MRIn in the news

Slip In Reading Spurs Action
Specialists Working To Train Teachers

By ROBERT A. FRAHM, Courant Staff Writer
Reprinted from the Hartford Courant, May 1 , 2006

HAMDEN -- She studied to be an elementary teacher, taught in New Haven public schools for 10 years and got a doctorate in curriculum and instruction, but Evelyn Russo says she was missing one crucial skill.

She didn't know how to teach children to read.

"I had no clue how to teach them to lift words off a page, to increase their vocabulary. ... I didn't know anything about fluency," said Russo, who quit teaching and studied to become a reading instruction trainer.

Trainers such as Russo may be a crucial piece of an effort to reverse a troubling trend in statewide elementary reading scores, according to officials who contend that many teachers are poorly prepared to teach this fundamental skill.

"The more we looked into it, the more it became clear that children were not being taught to read," said Elaine Zimmerman, executive director of the state Commission on Children and a key force behind proposed state legislation to improve the training for teachers of reading.

Zimmerman is pushing for legislation that would authorize the appointment of a state reading czar to oversee public school reading programs and would require reading coaches, such as Russo, at schools in Connecticut's Early Reading Success program.

Connecticut pours about $20 million a year into that program to provide full-day kindergarten, smaller class sizes and reading instruction in the state's neediest school districts. The state spends another $7 million annually under the Reading First program, part of the federal government's No Child Left Behind Act, but a recent downturn in reading scores by Connecticut fourth-graders on state and national tests suggests there is more to be done. It is fueling the push for extra training for new and veteran teachers alike.

"This is not something we can leave to chance," Russo said. "In order for no child to be left behind, we have to ensure that no teacher is left behind."

Advocates such as Zimmerman contend that schools have been slow to adopt the recommendations of a National Reading Panel report and Connecticut's Blueprint for Reading Achievement - both of which were published in 2000 and recommended a rigorous, systematic approach to language, including phonics instruction.

It is the same type of approach espoused by the federal Reading First program, yet recent studies of Connecticut teachers found that many are unfamiliar with fundamental elements of that approach.

"If you teach reading, you have to have good knowledge of the basic structure of English, why learning to decode words is difficult. That's an area that gets short shrift," said Jule McCombes-Tolis, an education professor at Southern Connecticut State University.

In a recent study co-authored by Tolis, researchers surveyed elementary teachers and found that more than half failed to identify at what stage young readers should develop certain specific skills, such as when they should be expected to sound out multisyllable words. About one-fifth of the teachers said they did not believe it was their responsibility to teach decoding skills.

"We have a reading crisis," said Margie Gillis, a researcher at Haskins Laboratories, a New Haven research institute specializing in language and literacy.

"There's a misconception that if you can read, you can teach someone to read."

Gillis is supervising a teacher training project using an intensive, systematic teaching approach that has produced promising early results with young readers in some of the state's most troubled school systems. The project sends trainers like Russo into schools to coach teachers how to teach skills such as phonics, awareness of sounds within words, vocabulary, spelling, fluency and comprehension.

Six-year-old Triana Highsmith, a first-grader at Church Street School in Hamden, recites the rhyme as she holds a small wand with the letter "e" next to several words printed on cards. She turns "pin" into "pine," "cub" into "cube" and "bit" into "bite," demonstrating how the "e" changes the sound of the vowels.

At Church Street, children practice recognizing the relationship between printed language and sounds under the guidance of teachers being trained by Russo as part of the Haskins project. Teachers give lessons on rules such as the magic "e," the bossy "r" and "vowel teams."

In a recent demonstration with kindergarteners, Russo used "Sonar," a hand puppet with large ears, to teach children to recognize the sounds within words. "Everyone say, `cat,'" she said. Then she asked the kindergarteners to say the word's first sound - "kuh" - moving quickly from one child to another, using the puppet to pretend to snatch the sound from the children's mouths as each child repeated "kuh."     Next >>