RESEARCH MATTERS -feature section written by Jean Florman

When Robyne (Halevy) Lewis (BA ’75) seeks a dream, she takes a nuts-and-bolts approach. Lewis is an avid reader and thinks every child should be too. When the Woodridge, Illinois principal decided the students in her school needed better training in the reading basics, she and her staff leveraged years of classroom observation and experience into Leading to Reading, an innovative and fun program that has succeeded beyond expectations. The dynamic approach groups children according to a series of 14 skill needs rather than by age. Teachers present each skill group in a variety of ways—visual, tactile, kinesthetic, and auditory—and children master each skill before moving to the next level.

On any particular morning during the 40-minute whole-school LTR period, a visitor to Lewis’ Sipley Elementary School might see children breaking pretzels to form letters, creating bingo cards of 24 consonant blends, or saying the sounds of letters as they form letter shapes with their bodies (think: The Village People).

The improvement in reading skills among Sipley students has been staggering. Whereas several years ago, 21 percent of the school’s third graders were below state standards for reading, now 98 percent are at or above that measure. Lewis says the program encourages students and teachers to make the most of their natural inclinations to teach and learn.
“Teachers become teachers because they are creative and don’t want to work from a script,” she says. “And the average child will learn as fast as we can teach them. An approach that is fun, easy, and successful is best for both.”

She says her time at Iowa nurtured her own passion for teaching reading.
“I didn’t even know that elementary school libraries existed before I took a children’s literature course at Iowa,” says Lewis, who eventually earned a Master’s degree in library science from the University of Oregon.
She also worked at the Iowa City Public Library, an experience that led her to believe that children were inspired to read by the topics in books. Years later, however, Lewis came to a different understanding of what inspires and enables children to read.

“By the time I started LTR,” she says, “I had begun to realize that regardless how interesting a topic might be, struggling readers aren’t motivated to read. Like most of us, they don’t like to do what is difficult. But once children learn how to read, they are motivated because it’s easy—and then they’ll read anything.”

Jessica Fandre, a first- and second-grade Sipley teacher agrees. “If you don’t teach children how to decode the sounds of language,” Fandre says, “they might be able to learn to read by sight well enough to get through the primary grades. But once they get to third grade, they can’t decode for comprehension and meaning. Robyne’s program enables children to do both.”

Launched in 1998, Leading to Reading is an example of what the pragmatic Lewis calls, “action research.”

“We created the program through on-the-ground research in the classroom,” she says. “The program is the research.”

Program assessments show a staggering improvement in reading ability among the primary students who participate. The average reading ability among Sipley students, for instance, is 25 percent higher than the average across the state. In fact, although the program was designed to continue through third grade, virtually all Sipley students complete it before finishing second grade. Fandre, who has taught LTR for five years, says the impact on her students has been “huge” regardless of social, economic, or language background.

Twenty-five schools across the Midwest have adopted the Leading to Reading approach and 80 teachers and school districts have bought copies of the LTR guide that helps educators launch the program.

“The program encourages us to create new ways to effectively teach children the basics of language,” says Lewis, who spends 40 minutes a day back in the classroom teaching reading enrichment. “And we’re always assessing the impact of what we do. We’ve found, for instance, that students become so proficient, they read beyond their comprehension. Quite frankly, that’s a problem we love to have.” –by Jean Florman