BROKEN ARROW — As Robyn Carey walked a student back to the classroom on Thursday, the student made a proclamation: “I love reading.”
Carey, who this year is a Reading Recovery teacher and Title I reading teacher at Arrowhead Elementary in Broken Arrow, was thrilled to hear it.
“That’s what I want,” she said. “Giving kids the confidence to feel, ‘I can read’ … so they want to keep trying — it’s such a big part of what we do.”
Reading Recovery is a program that provides one-on-one, targeted intervention for first-grade students who are in the bottom 20-25 percent of their class in reading. Broken Arrow Public Schools started using the program in 2011-12 and currently has 23 trained Reading Recovery teachers, with four additional teachers being trained this year.
In its fifth year, the district is seeing continued success with the program. For the past two years, results have shown that third-grade students who graduated the Reading Recovery program in first grade are doing well on the reading test they are required to pass as part of the Reading Sufficiency Act in order to be promoted to fourth grade.
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Officials said 90 percent of their third-grade students this year were promoted to fourth grade, and they attribute that largely to the Reading Recovery program.
Last year, 78 percent of all Broken Arrow third-graders scored proficient or above on the reading test, compared to the state average of 69.
Jan Grisham, the Reading Recovery Teacher Leader for Broken Arrow, said two major aspects of the program set it apart from other reading intervention programs.
The first is the amount of professional development involved in training the teachers. Teachers are required to complete six graduate-level hours of training, as well as an additional six sessions every year. At the beginning of the year, new teachers do several “behind the glass” observations of Reading Recovery sessions using a one-way glass. They then give and receive constructive criticism on their methods.
The other component that sets Reading Recovery apart is the 30 minutes daily of one-on-one, “extremely individualized instruction” that teachers give to students, Grisham said.
On average, students graduate from the program in 16-20 weeks. Grisham said the first 10 days or so of the program is about getting to know the students, including their strengths and interests. Then teachers work with them on “familiar” reading, or books that are on their level.
Eventually, teachers move on to a new book each day, observing the child try to read it. Portions of the lesson are also focused on word work and letter work — such as adding endings to words, breaking up words and working on phonemic awareness.
About 220 students are enrolled in Broken Arrow’s program this year. Each elementary site has at least one Reading Recovery teacher, with some having as many as three.
Rhoades Elementary is one of the sites that has made great strides in improving literacy. Last year, the school — which has the highest percentage of free and reduced lunches in the district — had 96 percent of its regular education students pass the third-grade reading test. The passing rate for all students was 83 percent, compared to the state average of 69.
In fourth-grade reading, the school showed the highest gains with 81 percent of regular education students passing and 76 percent of all students passing, a gain of 17 percentage points from the year before.
Dawna Mosburg, Rhoades principal, said her school is beating statistics. Typically, there is an association between students who are affected by poverty struggling with literacy.
“We should be at the very bottom, statistically,” Mosburg said. “And I’m proud to say that we’re not. We’re at the top.”
The school has blocked off a part of the day for intervention and enrichment, and that is the time that Reading Recovery teachers use for their students.
Carey said one of the reasons she decided to train as a Reading Recovery teacher was because she could see that students in her class who had been in the program had skills that other students didn’t.
“The kids that come out of Reading Recovery have skills to problem-solve when they come up against a challenge, when they come to a word they don’t know,” she said. “Whereas kids who have not had Reading Recovery, they don’t know what to do, they don’t know how to break the word apart.”
The district partnered with Texas Woman’s University, one of nearly two dozen Reading Recovery training centers in the U.S., through a grant from Ohio State University. For a year, Grisham traveled back and forth to Denton, Texas, every other week to take doctorate-level courses in preparation to train other teachers.
The grant covered training for the teachers, as well as books for both the teachers and students. The grant expires this year, but the district — which is already paying the teachers’ salaries — is committed to the program, Grisham said, and will continue to fund it to train additional teachers.
