Reading Recovery Program opens regional institute

Dr. Judith Neal, director of the Reading Recovery program, trains teachers in intervention methods for first graders who have difficulty reading.

by April Schulthies

This February Fresno State will begin sponsoring its own Central California Reading Recovery Institute to be housed in the Visalia Convention Center. The institute will serve 89 school districts, more than 200 schools in the region and many people from out of state.

Clinical psychologist Dr. Marie Clay originally developed Reading Recovery as an early intervention program to help first graders who are at risk of reading failure. Clay, who is a professor emerita of the University of Auckland, New Zealand, will be the featured guest at the institute's opening session Feb. 25 in Visalia.

Currently there are 28 Reading Recovery teacher training sites for the region, including nine out-of-state affiliated sites. This December Bellingham Public Schools in the state of Washington also became a new affiliate.

Dr. Judith Neal, professor in the Department of Literacy and Early Education, directs the Reading Recovery Program for the Central California region. She describes Reading Recovery as a "trainer of trainers model," which is training based, not curriculum based.

The program trains teacher leaders who learn how to help other teachers to address the individual needs of children, Neal said. This year Neal is training seven new teacher leaders who will in turn teach Reading Recovery methods in five local school districts.

"Our goal in the program is to enable the lowest performing children in the first grade to recover the trajectory of reading progress that their classmates are on," Neal said.

Neal noted that, with the help of a strong intervention program, first graders who fall behind in their reading progress often do not find it difficult to catch up with their peers, whereas readers with problems in the second and third grades have a wider gap to cover.

According to Neal, studies indicate a direct correlation between the prison population and the number of children who are illiterate in the third grade. Literacy in the first grade is directly related to success in school and later life, Neal noted.

The average Reading Recovery program takes between 14 and 20 weeks and has a 70 to 80 percent success rate in getting young readers back on track. The project regularly employs a full-time teacher leader in the Spanish version of the program, Descubriendo la Lectura.

Reading Recovery programs are now in five countries - New Zealand, Australia, Canada, England and the United States well as in Department of Defense schools in other parts of the world.