When President Clinton challenged all Americans to help the nation's children read well and on grade level by third grade by volunteering as reading tutors, Dr. Donna Richardson, Executive Director of the Family Education Institute at Oklahoma City University, knew that all those volunteers would have to be trained. "It is not necessarily true that knowing how to read qualifies you to teach another person to read," says Dr. Richardson, a literacy specialist with many years of experience training teachers. "To respond to reading problems, a tutor needs a basic knowledge of what skills and strategies beginning readers use. My personal goal was to develop a tutor-training program based on how children learn to read naturally."
The Reading Discovery Tutor Training Program was born in August, 1998, at the Family Education Institute with America Reads funds. By October, the training program was under way, and tutors were being placed in Oklahoma City schools. The community response to the training was overwhelming, reports Dr. Richardson. Two other community partners, the Oklahoma City Public School Mentoring and Tutoring Program and Partners in Education, came on board with their own volunteers who needed training. "Training is the missing link for all our volunteers," says Cheryl Jones, Partners in Education Coordinator. "It provides them with the essentials they need to help a child learn to read."
The Reading Discovery staff adopted the motto, "Have Training, Will Travel." To meet the diverse needs of community and corporate volunteers, training sessions were held during lunch hours, after work, and on Saturdays. "Early on, we discovered we had to be flexible if we wanted to train tutors, especially corporate tutors," says Jennifer Reid, Associate Director of Reading Discovery. "If we were going to ask them to train with us, we had to do it when they could."
Volunteers have the option of attending a one-hour, introductory training session, or a six-hour, indepth training. Most choose the indepth training. Reading Discovery trainers, who adopt user-friendly teaching techniques and speak in laymen's terms, stress a balanced approach to teaching reading that includes both comprehension and phonics. During the six-hour training, tutors learn how to use a teaching-for- success formula.
MODELS, the formula developed by Dr. Richardson, helps young readers use their prior knowledge of oral language to find contextual, visual, and auditory cues to create meaning from the text. Using this framework, the tutor:
A second strategy guides the reading session. When the child and the tutor "PRRR" through a book, the child:
Over the past year, Reading Discovery has trained more than 400 community volunteers, Federal Work-Study students, education majors, Even Start mothers, and volunteers with programs such as Read and Seed, Retired and Senior Volunteer Program (RSVP), and the Native America Student Services division.
"A tutor has to know how to reach deep down inside a child's mind and know what buttons to push to get a reaction," says Dr. Richardson. "Our tutors not only help children learn how to read, but they also build the children's self-confidence and help them realize how very special and capable they are."
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