Purdue News

August 27, 1993 Purdue brings reading recovery to Indiana WEST LAFAYETTE, IND.–When Maribeth Schmitt first met Isaiah, he had been in the first grade for more than three months and still couldn't read a simple story. "Isaiah had no trouble reading a list of words; he just couldn't understand how they were connected when they were part of a text," says Schmitt, who is director of Indiana's new Reading Recovery Program based at Purdue University. Schmitt decided that Isaiah was in danger of falling so far behind his classmates that he'd never catch up. She signed him up for Reading Recovery and began working with him one-on-one for 3O minutes a day. After two days he was reading simple texts. After four weeks, he had caught up with his classmates and "graduated" from Reading Recovery. When he finished the first grade, he was reading at the fifth-grade level. Schmitt worked with Isaiah in 1992 in Champaign, Ill., while she was spending a year learning how to train Reading Recovery instructors, who are called teacher leaders. This year she is back home at Purdue, training eight master teachers from around the state to be Indiana's first Reading Recovery leaders. Those eight women, who have just arrived on campus for a full year of training, will return to their school districts next year, and each will teach about a dozen co-workers how to apply Reading Recovery techniques. "This program is most effective because children learn to be independent readers," says Schmitt, who is a visiting assistant professor of literacy and language in the School of Education. "Studies by Ohio State University show a success rate of about 85 percent nationally, and most of the students who complete the program continue to read at the appropriate grade level at least through fourth grade, with no further intervention." The program also saves money in the long run, she says. Schmitt says research and actual experiences of schools show that one teacher, working half of each day in Reading Recovery for one year with a total of eight children, would enable a school district to at least: Prevent two children from being retained in first grade. Avoid the need to serve two children in Chapter 1, a federally funded reading remediation program. Those children probably would have remained in that program for five years. Avoid misclassifying one child as learning disabled. That child probably would have remained in special education for six years of elementary school. So what is Reading Recovery, how does it work and how did it come to Indiana? The program was developed in the mid- 197Os by Marie M. Clay, a New Zealand educator and psychologist. The program was implemented nationwide in New Zealand in the early '8Os. Reading Recovery identifies the 2O percent of pupils in a first-grade class who are at risk in learning to become literate. Specially trained teachers work one-on-one with those students for 3O minutes a day until the students have caught up with their classmates. The teachers typically work with four students at a time, providing customized lessons that are created each day for each student. on average, it takes about 16 weeks for a pupil to complete the program, so each teacher works with an average of eight pupils a year. A typical lesson has five parts: The student reads several familiar stories from hundreds of "little books" that are ranked according to difficulty. The student reads a story that he or she had read once with the teacher the day before, while the teacher records the child's reading behaviors. The student writes a story. The student works with a cut-up sentence from his or her story. The student and teacher read a new book that the student will read independently the next day. The program was pioneered in the United States by researchers at Ohio State University who were looking for alternatives to traditional remedial reading programs. They pilot tested Reading Recovery in the Columbus, Ohio, public school system in 1985. The school system adopted the program districtwide the next year, and the Ohio General Assembly provided money to expand it statewide. Illinois also was among the first states to adopt the program, which now operates in 39 states. It was an Illinois connection that brought the program to Indiana. The instigator was Timothy F. Hyland, superintendent of the Champaign, Ill., school system. He is a native of Lake County, Ind., a Purdue graduate, a former administrator in the Indianapolis Public Schools and a firm believer in Reading Recovery. "We started the program in 1988, and by last year we had a Reading Recovery teacher in each of our 1O elementary schools," he said of his district. "In Illinois, we are second only to Chicago in the number of Reading Recovery teachers." Hyland spoke to staff and faculty of Purdue's School of Education at a retreat held soon after Marilyn Haring became dean of the school in 1991. NOTE: A sidebar to this story lists all the elementary-school teachers in Indiana who are learning Reading Recovery techniques this year. Also, a black-and-white or color feature photo is available, as are black-and-white head shots of the eight teacher leaders and Maribeth Schmitt and Deborah Dillon. To request photos, contact Purdue News Service, 765-494-2O8O. Contact Purdue News Service (765) 494-2096 or purduenews@purdue.edu To the Purdue News and Photos Page