Reading expert visits school district

Ohio County elementary school teachers are the ones getting a chance to learn this week as Dr. Jan Richardson, a reading specialist and best-selling author of teaching resources, visited the school district.

Richardson, often called America’s leading expert in guided reading, is modeling two lessons in every elementary school building with students from two different grades to help teachers better utilize her reading program “Literacy Footprints: A Complete System for Supporting Guided Reading.” Some grades have been utilizing this program for a couple of years, according to Assistant Superintendent Kara Bullock, but this is the first year the program has been implemented for grades K-sixth.

The district used a portion of its ESSER funds, funds provided to state educational agencies and school districts to help safely reopen and sustain the safe operation of schools and address the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the Nation’s students, to purchase the program for the entire district.

“We have extra funding due to Covid to get what we really need to purchase for reading,” Bullock said. “We are very fortunate that our superintendent Mr. Southard and school board members invest in literacy.”

Bullock said having Richardson here is extremely beneficial to the teachers as she is helping to guide them through how to use the program correctly based on the students’ needs.

Richardson modeled the teaching methods with some students for the schools’ reading teachers to watch and later ask questions and talk about what they saw. She said it is like taking a golf lesson – it is better to watch the coach show you how to hit the ball instead of telling you.

“To our teachers, she is a celebrity. To watch her teach and be able to model after the best, that’s what we need to do,” Bullock said. “We need to learn how to do it right.”

Richardson said the program is designed to help teachers differentiate their reading instruction so they are meeting the needs of all the students regardless of where they are in the spectrum of the reading process.

“So, (teachers) are accessing (the students) and selecting the right strategies that would match the student to accelerate them,” she said.

The program is very phonics based with all the lessons working with reading comprehension, spelling, reading and writing.

“That’s the cornerstone of my work. These are all reciprocal processes. What I mean by that is what they learn in reading can help them in writing and what they learn in writing can help them in reading,” she said.

The material comes with books filled with engaging stories at different reading levels. Each book comes with a teaching card for each day with steps for the teachers to follow throughout that provide them with specific strategies.

Students are grouped together based on their reading level and the groups start out at different places. Some, she said, may skip steps and some will go slower.

“We call (the program) literacy footprints because we want to give teachers a footprint … how to teach reading so they can do it with any book,” she said.