Reading Recovery in the Modern Classroom

On Wednesday I listened to an interesting researcher presentation on Marie Clay, the creator of the Reading Recovery program.  I found the background information on Marie and her research very relevant to my own first grade classroom.  I teach in Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland.  Our county-wide reading leveling system is a combination of both Reading Recovery and Fountas & Pinnell.  Having used Fountas & Pinnell since the beginning of my career, I felt that I was very familiar with the foundations of the system and the research behind it.  However, after listening to my peers present on Wednesday, I realized that I did not truly understand where Fountas & Pinnell began their own research because I had not made the connection to Reading Recovery.  In the same way, I did not see where Montgomery County was coming from when creating their own leveling systems as a combination of Reading Recovery and Fountas & Pinnell.

Montgomery County uses the Reading Recovery leveling system through first grade.  The Fountas & Pinnell leveling system consists of a much broader range of reading skills in each lower level.  For example a level D (Fountas & Pinnell) are levels 5 and 6 in Reading Recovery.  This continues through the first grade leveling system with each Fountas & Pinnell level being the equivalent to two Reading Recovery levels.  See Reading Level Conversion Chart.

In addition to the leveling system, Montgomery County provides their teachers with an explicit guided reading planning sheet that includes daily high frequency word writing, word work, pre-reading strategies (meaning, structural, and visual), interactive writing, and running records.  When looking more into the Reading Recovery program and after speaking with a veteran teacher at my school this week, I have discovered that our guided reading system is largely based on the one-on-one Reading Recovery system.

So what does all this say about Marie Clay and the Reading Recovery program?  I see this at that Marie Clay's research has laid the foundation for a very strong and effective reading program in Montgomery County as well as many other school systems across the United States.  What Montgomery County has done is taken the best of that program and found a way to use it so that it is not just giving one student at a time the benefit of the system.  The Reading Recovery program provides teachers with skills and strategies that can benefit all students and does not necessarily have to be done in the one-one-one setting to be effective.  The program is still being actively used in my school by one reading intervention teacher, as well as by other teachers in the county.  Although Reading Recovery has its critics you can not argue that for some students it can be life changing.  Check out the provided article to read about one such student who had it not been for Marie Clay and Reading Recovery, he may not be where he is today.

Reading Recovery Student Intervention