by Adria Klein and Deb Rich, Trainers, Saint Mary’s College of California

As Trainers, we collaborate in planning our classes and support ongoing professional development with Teacher Leaders and Teachers. With a combined 33 years of experience training Teacher Leaders and even more working in schools, including both our experiences as former Reading Recovery Teachers, we have thought deeply about the power of Reading Recovery as a systemic approach. As we began drafting this blog, five factors influenced our thinking: Strength of the Professional Development Model, Collective Professional Knowledge, Dexterity and Deliberateness, Communication, and Complex Theory of Literacy Processing for Older Students. We researched these areas and found many references by Clay and others that expanded our understanding. In this blog, we will address the first two points and will continue with the discussion in the next blog.

Strength of the Professional Development Model

The seminal research of Linda Darling-Hammond, specifically around Reading Recovery as a professional development model, has influenced our efforts.  The quotes from her work that follow identified seven key factors of effectiveness:

Specifically, [Learning Policy Institute] found that it:

1. Is content focused
2. Incorporates active learning utilizing adult learning theory
3. Supports collaboration, typically in job-embedded contexts
4. Uses models and modeling of effective practice
5. Provides coaching and expert support
6. Offers opportunities for feedback and reflection
7. Is of sustained duration

The Reading Recovery program… is an example of one program that possesses all seven elements and has been found to generate positive student gains.

Darling-Hammond, et al., 2017, p. 4

These findings suggest that the Reading Recovery PD program is capable of positively impacting student achievement on a large scale and can help drive equitable learning outcomes for ELL and rural students.

Darling-Hammond, et al., 2017, p. 5

Ideally, the PD is aligned with school and district priorities, providing a coherence for teachers, as opposed to having PD compete with differing school and district priorities.

Darling-Hammond, et al., 2017, p. 5

To prepare teachers to play this critical role, Reading Recovery provides intensive PD that incorporates all seven elements of effective PD.

Darling-Hammond, et al., 2017, p. 5

Gaffney and Anderson found an additional factor that was important to consider.

The two-tiered scaffold illustrates the integral, interactive relationship between the processes used to prepare experts and the method used to teach novices. Reading Recovery, a supplemental program for first-grade children who are at risk of reading failure, is presented as an instantiation of Vygotsky’s theoretical framework and is used to illustrate the two-tiered scaffolding model.

Gaffney & Anderson, 1991, p. 4

Clay said the following about the essential qualities of professional development provided by Teacher Leaders:

They need to be able to lead teachers into discussions of the ‘why’ questions but their personal challenge is to become more articulate about what they understand by the term ‘literacy processing’, the theory of reading and writing with which they work…. These discussions will relate to the psychological processes described in current models of reading and writing acquisition. They may deal with text meaning and comprehension; with direct and rapid access to known vocabulary prompted both by visual recognition and phonological learning; with problem-solving new texts using knowledge of any kind interactively (visual, phonological, word, syntactic, language, book knowledge and world knowledge); and with monitoring whether a ‘good fit’ of all information has been achieved, and if not, then operating error detecting and correcting strategies.

Clay, 2015, p. 232

Collective Professional Knowledge

The complex learning that is developed during professional development fosters collective professional knowledge of the teachers. The I3 report provides a wealth of research for this work.

…in schools exhibiting integration, communication between Reading Recovery teachers, classroom teachers, and administrators was not only about Reading Recovery students, but about literacy more broadly, and what contribution the program could make to increasing capacity for excellent literacy instruction across the school. In these schools, classroom teachers actively collaborated with Reading Recovery teachers, and used the understandings they developed through this collaboration to improve their classroom literacy instruction. Because the scope of communication extended beyond the Reading Recovery classroom and Reading Recovery students, classroom teachers understood not only what happened in Reading Recovery, but how they could parlay the program into school-wide improvement.

May, et al., 2016, p. 141

Through a shared vision, administrators, Reading Recovery Teacher Leaders, Reading Recovery Teachers, and classroom teachers in the Long Beach Unified School District in California collaborated to “accelerate teacher skill development and confidence, build collective efficacy, and increase rates of student success” throughout the district.…we believed that our Reading Recov­ery staff had the expertise, experi­ence, and tenacity to support the implementation of an intervention system that broadened the impact of their work in schools.

Baker & Brown, p. 17

The Intensive Intervention Model includes three pillars summarized in Figure 1. Each pillar is considered critical to the model’s success…. In the LBUSD model, it is the coordination of services, the commitment to communication, and the acknowledgement that “we all have a job to do” that led to the model’s success.

Baker & Brown p. 18-19

In Summary

As Trainers and members of the Reading Recovery Professional Development community along with Teacher Leaders and Teachers, we explored the first two factors of five in this blog specifically and shared key quotes in this blog. The Reading Recovery Professional Development model utilizes well-prepared Teacher Leaders as district or regional coaches, based on Clay’s design for learning. What we are suggesting is that the Teacher Leader is an effective agent for systemic change across an entire district or region. Clay’s literacy processing theory is the foundation of our collective understanding; Teacher Leaders are key contributors to professional learning communities. Next time, we will address the topics of Dexterity and Deliberateness, Communication, and Complex Theory of Literacy Processing for Older Students.

References

Baker, J. & Brown, K. (2018). Broadening the sphere of influence: Reading Recovery as part of one district’s comprehensive intervention approach. Journal of Reading Recovery, 17(2), 17-23.

Clay, M. M. (2015). Change over time in children’s literacy development. Marie Clay Trust.

Gaffney, J. & Anderson. R. C. (1991, January). Two-tiered scaffolding: Congruent processes of teaching and learning. Technical Report 523. Washington DC: Office of Educational Research and Improvement.

Darling-Hammond, L., Hyler, M. E., Gardner, M. (2017). Effective Teacher Professional Development. Palo Alto, CA: Learning Policy Institute.

May, H., Sirinides, P., Gray, A., & Goldsworthy, H. (2016). Reading Recovery: An Evaluation of the Four-Year i3 Scale-Up. Philadelphia: Consortium for Policy Research in Education.

by Dr. Billy Molasso

A story goes that someone once complained to Voltaire that life is hard, to which the French thinker replied, “Compared to what?”

The “compared to what” question comes to mind with Henry May’s new research on Reading Recovery suggesting that the tutoring program for first graders struggling with reading does not produce lasting gains and may even hold back students. Any intervention has limited rates of success, but by failing to compare RR to any other intervention aimed at young readers, the study is unable to conclude that the program is not working. As Voltaire might ask, if not Reading Recovery, then what?

Decades of results and mountains of research show that Reading Recovery has been working well for generations of students since it was imported from New Zealand more than 35 years ago. That’s why it is used in more than 2,000 school districts in North America.

Results matter. Our annual results publicly published every year demonstrate that Reading Recovery has a profound impact on most children in the intervention.  Take a look at last year’s IDEC summary report and see how Reading Recovery students actually did better during the COVID disruption than did the random sample of students who did not receive this intervention.

The May study further suggests that children who had Reading Recovery in first grade actually showed “negative” impacts by third grade. Journalist Emily Hanford, who has been on a phonics-for-all crusade for years, seized on the findings, explaining that third and fourth grade test scores of Reading Recovery students were worse than, “similar students who did not receive Reading Recovery.”

Stop right there!

The students in the control group were not “similar.” If they were, we would know their demographics – which we don’t – and they would have been identified as needing intervention—which they weren’t.

In other words, the control group kids were very likely doing better in first grade compared to the Reading Recovery kids. And many Reading Recovery students continued to struggle, no doubt, for the same reason they struggled in the first place, which the study did not even attempt to identify.

Beyond that, many of the Reading Recovery students in the study did not receive the full 12-20 weeks. Some may have had only a week or two. This is a bit like concluding that sports teams that skip the second half of a game tend to lose.

Moreover, we freely acknowledge that Reading Recovery has a success rate of about 75%. Some kids who need help in 1^st grade also need help in subsequent years. Did they get it? The study doesn’t say, but the answer is most likely no. While effective when done right, one-on-one tutoring is expensive.

We also question the study’s reliance exclusively on standardized test scores from multiple states. These tests vary widely in quality and scale, and they tend to measure vocabulary and comprehension, both of which depend partially on content knowledge.

If the study was confined to those who both completed the program, and were identified as not needing further interventions, we might have more confidence in it. Or if the study didn’t have a 75% attrition rate, we might have more confidence in it. As is, we take the study with a grain of salt, or maybe even a gallon jar.

May seemed to concede as much, telling Hanford, he “wouldn’t go so far as to say” that Reading Recovery was “harmful.” Hanford, however, glosses over May’s nuance, stating definitively in her headline that the intervention, “Had a negative impact on children.”  In doing so she discounts other recent, peer-reviewed research, such as Hurry, Fridkin and Holliman’s exploring the long-term effects of Reading Recovery on UK students at age 16. That study finds highly positive long-term outcomes, but you didn’t see it amplified by Hanford, because it doesn’t adhere to her well-crafted storyline.

The whole point of Reading Recovery is to do whatever it takes to help struggling students learn to read. All kids need phonics, but some may already have it while lacking content knowledge or vocabulary. The job of educators – and especially one-on-one interventionists—is to meet kids where they are – not where we wish them to be.

Studies like May’s raise more questions than answers. We welcome an open, honest dialogue about the best way to help struggling readers learn, but the May study is not a good place to start. Instead, we point to decades of positive results, which—when all is said and done—trumps research every time.

Dr. Billy Molasso is the Executive Director of the Reading Recovery Council of North America.