Reading Specialists in Schools With Exemplary Reading Programs: Functional, Versatile, and Prepared.

Abstract

There is increasing recognition of the im portance of reading specialists in devel oping coherent, inclusive reading that meet the needs of all students (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998). Indeed, the po sition statement, Teaching All Children to Read: The Roles of the Reading Specialist (International Reading Association, 2000), explicitly states, must have reading specialists who can provide expert instruction, assessment, and lead ership for the reading programs (p. 1). Reading specialists in schools are not a new phenomenon. In the 1960s, amid growing con cern about students' lack of reading achieve ment, reading specialists were employed as remedial reading to work directly with students experiencing difficulty. Although working with students has been the primary role of the reading specialist, there have been changes over the years. These changes have been influenced by federal guidelines, given that reading specialist positions often are funded by Title I monies. (Title I is a U.S. federally fund ed program for at-risk students.) For example, the criticism of pull-out (Kennedy, Birman, & Demaline, 1986) and a demand for congruence between classroom and specialized instruction led reading specialists to work along side teachers in the classroom. Thus, although the instructional role was still an important one, more and more schools began to investigate different ways to deliver the instruction provided by the reading specialist. But researchers and reading specialists them selves have reported that reading specialists do much more than teach (Bean, McDonald, & Fotta, 1990; Jaeger, 1996; Quatroche, Bean, & Hamilton, 2001). Indeed, they provide resources to teachers, assess students with reading diffi culties, develop and implement professional de velopment experiences for teachers, and assume leadership of the school's reading program. In response to a national survey (Bean, Cassidy, Grumet, Shelton, & Wallis, 2002), over 90% of U.S. reading specialists indicated that they were involved with instructing students on a daily basis; the same percentage indicated that they spent time daily or some of the time serving as a resource to teachers. Almost all were in volved to some degree with curriculum develop ment and in working with other professionals such as special educators and psychologists. Likewise, reading specialists, in a study conduct ed by Bean, Trovato, and Hamilton (1995),

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 89 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.