'One Bite at a Time': Intervention practices in Utah districts strengthen reading teachers and improve student literacy - University of Utah reading teacher training curriculum

School Administrator, Jan, 2002 by Kathleen J. Brown

"Why are so many of our kids reading below grade level?" "What are you doing to improve reading scores in this district?" "Do teachers know what to do when at-risk and struggling readers enter their classrooms?"

These hard-hitting questions today are being directed to superintendents across the nation with ever-increasing frequency. And despite the best intentions of those on the front lines and the sunniest promises of consultants and academic experts selling silver bullets, easy solutions do not exist.

Part of the answer, however, lies in teacher knowledge. While state-of-the-art classroom materials are important, they are no substitute for educators who have deep expertise in reading development and reading instruction.

What is the best way to help teachers develop this expertise? University teacher preparation programs lay some foundation, but superintendents and principals know full well that novice teachers exit even the best programs only partially prepared for the complex job of teaching struggling readers.

Once engaged in classroom practice, teachers have access to a diverse range of professional development opportunities, all the way from workshops by colleagues to graduate programs in education. Certainly the quality of these experiences varies widely. What characterizes professional development programs that really make a difference? That is, what kind of professional development helps a teacher to respond effectively to a dejected 3rd grader who still reads at primer level or to a wiggly 1st grader who knows only 13 letter names?

Year-Long Training

At the University of Utah Reading Clinic in Salt Lake City, we are addressing those questions. Working together with school district administrators, reading specialists, classroom teachers, paraprofessionals and university professors, we believe we are making concrete progress toward satisfactory answers.

For the past three years, we have provided professional development in reading intervention for educators on-site in their own schools. The experience is intensive and ongoing, lasting a year or more.

As educators learn how to address the needs of struggling readers--the ones who keep us awake at night worrying-- they become better reading teachers for all students. In fact, at the completion of the program, veteran teachers with 15 and 20 years of experience often report they gained a significant amount of knowledge about reading development, and most importantly, improved their ability to facilitate that process for students who struggle.

We believe our reading intervention model and professional development program may inform the practices of other schools and districts eager to make a significant difference in literacy levels. We have learned from three years of implementation what it takes to make the experience happen effectively, what the benefits are, why our approach is effective and how potential hurdles might be overcome.

Individual Tutoring

The content of the reading intervention itself is simple yet elegant and robust. Although the amount of time spent and the sequence of activities vary somewhat with the child's reading ability, each tutoring session includes three basic components: guided reading precisely at the child's instructional level; systematic, isolated decoding/spelling instruction; and fluency work. For readers below a primer level, tutoring occurs daily. For those above primer, tutoring occurs twice a week.

How do we know it works? We collect pre-post data on all students who receive the intervention. Moreover, the model itself has been tested empirically in quasi-experiments with excellent results. (See resource list, page 28.)

All tutoring sessions take place in a one-on-one format. One-on-one is a powerful aspect of many reading interventions, but that power does not benefit students alone. The opportunity to watch reading development happen up close and personal without the demands of classroom management significantly contributes to teachers' increased expertise.

"It's the one-on-one and the online feedback," says Peggy Lundberg, a reading specialist in the Murray, Utah, School District, pointing to the key elements. "I appreciate the fact that this intervention model is research-based. I've been teaching for 18 years and I've learned more about teaching reading from this program than I learned in all of my university coursework and district in-services. For the first time, I was free to focus on the reading process itself, instead of trying to keep 25 kids on task. And we had follow up all along the way from people who know what they're doing!"

Of course, the benefits of this increase in teacher knowledge are not restricted to one-on-one tutoring formats. Educators report that they apply what they have learned with other students in pairs, small groups and even whole group settings.

"I immediately started using the 'writing for sounds' part of the intervention with my whole class," reported Vicki Gomez, a 1st-grade teacher with 20-plus years of experience in the Granite, Utah, School District. "It really made a difference in my kids' journal writing. I was able to read what they had written much sooner than in previous years. And that spelling knowledge transfers directly over into reading when the kids come across words they don't know."