Deanna Mack, a special needs teacher at Malabar Intermediate School, works with a fifth-grader in a Literacy Lessons session. Looking on in the foreground is Mary Fried, a Literacy Lessons trainer from Ohio State University’s Columbus campus.
Literacy Lessons. The title is short but the impact of the Ohio State University-based program is proving to be huge in Mansfield City Schools.
During a recent board of education meeting Superintendent Brian Garverick described the reading success of a special needs fifth-grader at Malabar Intermediate School who works with special education teacher Deanna Mack in one-on-one, 30-minute sessions.
“This young man’s reading improved more during 32 Literacy Lessons sessions than it had in the previous six years,” Garverick said.
OSU’s Literacy Lessons is a professional development project for specialist teachers, including special education teachers, who work with children having difficulty learning to read and write. Teachers must complete graduate-level course work over two years to earn designation as a Literacy Lessons intervention specialist.
For several years typical students in district classrooms have benefitted from OSU’s Literacy Collaborative, professional development which emphasizes specific strategies for teaching reading and writing. But for special needs students and first-graders struggling with reading, individualized help comes through Literacy Lessons and Reading Recovery. Teachers who desire specialist designation in either of those programs are trained under a district contract with Ashland University.
Veteran teachers Teresa Fruth and Holly Christie are Mansfield City Schools’ certified “teacher leaders.” Trained in both Literacy Lessons and Reading Recovery, they assist in providing ongoing professional development to teachers involved in the two programs.
“We are the intervention piece,” Fruth said. “The goal of Literacy Lessons is to get special needs students to function at their age-level classroom.
“Each special education teacher regularly has 14 or 15 students in the classroom, but finds the time for one-to-one Literacy Lessons instruction.”
Reading Recovery targets typical first-graders who have difficulty reading.
“A first-grader works one-on-one with a Reading Recovery teacher outside the classroom for up to 20 weeks,” Christie said. “We want to raise the student’s reading level to that of his or her peers as quickly as possible.”
While Reading Recovery has been in place for years, Literacy Lessons for special needs students is a newer concept. Across Ohio few sites are training special education teachers in Literacy Lessons. In addition to Mack, district special education teachers trained in Literacy Lessons include Nancy Fensch, Gena Boyd, Leslie Ternes and Micaela Lattimer. As intervention specialists, they work one-on-one with individual students while maintaining their daily full-classroom duties. Teachers Suzanne Allen and Lori Brumenshenkel also completed the training.
In December Mary Fried, a Literacy Lessons trainer from the OSU Columbus campus, was at Malabar to observe Mack in a one-on-one Literacy Lessons session. Fruth and Principal Andrea Moyer also observed.
The following day, Mack taught the same fifth-grader in a “behind-the-glass” session at Ashland University which allowed teacher leaders from several counties to watch the session without the student seeing them. That’s where a teacher leader from another county, citing the recorded data, noted that the fifth-grader had achieved more in reading during Literacy Lessons than during his previous years in school.
Afterward, the teacher leaders – including Fruth and Christie – participated in a roundtable discussion designed to share ideas and improve professional development.
“That’s the key,” Christie said. “Professional development is ongoing. It never stops as long as a teacher is involved in the program.”
Christie emphasized that teachers’ training has an impact far beyond the students they work with individually.
“Although Reading Recovery and Literacy Lessons teachers work one on one with children for a portion of their day, the other part of their day they are using their knowledge to work with small groups or, in some cases, classrooms full of children,” she said. “Many children benefit from their continued learning.”
Mack, now in her fifth year as a Literacy Lessons intervention specialist, said her training and continuing professional development have paid huge dividends.
“Literacy Lessons has given me the tools to teach those struggling and hard-to-reach students,” she said. “Each day I analyze our completed lesson and develop a lesson for the next day to be on the student’s cutting edge of learning. There is a constant sense of urgency to move the student to the next level of their ability.”
For Christie, the importance of intervention cannot be understated.
“We’re saving lives,” she said. “Prisons are full of those who read poorly or can’t read at all.”