Diploma in Reading Recovery
Reading Recovery Centre at Marino Institute of Education
Introduction:
Reading Recovery is an early intervention for children who have made very little progress in reading and writing during their first year at school. It involves a daily one-to-one lesson with a highly trained teacher for a period of between twelve and twenty weeks. At the end of this time, most of these ‘hardest to teach’ children have caught up with their classmates and can read and write at a level within the average band for their age.
Marino Institute of Education, in collaboration with the Department of Education and Science and the Institute of Education (University of London) launched the second implementation of Reading Recovery (RR) in the Republic of Ireland in September 2002.
Course Requirements:
To become a registered RR professional, teachers pursue a one-year, part-time postgraduate course in literacy learning and literacy development. They are also required to work on a one-to-one basis with a minimum of four children as part of their training.
Qualification(s) / Registration:
At the end of their training year, they receive a certificate from the Institute of Education (University of London) and become registered members of the European Network of Reading Recovery. During training, they have the option of receiving a qualification at diploma level also (accepted by some universities as the equivalent of one module at Master’s level).
Continuing Professional Development:
On-going professional development is provided for qualified RR teachers for as long as their school is implementing the programme.
Effectiveness of the Programme
The success of Reading Recovery is largely due to the quality and intensity of the initial and on-going professional development for qualified and experienced teachers selected annually for this postgraduate certificate course which is delivered at Marino Institute of Education.
Success is judged by the achievement of pupils who participate in the programme. The children are aged between five years nine months and six years three months and each teacher submits to a central statistical site in the U.S. pre- and post-intervention data for each child taught in the programme. The success rate in Marino is close to 90% with accumulating, follow-up research evidence showing that gains achieved during the series of lessons are subsequently maintained.
By June 2009, seven cohorts of teachers will have graduated at MIE, and will continue to implement the programme in 60 schools throughout north Dublin.
Programmes in the Republic of Ireland last about eighteen weeks or thirty-eight hours, on average. This seems a small price to pay for helping such children to access the curriculum and for sparing them and society at large the negative spin-off effects of early literacy failure.
‘Success in the early grades does not guarantee success throughout the school and beyond, but failure in the early grades does guarantee failure in later schooling’
(Askew & Frasier, 1997)
For further information contact Freda.Kenny@mie.ie