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Johnny Can Read |
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By Colleen Pohlig Union Gap enthusiastically adopts interactive learning program that uses brain research to help kids read as smoothly as they talk UNION GAP - Fifth-grader Justine Kochie begins reading a passage that starts. "Some people believe ...." As she stumbles over the words, she is immediately interrupted by a tutor who asks her to start again. And again. And again. Still struggling, Justine is asked to look at her tutor and say; "Some people believe ...." She does it, twice, without a problem. Her eyes dart back to the text and she reads it effortlessly, then moves on to the next sentence. Her tutor, Adrienne Rios, said that's the goal of the Read Right program: for students to read as smoothly and fluently as they talk. In the nationwide sprint to find a cure for illiteracy, Union Gap schools Superintendent Bob McLaughlin says he's got it. And other districts are taking note. "To me, a kid is injured when they can't read at grade level," McLaughlin said. "Read Right heals them." The program, which the district purchased and uses in grades three through eight, has its roots in the workplace teaching adults to read. Based on interactive learning, the program uses brain research that has found a person learns to do something by building a network in the brain that guides the action. The root cause of reading problems is when the network of nerves in the brain is guiding the reading action incorrectly, said Read Right founder Dee Tadlock. "If you have a reading problem, you have errors in that network and you have to remodel that network, and that's what Read Right does," she said by phone from her home in Shelton. "We tell the brain what it needs to do to read excellently, and then we tell it when it is reading excellently." REMODELING THE NETWORK To fix the reading problems, students work for 45 minutes a day, five days a week, in small groups of three with one tutor, who is trained by Read Right employees. Students read along as they listen with headphones to passages in a book. As soon as they can read the text to themselves without stumbling, they signal for the tutor to listen to them read aloud. Then, if the student struggles with a word, the tutor asks him or her to read the entire sentence again until it can be read smoothly. Instead of having the student sound out words or point out the exact word, tutors encourage them to read the whole passage and predict what the word is. "If the student still can't get it, then nine out of 10 times it's a new vocabulary word for them and we teach them what the word is," said Faye Fulton, a Union Gap teacher who directs the program. "We want to empower the kids to know themselves when they are reading excellently," Fulton said. "We don't want them to always look to us." Fulton, who was the reading specialist in the district when Read Right started there in 1996, said she can't teach reading again any other way. The traditional ways aren't working for a lot of kids," she said. "Teachers see so many things change, and the pendulum is always swinging back and forth. But this program really works. We have the scores to prove it." Union Gap, in its third year using the program, was the first school district in the state to try Read Right. The district's elementary students, who have received an average of 57 hours of head Right tutoring, have raised their reading skills an average of one grade level. It's even faster for middle schoolers. On average, they learn to read in 41 hours of tutoring, McLaughlin said. The district uses the Woodcock-Johnson Reading Test as a pre- and post-measure. "Our goal is we will have no students move to the high school unless they are reading at or above grade level," McLaughlin said. Last June, of the 52 graduating eighth-graders at Union Gap, 48 scored at or above grade level on the reading test. The four others were special-education students, who also received Read Right tutoring, he said. In the past, the district moved non-readers on to high school because they didn't have a successful program, McLaughlin said. Most students referred to the program are at least two grades behind in reading. And the older they are, the greater the chance they'll be even further behind, McLaughlin said. The average eighth-grader in the program reads at a third-grade level, he said. Students with reading problems are pulled from their regular reading and Language Arts classes to receive Read Right tutoring. WORKPLACE TO CLASSROOM Dee Tadlock, a former teacher now based in Shelton, developed the program after her son had problems learning to read. She researched for three years how the brain learns, then sat down with her son again. In three months, his reading problem was gone, she said. "Obviously what we knew about reading wasn't working for every child," she said. She went on to use her methods in the Monroe School District. In 1991, she started the program at the Simpson Timber Co. in Shelton after the company invited her to set up a learning center there for its employees. The high success rates there - the average worker unproved a grade level in 10 hours of tutoring - helped the program branch out to Boeing and Weyerhaeuser, she said. Since 1991, 81 Read Right learning centers have opened at industrial centers in the United States, Canada and China. Tadlock said she focused on the workplace for the first six years because the teaching techniques for Read Right were so unusual, "and schools are much more resistant than most companies." "We wanted to wait until we could build a convincing database of success and then we went to schools," she said. Today, 19 schools in the state and 12 others across the nation employ Read Right. McLaughlin said he wishes more school districts would take advantage of the program. "This is my 31st year in teaching, and this is what's keeping me around - seeing all these students who never thought they could do it read excellently." Reporter Colleen Pohlig can be reached at 577-7684, or by
e-mail at cpohlig@yakima-herald.com |
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Copyright 1995-2010 Read Right Systems, Inc. |
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