Reading Recovery is a short term early intervention for children who have the lowest achievement in literacy learning in their first years at school. Children are taught individually by a specially trained teacher for 30 minutes each day for an average of 12-20 weeks. The goal is for children to develop effective reading and writing strategies in order to work within an average range of classroom performance.

I love my job. Every day I observe children being taught in Reading Recovery and I hear stories of how they have become more confident in themselves as a result of being on the programme.  I also have the privilege of supporting teachers as they sometimes struggle to match their teaching to the child and not vice versa.  At the moment I am supporting twelve Reading Recovery teachers in training and providing Continuing Professional Development and support to thirty eight qualified Reading Recovery teachers. They are in fifty three schools spread over seven counties.

Today I saw a child called Mary. She read four little books with fluency and expression and wrote: “I like reading because the books are good.”   Her teacher praised her regularly, during the thirty minute lesson, for doing what good readers do i.e. reading with expression, monitoring her reading and problem solving difficult words on the run.  When the lesson was over and the little girl had returned to class, the teacher told me that she is living in a refugee centre and that when she started in Reading Recovery she was very reluctant to participate in classroom activities.  Now her class teacher reports that she is constantly putting her hand up to read.  When she finishes in Reading Recovery, Mary will be an independent learner whose reading and writing will continue to improve.

It is thanks to the Sisters of Mercy that Reading Recovery is available in Ireland. In 1999 the PLT in the Northern Province asked Sr. Elizabeth Connolly to train as a Reading Recovery Teacher Leader. Sr. Olive McConville persuaded the DES to employ Elizabeth on a pilot basis in Monaghan. Two years later the PLT in the Western Province asked me to train and Sr. Carmel Molloy began negotiations with the DES to employ me.  The DES asked me to work in the most disadvantaged schools in the country which were in Dublin. Such was the success of our work in Monaghan and Dublin that the department decided to train three more Reading Recovery Teacher Leaders. So when the plan for DEIS  (Delivering Equality of Opportunity in Education) was announced in 2005, I was transferred to Galway and the new teacher leaders (one of whom was Sr. Freda Kenny of the Western Province) were appointed to Cork, Limerick and Dublin.  In subsequent years five more teacher leaders were trained. Thanks to the initial generosity of the Sisters of Mercy, and the tenacity of Olive and Carmel, over 3.000 children in nearly 400 schools have the opportunity to have Reading Recovery each year. Unfortunately, in the present economic climate, the DES is not able to sponsor the training of new teacher leaders, so in order to maintain the programme none of us can retire yet!

A number of Sisters in the Western Province have trained as Reading Recovery teachers and even though they have retired they continue to work with children in schools. The thing that I particularly like about Reading Recovery is that, at every level in the organisation, we teach children. I work with two children in the local primary school in Craughwell most days.  I learn something new about the complexity of reading and writing from every child I teach and teaching makes me very aware of the difficulties the teachers, with whom I work, encounter. When I was first asked to train in Reading Recovery I responded that I was being asked to go from infant education to adult education.  I didn’t realise that I would be able to straddle the two worlds and that I would love it!

 

Helen Diviney rsm
Western Province