A DECISION-MAKING MODEL OF
READING RECOVERY TEACHING
Noel K. Jones
University of North Carolina, Wilmington
People who enter training in Reading Recovery are often surprised, if not overwhelmed, with the tasks of making decisions in their teaching. Many novices seem to expect that decisions about procedures to use in lessons will be fairly clear cut, but nothing could be further from the truth (Jones, 1992). Every action of teaching during a Reading Recovery lesson represents a decision that the teacher must make for that child at a particular point in time. Teachers who look for shortcuts or routine ways of doing things become ineffective in accelerating children's learning.
Decision-making in Reading Recovery requires skills of observation and reflective analysis that most teachers have not had to learn in order to become good classroom teachers. This is because Reading Recovery sets the teacher a very complex task which involves the construction of a curriculum for each individual child - a curriculum that is consistently and regularly contingent upon that child's current knowledge and emerging awareness and is guided by the teacher's close observations, her or his understanding of Clay's theory of literacy acquisition, and her or his own experience with various paths that different children may take in the process of becoming literate (Clay 1993b; 1998).
These decision-making processes might be compared to action research, which has been described as "a form of professional practice, a research process, and a reflective way of teaching." (Arhara, Holly, & Kasten, 2001, p. 15). The information that must guide Reading Recovery teachers in their actions and choices must come from several different sources, guided by a wide range of considerations based upon theory. This article will attempt to analyze the decision-making steps in Reading Recovery teacher decision-making. Second, it will present and explain some of the considerations and principles that guide teachers decisions to su0pport children's learning. The aim of the paper is to make readers aware of the cycle of decision-making steps that underlie good Reading Recovery teaching, and at the same time to make them think about the many ways to bring their teaching into balance so that the children they serve have a increased opportunity to develop self-extending literacy-learning systems.
A Decision-Making model
Decision-making begins with observation of the child's current strengths, knowledge and capabilities. The skillful teacher observes the individual child to find out what is secure knowledge - what the child is able to do with accuracy and fluency, or at least with correctness and control. The teacher must also observe and make inferences about the child's ability to process information when engaged in reading and writing tasks. Clay refers to processing as the ability to use information of more than one kind to solve problems quickly (Clay, in press). Does the child monitor and attempt to correct his own performance, even on simple tasks? Does he learn new letters and/or words fairly easily, or does he or she have great difficulty entering new information into his long-term memory? On what kinds of texts can the child attend both to meaning and some aspect of visual information on the page? Classroom teachers do not have time or opportunity for such sensitive observation; and indeed, most children can learn under conditions that are not so focused on the individual's knowledge and needs. However in order to initiate and accelerate learning for the lowest children in the classroom, a much more individually sensitive program is necessary. This is one of the major justification for Reading Recovery as an early intervention for the lowest performing children.
Closely related, but somewhat different, is observation of the child's partial knowledge and developing awareness of new knowledge (Clay 1998). The Reading Recovery teacher's observation skills must be sensitive enough to distinguish emerging knowledge from achieved knowledge. Achieved knowledge is under the child's control, for example, the ability to read and write a certain word consistently, or the ability to search all sources on information to problem solve a new word. Emerging knowledge is just beginning to come into the child's notice, but he or she cannot use it independently or uses it inconsistently. For example, a teacher might notice that a child is now aware of word spaces on the page (and puzzled when they don't match with the language message), or aware of the identity of a word in reading that he or she cannot yet write.
Another important factor to consider are any special problems that this learner may have. All Reading Recovery children have problems in acquiring literacy, but special problems may be posed by factors such as: limited control of English, dysfluent use of language; a strong tendency to invent text; difficulty in attending to print, etc. (Clay 1993b).
Based upon these observations of actual and emerging knowledge and the child's ability to process information, the teacher puzzles over what the child is just ready to learn next. This difficult decision draws upon the teacher's understanding of Clay's theory of beginning literacy. The teacher's overriding purpose is to help this child develop a literacy-learning system that becomes self-extending. Acquisition of strategies is all-important, but items must also be learned so that the child can use this knowledge strategically on appropriate texts. Specific areas of processing -- such as hearing and recording speech sounds in sequence, the ability to read fluently for meaning, the ability to recognize and respond to letters quickly, etc. -- also must be considered at this decision phase.
The Reading Recovery lesson format is a great help to teacher planning, but within that framework, decisions must be made about choice and levels of books, about specific procedures, and about what to emphasize for with this child. Plans are made not only for the next lesson, but also for the next few lessons; and all plans are made with an attitude of tentativeness and flexibility, allowing for quick revision based upon daily observations. This is a time that teachers may consult Clay's texts, particularly Reading Recovery: A guidebook for teachers in training, and perhaps seek advice from a colleague as well. The teacher should enter each day's lesson with an intention of what the child needs to learn or learn to do in each part of the Reading Recovery lesson and a plan for how she is going to try to realize that intention.
The decision-making responsibility does not stop here. As the teacher implements the procedures she has chosen, she puts herself again into the role of sensitive observer of the child, but now she also has to learn to become a sensitive observer of her own teaching, a point which will be discussed below in greater detail. Reading Recovery teachers take a running record of the child's reading each day, and they also keep records of the lesson events and interactions. Most teachers add to their records after the lesson is over, making more detailed notes about what the child was attending to and what he or she could do, recording also notes about her or his own teaching moves during the lesson. These records are of utmost importance; they are what allows the teacher to engage later in in-depth analysis of patterns of child and teacher performance that may give clues to acceleration or lack of progress.
The next step in the recursive decision-making process is evaluation. In addition to sensitive observation during the lesson, the teacher needs to reflect, each day, about whether the child was able to extend his or her learning as she had intended. The analysis may be brief if the child is making the forward moves the teacher had hoped and expected. But if there is limited progress, even for two or three days, the teacher needs to engage in a more careful and formal analysis of the child's responding and of the lesson interactions. In such cases, evaluation leads to new hypotheses about the child's learning and processing and a search for different or additional procedures, materials, books, and so forth.
A diagram of this recursive decision-making process is presented in Figure 1. This is of course an oversimplification of the processes teachers engage in. The steps of the process as described here, may overlap or intertwine, and of course, teachers go through the cycle many times in the process of teaching a child.
If the teacher becomes concerned about very limited progress after four or five weeks (and perhaps before), and after she or he has engaged in thorough analysis of the child's progress, his or her program, and her own teaching, it may be time to seek assistance from others. Clay advises in no uncertain terms, that if a child is very hard to accelerate, "There is only one position to take in this case. The programme is not, or has not been, appropriately adapted to the child's needs. It is time to take a close look at possible reasons for this, and colleague comment is what the teacher should seek." (Clay 1993b, p. 56).
How is the Teaching Supporting the Child's Learning?
An important part of the re-analysis, alone or with a colleague, is to reconsider your assumptions and hypotheses about how the child is functioning and what might be holding him back. Clay suggests that the teacher re-examine or check on: "Your analysis of the child's difficulties; new explanations (of his difficulties) that may apply; the intactness of the reading process on easier material; and whether the child's writing behaviour is improving." (Clay, 1993b, p. 57).
But Clay also stresses the need for teachers to check on their own teaching behavior. "Often (the child) has learned to do something which is interfering with his progress, and he may have learned it from the way you have been teaching." (Clay, op cit., p. 57). The question of how the teaching is supporting the child's learning is important to consider in working with all Reading Recovery children, but it is critical in those cases in which the child is making poor progress.
The goal, for all children, of course is that they develop a literacy learning process, and key indications that this is occurring include not only an ability to read and write more difficult material more independently, but also that the child:
Teaching can inhibit this from happening in many ways. Some would be obvious, such as doing everything for the child and not allowing independence. Others are more subtle traps that teachers may fall into unwittingly, sometimes for only one of the children they are teaching. The following suggestions are not complete, but they capture a large percentage of the issues I have personally observed in my own teaching and on the many visits I have made to teachers over the past 10 years.
One of the first questions to ask might be, Are you keeping the learning easy enough so that the child continues to be an active, productive learner? Accuracy is not the only indication of book difficulty. The text should require some "reading work" on the part of the child, but this reading work may actually occur in accurate reading. We can often be surprised by the amount of psychological and physical effort that may go into a child's accurate reading of a text. It is easy to fall into the pattern of making the learning too difficult. For example, a teacher might choose non-patterned text to foster greater attention to print (for a child who relies on memory in reading patterned text) and end up with choices that are too difficult. Once text level becomes too difficult, there will be things to sort out on the new book that have not yet been worked out. This may lead to book choices in familiar reading that are too hard, and fluent reading disappears. It is also easy for the amount of work in writing to become too great Perhaps this has occurred for those children who seem deliberately to compose simple sentences and object to writing more.
According to Clay, "Two kinds of learning must be kept in balance: on the one hand there is performing with success on familiar materials which strengthens the decision-making processes of the reader as he works across text, and on the other there is independent problem-solving on new and interesting texts with supportive teaching." (Clay, op. cit., p. 9). What is harder to determine is how hard the text reading should be during that time that reading work occurs. Instructional level is judged by 90% to 94% accuracy; yet Clay's early research demonstrated that self-correction level is also an important indicator that processing is going on, and that the readers who progressed well typically read at 95% accuracy or greater. (Clay, 1982)
Another question to ask is whether the teaching is stressing accuracy or item learning at the expense of strategic processing. It is difficult to divest ourselves of the belief that accurate reading is important for learning progress, so we often find ourselves compelled to bring attention to errors that the child would (at his current level) not be able to detect himself. Some teachers retain a tacit belief that children learn to read primarily by acquiring items of knowledge (words and/or sound symbol associations). This belief can lead the teacher to direct the child's attention rather narrowly to visual information in print, rather than to observe and build upon the child's emerging awareness of many aspects of print, book organization, story structure and meaning, oral language, relationships among oral and written words, and many other dimensions of literacy and language that are part of a literacy learning system in formation that we only vaguely understand.
The imbalances I have mentioned so far tend to lead to obtrusive teaching practices -- teaching moves that tend to usurp the child's notice and intent and move him or her to a somewhat passive approach to learning. Being kind but too helpful, or talking much more than the child can attend to are other ways that teachers can unwittingly foster dependence and passivity. But there are ways of teaching that lead to imbalances in the opposite direction as well. Teaching can many times not be obtrusive enough. Allowing a child to persist with a habit or practice that interferes with learning is also counter-productive. Teachers must many times teach strenuously to get a shift in a child's performance, or to get the child to work hard enough to learn a word, or to pay attention to punctuation, or to consistently follow the directional rules of English. The tricky issue, of course, is how to judge when to teach hard and insistently, when to teach with a light touch, and when to leave the child alone. There is no way to give advice to cover all cases. But if a teacher is reflective about her or his teaching, and if she becomes a careful observer and problem-solver, she will be more capable of judging when these moves tend to be helpful or obstructive of learning.
There are many more ways in which teaching may fall short of supporting learning or may actually interfere with acceleration and learning progress. Rather than discussing further possibilities, let me offer instead, in Table 1, a set of questions that teachers might use in analyzing themselves as Reading Recovery teachers or in analyzing the teaching support they are giving to a particular child who is finding it hard to accelerate. There is no claim that these should be the only questions that might be considered, nor is there a claim that any person would need to think about them all. They are offered only as a resource to remind us of the many ways that our teaching may go astray and become part of the problem that stands in the way of a child's accelerated learning.
[Table 1 about here]
Reflecting and analyzing one's own teaching is not always a comfortable thing to do, and it certainly is not easy. Overlooking problems is most likely to occur when people attempt to assess their own teaching, because the perceptions and judgments are generated from the same belief system that underlies the teaching performance. Clay advises teachers:
You are likely to have some blind spots in these areas and the opinions of colleagues could be most useful for the readjustment of your programme. It has been one of the values of the Inservice Training sessions that teachers have been able to pool their collective wisdom on their most puzzling pupils. (1993b, p. 57)
In seeking assistance of colleagues, a teacher must be careful not to relinquish personal responsibility for analysis and reflection. Teachers should not request or expect colleagues or a teacher leader to problem-solve for them; they should be requesting others to problem-solve with them, and only after they have made a continuous and sincere effort to understand the child and the teaching program for that child through their own analysis.
Reading Recovery teaching will always be challenging and difficult because it involves analysis and problem-solving of the most difficult learning cases, each of which requires skillful, daily decision-making based upon unique need. However, the challenge, and the ability to succeed with many children in the face of that challenge, is what is both rewarding and interesting about Reading Recovery teaching. Certainly Reading Recovery teachers don't stay in this program for the opportunity to read books like Nick's Glasses or Mrs. Wishy-Washy fifty to one hundred times!
Through their initial training and through their continuing professional development, Reading Recovery teachers should come to understand and use the decision-making processes that this article has attempted to describe. Teachers need to realize also that continued improvement in their teaching effectiveness depends upon their ability and commitment to improve as analysts and problem-solvers of children's learning and of their own teaching. Clay's work, and the work of hundreds of Reading Recovery teachers, has shown us what is possible; and if there is any possibility of bringing a child back onto a successful learning path, then we have both a moral and professional obligation to find out how to do it and to make it happen. Solving the learning problems of many of the children we see in Reading Recovery can be extremely difficult. Yet every time a teacher succeeds in achieving a break-through with such a child, she increases her own understanding and ability to teach, which brings benefits for many children still to come.
REFERENCES
Arhar, J. M., Holly, M., Kasten, W. 2001. Action research for teachers: Traveling the yellow brick road. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Cachemaille, C. 1982. Nick's Glasses. Wellington, New Zealand: Learning Media, Ltd.
Clay, M. M. 1991. Becoming literate: The construction of inner control. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
_____. 1992. A second chance to learn literacy. In Cline, T., ed. The Assessment of Special Educational Needs, pp. 69-89. London: Routledge.
_____. 1993a. An observation survey of early literacy achievement. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
_____. 1993b. Reading Recovery: A guidebook for teachers in training. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
_____. 1996. Accommodating diversity in early literacy learning. In Olson, D. and N. Torrance, Eds. The handbook of education and human development, pp. 202-224. London: Blackwell Publishers.
_____. 1998. By different paths to common outcomes. York, ME: Stenhouse Publishers.
Cowley, J. (1980). Mrs. Wishy-washy. San Diego, CA: The Wright Group.
Figure 1
PROBLEM-SOLVING MODEL TEACHING
1 - OBSERVE
10 - RETEACH 2 - STRENGTHS
9 - REVISE 3 - EMERGING
PLANS AWARENESS
6 - 10 and 1
Evaluate
8 - EVALUATE/ Teaching 4 - MAKE PLANS/
CONSULT Support SET EXPECTATIONS
7 - OBSERVE 5 - CHOOSE PROCEDURES
RECORD AND EXAMPLES
6 - IMPLEMENT/
TEACH
{Needs arrows or lines drawn to indicate a circular, clockwise progression)
Table 1
Questions to Help you Analyze Yourself as a Reading Recovery Teacher
Do you observe carefully, analyze strengths, analyze notes and records at home, use Guidebook and resources to plan instruction, observe results and re-plan as needed?
Do you have productive, 30-minute lessons daily with every child?
Do you try to focus your teaching to make progress every day?
Are you concerned and take action about slow student progress?
Do you request and use suggestions from others?
Are you determined to succeed with every child?