Literacy Lessons: Designed for Individuals: Part Two: Teaching Procedures

Successful early literacy intervention must be designed for individuals and delivered by trained teachers in the first two years of school.

Literacy Lessons: Designed for Individuals Part Two is a training manual for practising teachers. Children unable to READ and WRITE can achieve effective performance among their peers in their first or second year in school. Subsequently, in professional development sessions, those teachers will continue to explore many questions raised in the theoretical and research-based explanations provided in this book for each teaching procedure.

The book Reading Recovery: A Guidebook for Teachers in Training (1993) is still valued by early intervention teachers. More than a decade after its publication we have a wealth of new evidence which calls for a new guidebook. Many sharp minds have applied their thinking about theory, research results, critiques of different kinds, and implementations in vastly varying locations to re-consider how best to provide for children who find it difficult to learn to read and write in the first two years of school.

• New theory and research from several disciplines has guided the revision of teaching procedures.
• Implementations in New Zealand, Australia, Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom have created a body of research and evaluation from many different cultural perspectives and in English, Spanish and French.
• Emphasis has been placed on oral language and teacher-child conversations,
  on the importance of early writing,
  on hearing and recording the sounds in words, (which teaches phonemic awareness)
  on knowing how words are spelled,
  on phrasing, fluency, and speed of response and on appropriate eye movements for written language.

A competent reader uses a vast range of alternative approaches flexibly, so during a series of individual Literacy Lessons, children are introduced to alternative ways of solving new challenges in increasingly difficult texts. The way they work on print changes over time.

This new guidebook, Literacy Lessons: Designed for Individuals, is expected to expand the range of children who can be helped, to increase teacher effectiveness, and to generate new research questions about effective reading and writing in the early years of school.

A comprehensive review of Reading Recovery in the United States by five distinguished authors is available separately at the RRCNA Web site. Authors Maribeth Schmitt, Billie Askew, Irene Fountas, Carol Lyons, and Gay Su Pinnell share their knowledge and provide persuasive evidence for the power of an early investment in changing futures of children.

readingrecovery.org/sections/home/changingfutures.asp

A Note from Dr. Marie Clay

Let me introduce my new guidebook Literacy Lessons Designed for Individuals. The teaching advice previously found in the book Reading Recovery: a Guidebook for Teachers in Training (1993) has been updated. The new book comes in two volumes.

Volume 1 describes why a short period of individual help is essential for a small proportion of six-year olds, and recommends how this can be provided in a school or school district. The volume is written for administrators and serves as an executive summary. It explains the principles and infrastructure that support successful implementation. It clearly summarizes the changes in children's literacy behaviors that can be observed and reported. These changes allow for scientifically-based research to demonstrate that accelerated progress has been made and that the intervention is a sound investment. Early intervention produces significant outcomes.

Volume 2 contains teaching recommendations and procedures which take into account new theory and research findings. We are confident that a wider range of children's problems can now be addressed.

Reading Recovery's professional organizations, RRCNA, NATG and IRRTO, have recommended ways in which the transition to new teaching procedures described in the Literacy Lessons volumes will best be made.

They recommend:

• that no changes be made in Reading Recovery lessons during the 2005-2006 school year, to ensure that data collection and program evaluation projects are not affected;
• that during the remainder of the 2005-2006 school year, Reading Recovery training and professional development (continuing contact) classes will continue to work with Reading Recovery: A Guidebook for Teachers in Training (1993), so that evaluation data can capture the change effectively;
• that Trainers and Teacher Leaders prepare themselves for working with the new guidebook with teachers during the 2006-2007 school year;
• and that sites change from using Reading Recovery: A Guidebook for Teachers in Training (1993) to using Literacy Lessons Designed for Individuals at the beginning of the 2006-2007 school year.

Sites requiring new books for training classes or professional development (continuing contact) classes beginning in August/September 2006 should place their orders before 1 June.

I ask teachers who purchase the books when they become available to respect the request not to change their Reading Recovery lessons during the 2005-2006 school year. Teacher leaders will not be available to discuss changes in lesson delivery until after June 2006.

People who read the new materials and wish to initiate new programs should discuss such developments with Trainers at Reading Recovery training sites across USA. They may be thinking of expanding existing programs or they may be considering the use of Literacy Lessons Designed for Individuals with special groups of young children who need a limited number of hours of individual instruction in order to be able to participate in their classroom activities. Suggestions for such expansions are dealt with under the heading Particular Children, in Volume 2 of the new teaching procedures.

I fully support these plans to update Reading Recovery teaching.

Marie M Clay

Marie Clay, FRSNZ, FNZPsS, FNZEI(Hon),Emeritus Professor, taught in primary schools and then at the University of Auckland where, for the next 30 years she introduced educational psychologists to ways of preventing psychological problems. She did post-graduate study in Developmental Psychology at the University of Minnesota on a Fulbright Scholarship and completed her doctorate at the University of Auckland with a thesis entitled "Emergent Literacy." Her 'Reading (and writing) Recovery' is an early literacy intervention, which is now implemented in five countries, and three languages. Literacy Lessons Designed For Individuals integrates what has been learned from that innovation with new research and theoretical advocacies. Shifts in early literacy learning can be monitored by teachers using her Observation Survey of Early Literacy Achievement in English, Spanish and French. A series of individual lessons can be delivered in those languages to about 150,000 children worldwide annually using a guidebook called Reading Recovery: Guidelines for Teachers in Training. Literacy Lessons Designed for Individuals is a similar guidebook which aims to make accelerated progress possible for a wider range of problems. Marie Clay was past-President of the International Reading Association, served on the editorial committees of professional journals, was a research consultant at home and abroad including UNESCO, chaired a Social Science Research Committee advising government on policies and research allocations, and worked internationally with problem-solving related to early intervention research and practice.