Breaking the Poverty Barrier by Esparza-LeBlanc Ricardo;Roulston William S;

Author:Esparza-LeBlanc, Ricardo;Roulston, William S;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Solution Tree Press
Published: 2011-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Rewire Reading Setup

Will stumbled onto the beginnings of our reading intervention in his job as a curriculum generalist with the Migrant Education Regional Office in Yakima, Washington. One day, he was invited to observe a pilot project in a middle school Title I reading classroom in Pasco, Washington. He was amazed by what longtime teacher Ruth Cole had created. Never had he seen a classroom of so many struggling readers so deeply engaged in learning to read and write. When yearend test results were in, they matched his anecdotal observations of the impact the program was having.

Together, Will and Ruth planned to try to disseminate her strategy to nine school districts the next year. Unfortunately, Ruth had heart surgery during the summer and died as a result of complications. Not willing to let Ruth’s work pass away with her, Will worked with the three paraeducators Ruth had trained and put together a training program based on their reflections and his own research. The pilot program went on as scheduled; the nine districts experienced great success, and Will continued to experiment and refine his approaches as other schools asked for his help. Now, in December 1999, I was asking him to help us put together our pilot program to turn around our struggling readers.

Training

The training to get started consisted of two full days, during which Will trained the freshman English teacher and her aides, which was critical.

Richard Allington (2002), in a section of his book Big Brother and the National Reading Curriculum titled “No Such Thing as a Proven Program,” cites a large-scale evaluation of commercial elementary reading programs (including some that are popular today) in which the evaluators found that no program worked well at all sites. He concluded, “If the concentrated effort of highly competent and well-funded sponsors with a few sites cannot produce uniform results from locality to locality, it seems doubtful that any model program could” (House, Glass, McLean, & Walker, 1978, p. 154). Allington (2002) commented that their conclusion was “the one consistent finding in educational research: Programs don’t teach, teachers do” (p. 17). In accordance with this belief, Rewire is successful only inasmuch as the teachers’ and paraeducators’ commitments to follow the training and become more skilled at using the model to teach reading.

Ruth Cole led by example during the year she was developing her program in her classroom. Because her school used a pullout model for serving students, she and her three aides worked with students four days a week and used Fridays to prepare for the coming week and to review what had happened that week. They were a true professional learning community before that term was in vogue.

We were unable to use a pullout model, and thus we couldn’t provide that kind of ongoing training built into the schedule for Rewire. Still, we tried not to lose sight of the need for ongoing reflection that would allow our practitioners to refine their understanding of Rewire Reading, observe the progress of their students, and adapt their practices to ensure higher student success.

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