Reading Recovery v phonics: Tutor risks job by ‘sneakily’ teaching different method to struggling students

A Reading Recovery teacher is risking her job by teaching struggling students to read using phonics. Photo / 123rf

A Reading Recovery teacher is seeing struggling readers progress like never before thanks to a stronger focus on phonics - but she’s having to keep her methods a secret from her employers.

The teacher, who agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity, takes small groups and individuals for extra literacy lessons through the Reading Recovery programme funded by the Ministry of Education.

The school she works at uses the balanced literacy system to teach students to read, as does the Reading Recovery programme. Reading Recovery requires its tutors to follow certain methods of teaching in one-to-one lessons for 6-year-olds who are struggling to keep up with their peers in reading.

Speaking to the Herald, the teacher said she believed in the Reading Recovery method when she completed her training, but started to see the value of phonics and began watching webinars about structured literacy during New Zealand’s first Covid lockdown.

Now she’s so convinced structured literacy is the best way to teach children to read, write and spell, she’s willing to risk her job by using the method without her school or the Reading Recovery provider knowing.

“I’m doing it sneakily. I actually feel way better in myself because of it,” she said.

“I feel so much more sure that they’re just so much more set up for life with this way of doing things.”

Balanced literacy mainly encourages children to use clues, such as context and pictures, to figure out words they do not know. But in recent years, more and more teachers around the world have been moving toward the structured literacy method, with its focus on phonics - the sounds made by letters and groups of letters.

The teacher said she felt conflicted to start with and started tweaking Reading Recovery lessons to add phonics where she could, but found the mixture of methods was confusing already struggling children.

When Reading Recovery changed its model a couple of years ago to introduce small group lessons, known as Early Literacy Support, as well as the one-on-one sessions it gave her a chance to go all in.

“There’s such a fixed way of doing things with Reading Recovery that you’re not meant to stray from.

“Lots of people say, ‘We’ve got no training in this Early Literacy Support because it’s so different, working with a small group as opposed to one-on-one’. But it ended up being a blessing, really, because I really could do what I thought was best.”

She’s now using structured literacy in her one-on-one lessons as well, and seeing students make more progress than they would have under the strict Reading Recovery formula.

“They’re just picking it up - kids that just look at you the whole time, having a guess at each page, and then all of a sudden just decoding and being able to read each page, even though it might only be a line of text. It’s actually making sense and just clicking.

“It’s huge. You just can’t look away from that.”

As part of some phonics training, the teacher worked with a boy she had referred on for further support after he had done the Reading Recovery course.

Although he’d made very little progress during his time in Reading Recovery, after a term of phonics instruction, he had jumped multiple reading levels.

“His parents really wanted me to tutor him, because they said this is the first time that he has ever clicked. It just totally made sense for the first time.”

The tutor said a number of former Reading Recovery colleagues had moved into structured literacy roles, but some remained convinced by the balanced literacy model.

“I think the only way to really see the big difference is to go and observe it in action. That’s the way you get hooked in.”

She was hopeful the incoming National Government would move quickly on their promise to ensure all students were taught using structured literacy so she could teach using the method she was passionate about.