Principles | Reading Rescue

Reading Rescue Program:
Principles

The Literacy Trust, Inc. is committed to helping schools find a permanent solution to the problem of early reading failure. Since literacy for each child is a primary, if not the primary mission of every elementary school, Nora L. Hoover, Ed.D and her colleagues are convinced that schools must be willing to reorganize, allocate more resources to the early grades and provide essential teacher training, if they are going to help struggling readers during the regular school day. After school programs are dependent on additional funding and volunteers come and go. Likewise, bringing in commercial firms to teach the most challenging students is counter productive to the goal of equipping and empowering schools to fulfill their most serious responsibility to their students.

While aware of the studies that have reported similar gains among struggling readers whether taught in groups of three or one-on-one, Hoover points out that, in the studies where tutoring appeared to be as effective as small group instruction, the students in the tutoring condition remained with their assigned instructor regardless of their progress. This is not the case in Reading Rescue programs. The benefit to a school in having a cadre of highly trained tutors is that when a child is not succeeding with a particular tutor s/he can be reassigned to a different tutor, as openings become available. Or, when a child is struggling in a group and holding the other students back, s/he can be assigned a tutor.

Switching tutors does not generally occur in the first two years of Reading Rescue's implementation, however. During this time, all the members of a tutoring cohort are learning how to tutor. It takes some time before the school Coordinator has some data that indicates who his or her strong tutors are and time is needed to learn the instructional strengths of each tutor. Hoover also points out that, when a child taught in a group of three or four does not achieve fluent reading, the next logical step is to find a tutor for the child.

A referral for Special Education carries with it the implication that the school did all it could to help the child without success; therefore, the deficiency must be within the child. But, until a child receives a tutoring program from a highly skilled instructor, a school cannot claim to have provided the most individualized form of instruction. When tutoring is prohibitively expensive it's not a viable option. However, a trained cadre of staff members who fulfill other functions within a school and who provide highly-skilled tutoring makes one-on-one instruction feasible for the few who absolutely need it to become fluent readers in first grade. When a principal who has Reading Rescue in his or her building stipulates that no child is to be referred for special testing unless s/he has received tutoring, referrals are fewer in number and more accurate.

With regard to whether students who are tutored maintain their gains, Reading Rescue reports that 60 to 70% do, and since significant numbers are served in most schools, teachers in second grade report a big improvement in how well students come into their class reading. The quality of instruction in grades two and three is critical; the better the literacy programs at those grade levels are, the more who do continue to achieve at grade level. The implication that tutoring is a waste of money if a student does not maintain may be true when a school is investing $2,000 or more per child. However, if tutoring can be provided relatively inexpensively, as is the case in a Reading Rescue school, and if it helps to send each child who is tutored into second grade reading at grade level, surely that's a better outcome than retaining the child or sending him or her on to second grade as a non-reader or a very poor reader.

When teachers have the opportunity to participate in what amounts to clinical course work in reading and when they are given the opportunity to apply what they have learned in supervised one-on-one sessions with their most difficult-to -teach students, the reading instruction they provide for all students is enhanced. Several program components are designed to assure that teachers attain the knowledge and skill required to work effectively with struggling readers. This outcome is as important as the attainment of literacy on the part of the one or two students a teacher may tutor in a year, because, when teachers know how to prevent reading failure, the need for intensive instruction is greatly reduced among all students. Schools with Reading Rescue programs regularly report an overall improvement in standardized test scores suggesting that concerns about the impact on student achievement when non-certified personnel monitor classroom activities while a teacher tutors is, in fact, unwarranted.

Hoover and her colleagues are persuaded by research suggesting that the most effective staff development is school-based and on going. For that reason, Hoover hesitates in referring to Reading Rescue as a program because programs come and go in schools, sometimes with amazing rapidity. As Hoover sees it, when a school adopts Reading Rescue, it's making a commitment to differentiate the delivery of reading instruction so as to maximize each child's chance of developing fluent reading in first grade. In some schools, second and third graders are also tutored but first grade is the preferred year. In adopting the model, a school also commits to ongoing staff development in literacy within their building provided by their Reading Rescue trained Literacy Coach. After the initial three-year agreement expires, should a school wish to continue identifying themselves as a Reading Rescue school, they are required to maintain a minimal level of service from The Literacy Trust, Inc. to assure their program's continue compliance to the model.

The theoretical bases for program components

Several bodies of research and theory underlie the Reading Rescue model. Findings from research on teacher education, in-service education and adult learning informed the design of the professional development package that's delivered to schools.

Research on oral language development, including acquisition of a second language, as well as an extensive body of research on early literacy and literacy interventions as well as studies of phonological awareness, phonics, reading fluency, vocabulary development, reading strategies, comprehension, metacognition and text structure all inform the content of the professional development provided for school staff members. Findings from research on reading and learning disabilities, as well as effective instructional approaches, support the instruction that tutors are trained to provide for struggling readers. The Reading Rescue Tutor's Handbook is continually updated based on current research.

Findings from studies of school improvement and school change provide insight into the process of school restructuring and reallocation of resources essential to implementation of the model.

Research supporting the instruction tutors learn how to provide for struggling readers

The first schools that Hoover assisted asked her explicitly to teach their staff to tutor following Clay's recommendations which are available to the general public in books published by Heineman. From the outset, however, instruction Reading Rescue tutors were trained to provide did not conform in every respect to Clay's model.

The specific modifications Hoover made early on in Clay's Reading Recovery reflected research that Hoover found persuasive. The teaching of phonograms during the word study portion of the lesson was emphasized as a result of the Iverson and Tumner's research reporting enhanced results of tutoring attributable to direct instruction in phonograms. Findings from research on repeated reading formed the basis for the inclusion of Timed Readings during the first portion of the lesson.