonsense.” There is a science to reading, and the work of our best teachers and literacy interventionists is informed by it. But I think the way the phrase “science of reading” gets thrown around in the press can be reductive and misleading. I might have been a little reductive myself there, and I apologize.

I’d also like to add that I’m still trying to understand literacy research and policy, which have certainly shifted in the 3 years since I lost my news reporting job. One of our kids’ teachers recently went through certification for the Orton-Gillingham Approach, a multisensory method of small-group pull-out reading instruction that has a strong track record especially (but not exclusively) for kids with dyslexia. I’ve seen O-G methods in practice and I’m a big believer in including them as a tool for teaching literacy. What makes me wary is when policymakers try to mandate one approach to the exclusion of other valid approaches. If my tone in this piece was dismissive, again, I apologize.

 

Paul Bowers is the author of the newsletter Brutal South, a weekly newsletter about class struggle and education in the American South.

 

 

Reading Recovery: The Facts

2023-02-16T11:25:19-05:00October 19th, 2022|Latest News|

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A Message from the North American Reading Recovery Trainers

Reading Recovery teaching reflects the complexity of early literacy learning.  As with many areas of specialized study, inaccuracies may occur.  Use this resource to check misinformation.

Reading Recovery provides tutoring that is additional to classroom instruction for first-grade children who are having difficulty learning to read. The individual tutoring of reading, writing, and phonics is systematic, explicit, and intensive. Documented in the national data collected annually on every Reading Recovery child served, the evidence clearly demonstrates that Reading Recovery works successfully with any high-quality instructional program provided by the classroom teacher.

“Whole Language” is a philosophy of education that was influential on classroom reading and writing programs in the 1980s and 1990s.  It brought attention to the importance of language and high-quality books in classroom instruction.  It was widely misunderstood, not adequate, and not related to the instruction in the Reading Recovery tutorial.  Reading Recovery tutoring is based on a completely different theory of how children learn to read and on decades of research evidence that reveals the complex way readers process information in the brain.  In Reading Recovery, the young reader learns to decode words with accuracy and read with fluency and understanding.

Children in Reading Recovery are taught to decode words accurately and read for understanding. While each child’s prior knowledge contributes to checking on and comprehending their reading, phonemic awareness and phonics instruction teach children a system for decoding unknown words proficiently and quickly while reading.  This system becomes more complex over time as readers meet new challenges in more difficult books.

Reading Recovery is not a commercial, for-profit program. Reading Recovery’s trademark is a guarantee of both high-quality training for teachers and research-based instruction for each child having extreme difficulty learning to read and write in grade one. Teachers choose from a wide range of instructional materials based on daily observations and evidence of what the child knows and needs to learn next.

Specially trained Reading Recovery teachers design daily, individualized, one-to-one lessons based on each child’s current reading and writing, and yes, phonics skills. Teachers assess and adjust the child’s instruction using high-quality books, and materials to develop letter-sound understandings, phonics, and word knowledge. Children delight in their Reading Recovery teachers’ attention to their strengths and needs and thrive in this 30-minute instructional format.

Reading Recovery is a short-term, preventative intervention for first graders experiencing extreme difficulty with reading and writing. Instead of waiting for the child to fail, Reading Recovery intervenes in grade one. In just 12 to 20 weeks of daily 30-minute lessons, children make faster-than-average progress, ready to take advantage of good classroom reading, writing, and phonics instruction and continue to learn with their classmates.

Reading Recovery is designed to prevent young children from years of difficulty in reading and writing. When 30-minute daily lessons are provided to the first-grade children who have the most difficulty learning to read and write, the research evidence demonstrates that approximately 70 percent of students achieve success in approximately 12-20 weeks and can take advantage of classroom instruction to continue to learn.  The small number of children who do not make enough progress in the short-term intervention benefit from the weeks of systematic diagnosis and are identified for further evaluation of their ongoing needs.

Reading Recovery intervenes early to develop reading, writing, and foundational literacy skills, so children do not experience years of failure.  The first graders with the most difficulty are provided daily, systematic, 30-minute tutoring by a specially trained teacher for approximately 12-20 weeks.  Systematic, individualized instruction is based on daily evidence of children’s performance and is provided in addition to a high-quality classroom reading, writing and phonics program.

Reading Recovery does not replace the classroom program, the primary source of literacy instruction for all children, but works as a secondary intervention.  Reading Recovery provides a short-term intervention of no more than 20 weeks to accelerate children’s progress in reading and writing and prepare them to participate successfully in the classroom program.  Familiar with classroom teachers’ expectations, Reading Recovery teachers assist students with the process of joining their average peers ready to meet the expectations of the classroom program.

Reading Recovery procedures involve explicit and systematic instruction in phonics and word analysis skills across the lesson in reading, writing, and hands-on activities.  Children learn the foundational skills to develop a reader’s complex literacy processing system.  Research-based procedures address phonemic awareness, letter identification and discrimination, phonics, and advanced skills to decode unknown words when reading, and hearing and recording sounds in words when writing.

Every first-grade literacy learner is unique. Reading Recovery teachers tailor instruction to the student.  Knowledge of letters, letter-sound links, words, print concepts, and text reading are assessed in detail.  Teachers analyze reading and writing strengths, note individual learning differences, and design individual lessons that support every child’s acquisition of reading, writing, and phonics skills using a range of interesting books, manipulatives, magnetic letters, and other specially selected materials.

A key element of Reading Recovery is the careful monitoring of every child’s literacy progress.  Teachers assess and analyze the child’s reading, writing, and phonics skills and use this information to design precisely tailored daily lessons.  Assessment data are used to communicate with families and the classroom teacher to ensure seamless coordination of instruction and literacy success. Assessment data collected at the school and district levels inform program delivery and school improvement with the goal of every child becoming a reader and writer.

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