It’s Roaming Week at RRCNA! Check back in on Thursday for the rest of our two-part blog series Roaming: The Power of the Known for the blog The Power of Name: Getting Students Off to a Powerful Start in Roaming.

The year that I completed my Reading Recovery training, I shared a teaching space with a highly seasoned Reading Recovery teacher. After teaching in the classroom, the idea of only working with what is known during Roaming was such a stretch for me. I would begin my Roaming lesson thinking I was doing ok, only to hear from across the room, “You’re teaching!” I began to dread those Roaming lessons because I knew that I was under scrutiny. I know that this teacher was only trying to help. It may have just taken her words to help guide me to the discovery that time spent in Roaming can be beautiful.

How can it be beautiful? I find that our students who qualify for Reading Recovery already feel defeated. They recognize that they are behind their peers and that literacy learning does not come easy to them. This awareness is hard to overcome but, brilliantly, Dr. Clay designed this special Roaming time to help us show them that, yes, they can be successful.

Roaming is a time to get personal. This time allows us, the teachers, to get to know the child, more closely than any other teacher has before. We need to discover their interests, their passions, their family dynamic, etc. During Roaming, we can develop a rapport with them and this genuine interest is not missed by many children. Without the time to discover this particular child’s personality, conversations in further lessons will be contrived and strained.

Roaming is a time to have fun! Read those books that are of high interest, whether they are read to the child, read with the child, or at a level that the child can read easily without frustration. Write fun stories about superheroes, princesses, pets, and loved characters. Personally, I ask parents to send me pictures of the child doing what he or she loves from home. Those faces light up when they see a picture of a pet or a family member that they can write about. I also hang their writing completed during Roaming in the hallway and they notice. I see and hear them in the hallway pointing their work out to their friends.

While we are not explicitly teaching during Roaming, our students are still learning from our wise modeling and immediate assistance. At a recent LitCon conference, Mary Fried shared her study of High Impact Reading Recovery teachers. She noted what successful teachers had going RIGHT during the first 6 weeks of lessons. One aspect that I found interesting is that these teachers reassessed each child’s Writing Vocabulary and Hearing and Recording Sounds in Words at lesson 10, as well as Mary Fried’s Letter Formation and Clay’s Record of Oral Language. Now that I am a Reading Recovery Teacher Leader, I encouraged my teachers to complete these activities to see the growth that occurred during Roaming, especially after the low scores we saw following Covid quarantines. It was not surprising to see students grow 2-3 or more stanines after only 10 lessons of Roaming! While we are not teaching, they are surely learning!

For a student to experience success with literacy tasks with our expert support during Roaming is quite possibly what begins to change the trajectory of his or her literacy learning. This, my friends, is quite a beautiful thing!

Nancy Lane has worked as an educator in the lower primary grades for a total of 25 years. She has been involved in the Reading Recovery community for a total of 17 years, 12 years as a Reading Recovery Teacher and the last five as a Reading Recovery Teacher Leader at the LaRue County Reading Recovery Site in Hodgenville, Kentucky. Nancy is also a National Board Certified Teacher in the area of Literacy: Reading-Language Arts/ Early and Middle Childhood.  In her free time, she enjoys spending time with her family, which includes her husband, their two children, and three rowdy dogs.

Join us this year in a five-part series while we follow the journey of Courtney Smith at Clemson University as she trains to be a Teacher Leader.

By Courtney Smith

I was in a classroom the other day at school where a teacher had a poster of various emotions asking, “How do you feel today?” As I looked at the faces and stages of feelings, I realized that in this first month and a half of Teacher Leader training I have been through a range of emotions: excited, stressed, happy, worried, grateful, scared, tired, and energized.  

My training class at Clemson is comprised of six Reading Recovery teachers from the state of South Carolina, including myself. We started off our training with the infamous Observation Survey training week and concluded by receiving our giant tub of books. As training continued, we constantly reminded ourselves that, in the words of Ross Gellar, “It’s fine. I’m fine. Everything’s fine.”

As anyone trained in Reading Recovery knows, the first sight of the tub of books and discussion about the oral exam can send a shiver down your spine. My training class shared a thought: ”Can I really do this?”

Yes, we can.

As I returned to my classroom and worked out with the school team to whom I would be serving the first wave, I was assigned a little girl I knew from kindergarten. The whole school knew her from kindergarten. She’d had a tough life at only five years old and handling big emotions wasn’t always easy. Her behavior and tantrums often prevented her from staying in the classroom and having the opportunity to learn.  

As she and I continued to build upon the relationship we had established last year, she began to open up more in her roaming lessons, and her confidence as a reader and a writer grew. During roaming, she loved to write stories and make books to share with teachers throughout the building. On roaming day eight, she told me she wanted to write a book for the library so that other kids could read a book that she wrote. A child who once refused to name a letter of the alphabet for her kindergarten teacher as an act of defiance is now so proud to share her writing that she wants the whole school to see it!

This is the reason we get the box of books, hear and slightly panic about the oral exam, and stay up later than we want to trudge through the brilliance of Marie Clay in Change Over Time. Every day in our work with our students makes a difference in their lives.  

As future Teacher Leaders, we will have the blessing and opportunity to impact more than the students we serve but also all the students of trained teachers in our district. This impact has to be our focus as we go through the year. It may feel like there isn’t enough time to accomplish everything. Sometimes, you may question if you ever really knew anything about Reading Recovery when trying to understand the readings. However, it is worth the stress, the late-night reading, and the long uphill walk to class in August in the South (if you’ve ever been to Clemson, you know what I’m talking about — NO parking!).

It’s worth it for the students we teach, the teachers we train, and the community of Reading Recovery professionals we are building.

BOULDER, CO (September 13, 2022) – How students learn to read and how reading is best taught are often the focus of media, public, and political criticism. In a new NEPC policy brief, The Science of Reading Movement: The Never-Ending Debate and the Need for a Different Approach to Reading Instruction, Paul Thomas of Furman University explores the controversial history of the reading reform movement.

Throughout the decades, a striking amount of attention has sporadically been focused on how teachers teach reading—typically with a specific concern for phonics instruction. This attention has then spread to standardized test scores (including international comparisons) and a changing list of hypothetical causes for disappointing test scores (including progressivism, whole language, and balanced literacy).

Disappointing reading achievement has been sometimes attributed to how reading is taught, sometimes to social influences on students (such as technology and media), and sometimes to both. Widespread and ongoing criticism over the last 80 years has targeted a wide array of culprits:

• State and federal reading policy;
• The quality of teacher education and teacher professional development;
• Theories of learning to read and reading instruction;
• The role of phonics and other reading skills in teaching reading; and
• The persistent gaps among classroom practices, reading policy, and the nature or application of science and research.

These discussions have not been evidence-free. In fact, scholars and literacy educators have over this time conducted extensive research into these and other issues. But the research has only limited impact on policy and practice.

Specifically, in contrast to much of the public debate and policymaking, these researchers have found reading instruction and learning to be complex, complicating the design of effective policy and classroom practice. Overall, this robust research base supports policies and approaches that acknowledge a range of individual student needs and that argue against “one-size-fits-all” prescriptions. Among literacy educators and scholars, then, important reading debates continue but do so without any identified silver-bullet solutions.

The current public debate is different. Since 2018, the phrase “science of reading” has been popularized as loosely defined shorthand for the broad and complex research base characterizing how children learn to read and how best to teach reading. Simplifying the issue for the public and for political readers, and failing to acknowledge the full complement of research findings, prominent members of the education media have used the term when framing the contemporary debate—often as pro-phonics versus no phonics. Various types of vendors have also found the shorthand term “science of reading” highly useful in branding and marketing specific phonics-oriented reading and literacy programs.

As the “science of reading” movement has grown, scholars have cautioned that advocates and commercial vendors often exaggerate and oversimplify both the problems and solutions around reading achievement and instruction. Yet these advocates have been extremely effective in lobbying for revised and new phonics-heavy reading legislation across most states in the U.S., producing rigid and ultimately harmful policy and practices. Still, in pursuing reform to address identified challenges, the movement does provide an opportunity for policymakers to investigate different approaches to reading instruction and to develop more nuanced policy.

Accordingly, Professor Thomas provides recommendations for state and local policymakers to provide teachers the flexibility and support necessary to adapt their teaching strategies to specific students’ needs.

Find The Science of Reading Movement: The Never-Ending Debate and the Need for a Different Approach to Reading Instruction, by Paul Thomas, at: https://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/science-of-reading

Submitted by Lisa Fisher, Reading Recovery Teacher Leader, Sarasota County Schools

Watch this powerful video about the Sarasota County Reading Recovery program to hear parents, principals, Reading Recovery Teachers, homeroom teachers, and both current and past Reading Recovery students discuss what Reading Recovery means to them. “This is the most targeted, individualized instruction available to help with early literacy. I dare say it is the best thing that has happened to Sarasota County students,” says Principal Lisa Wheatley. 

Mairym, a former Reading Recovery student, shares how she has grown into a seventh-grade honor student while Kayla, a recent Reading Recovery first-grader, grins while she proudly shows off her recent A on a reading test. “I have seen complete joy take over a child’s face when reading just clicks,” shares Reading Recovery Teacher Kelly Watts. “Tapping into and opening up that joy is what Reading Recovery does each and every day.”