John Kruidenier, educational consultant and literacy and technology specialist, saw a new and exciting opportunity with the America Reads Challenge. After years of training reading specialists and other literacy professionals in the academic world, he was interested in the possibility of training community volunteers as reading tutors.
Kruidenier proposed to the Opportunities Industrialization Center (OIC) in Norristown, Pennsylvania, that the center form a partnership to create a local America Reads project. Located in an old mining and industrial town west of Philadelphia, the OIC serves one of the largest pockets of low-income families in the region. With an adult literacy program already well established, the OIC seemed a logical base for a volunteer reading tutor program aimed at serving the children of Norristown. The community responded to the idea with plenty of willing partners: a family services center, public and private schools, libraries, and two nearby colleges.
START (Systematic Training for America Reads Tutors), the partnership that resulted, set up an office at the OIC and declared its goals: to collaboratively develop a systematic and effective tutor training for 300 America Reads tutors, and to match these tutors with at least 200 schoolchildren in kindergarten through third grade.
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Photo by Mark Psoras, Norristown, PA |
The 16-hour tutor training, led by reading specialists, is spread over four weeks. No more than 10 volunteers at a time are involved in training, which includes five two-hour sessions devoted to classroom instruction, and three two-hour sessions of supervised practice and case studies. The training model assumes that volunteer tutors can be effective if they are provided with: basic knowledge related to literacy development in young children; systematic training; and supervised practice in the tutoring of reading.
Assessment is a thread woven throughout the START program. After tutors are introduced to concepts of reading theory-particularly the levels of reading development and the components of the reading process-they get a chance to see how theory is applied to practice when they are introduced to the screening assessment tool they will use with their students from Teaching Children to Read: A Step-by-Step Guide for Volunteer Tutors (Chall, Rosewell, Fletcher, Richmond, 1998). While the tutors rehearse doing an assessment, they are also learning some basics of teaching reading, such as how to pronounce individual consonant and vowel sounds, and how to listen carefully as a child reads aloud.
Once tutors are assigned to their students and the "real" screening assessment is completed, they use the results to formulate lesson plans. Assessment does not end there, however. Tutors are taught how to continually assess their students and how to modify their lesson plans based on informal assessment. Tutoring is presented to the volunteers as a cycle of planning, teaching, and assessing, built on a foundation of reading levels and reading components.
The screening assessment is used again at the end of the tutoring module so both the tutor and the student can see how the student's reading has progressed. This information from the post-assessment is also used to evaluate the program as a whole. The success of START, like that of any tutoring program, should be measured by the reading progress of its tutored children.
Tutors, too, are assessed at START. Their knowledge about reading and the teaching of reading is evaluated at the beginning of training to show them what they need to know, and again at the end of training to show them what they have learned. Assessment shows, for instance, that, after training, volunteer tutors average a 46- percent gain in their tutoring knowledge. One final way START is assessed is by conducting student, tutor, parent, and teacher satisfaction surveys.
START demonstrates the value of integrating assessment throughout a volunteer reading tutor program. The self-assessment by the volunteer tutors allows them to continually improve their practice. Assessment can be used in the teaching of reading so the individual, changing needs of each child may be answered by a flexible and responsive learning plan.
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