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JULY 2003


SIR: A Unique Program for Private and Public Schools

by Joan Baum, Ph.D.

According to Professor Emeritus Jed Luchow of the College of Staten Island, the four-year phonics-based teacher training literacy program he directs—called Success in Reading or SIR—is not only having “dramatic” effect in the Hebrew day schools where it has been introduced, but holds out extraordinary promise for the public schools.

The project, which runs under the auspices of the Board of Jewish Education of Greater New York, recently was given a grant by the Dichler Foundation which will make it possible for SIR this September to work with P.S. 163 on West 97th Street as part of that school’s partnership with Fordham University, where SIR strategies will be introduced. So how is this literacy program different from all others? Prof. Luchow, forthright, thoughtful, organized and quiet-mannered—until he rifles through his papers for corroborating evidence from his data charts—notes that SIR, first, is fulfilling its mandate, which is to provide yeshiva teachers, who need not be state certified or have a Master’s degree, with the latest research-based principles?and strategies about teaching reading and writing in grades K-1.The goal is to lower the risk pool of students who do not meet New York State benchmarks in various literacy categories—a number that consistently hovers at about 15%. Luchow also says that a concomitant goal is to encourage intervention with these strategies at the earliest possible time. For the Hebrew day schools, whose environments do not typically include the kind of pre- and post-testing engaged in by the public schools, the hope is to introduce those teachers to the research-validated “screening tools” that will help them assess “phonological awareness.”

Interest in phonics is hardly new, but newer studies begun in the ’70s and widely disseminated in the ’90s (particularly the work of Shepherd & Uhry and Vellutino & Scanlon) show that decoding or word recognition (“the act of transcribing a printed word back into speech”) is not the same as reading comprehension, (“interpreting the message or meaning of a text”). In other words, children who manifest difficulty reading early on have not been adequately and sufficiently exposed to “phonomenic awareness.” What to do? Intervene early and provide children with intensive remediation in decoding and writing letters. Critical to this approach is the understanding that cognition is different from the “learned skill” of being able to segment sounds. Remediation at the end of the first grade is too late.

To judge from the enthusiastic response of the three-day training program held at the Board’s mid-Manhattan office this month, the yeshivot and day school teachers, many of whom were hearing about the research for the first time, and taking copious notes, there was much to think about regarding strategies, materials, and testing, some of which were demonstrated at the various workshops. Here was Robin Rottenberg going through a number of clever “games” that get children to associate letter names and sounds (“all the kids do get it at some point”); Flo Fruchter, rehearsing strategies for reading aloud and for shared reading, particularly suitable for those children for whom English is a Second Language, she noted; and Lisa Robbins, a kindergarten evaluator who encouraged the group to diagnose literacy levels from fill-in writing samples.

But is Project SIR for all schools? Aren’t public school students different from those in the day schools? Luchow smiles: there are myths and there are myths. The Jewish day schools now include immigrant populations with deficiencies similar to those associated with lower-income Americans and with children whose non-reading struggles are all too familiar to teachers of inner city youngsters. Out come Luchow’s charts about a certain yeshiva in Far Rockaway, where three-year data show a “phenomenal” reduction in the overall number of at risk boys there and a clear “accomplishment” in first graders being able to decode both Hebrew and English letters! Clearly, he believes, good strategies transcend culture and ethnicity, and good data drive efficient pedagogical reform.#

 

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