eing lulled to sleep by a favorite bedtime story. A poem penned by someone you love. A laugh-out-loud e-mail from a good-humored friend. There are so many pleasures associated with reading, pleasures unknown by a large number of people who struggle with the written word. Fifteen years ago it seemed that everyone could read. The Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy had just taken root, and occasionally we’d hear about someone who “slipped through the cracks.” But widespread standardized testing in our schools and increased research has since revealed the enormity of our nation’s reading problem. According to the International Adult Literacy Survey, a 22-country initiative conducted between 1994 and 1998, only half of the U.S. adult population can read at what is considered the minimum proficiency level required for success in today’s labor market. In Florida last year, 65 percent of tenth-graders failed the reading portion of the Florida Comprehensive Achievement Test (FCAT), which now doubles as a high school graduation proficiency exam. And the National Center for Education Statistics reports that the state’s reading scale score is below the national average. Parents, educators, and politicians may feel the problem is insurmountable, but the Department of Teaching and Learning at the University of Miami School of Education is turning pages locally with an approach that holds great promise for the rest of the nation.

“The most important element in terms of whether a child succeeds or fails in learning to read is a well-trained teacher,” says department chair Jeanne Shay Schumm (Ph.D. ’84), who spearheaded the launch of the UM STARS reading assessment program. An acronym for Students and Tutors Achieving Reading Success, STARS enables licensed Miami-Dade County teachers who are pursuing master’s degrees at the University to tutor struggling readers under the observation of their professors. The after-school sessions take place at Professional Development Schools, eight Miami-Dade public schools participating in Project SUCCEED, a school-improvement coalition funded by a five-year, $10.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education. The UM STARS program began in fall 2002 at Poinciana Park Elementary School in Liberty City. Programs will continue to follow at other Professional Development Schools, the real-world “clinics” where undergraduate students learn to be teachers, graduate students learn to be better teachers, and struggling readers receive the help they otherwise might not be able to afford.

“This quality of one-on-one tutoring is usually very expensive, so it’s really a great service to the community,” says UM STARS director and visiting assistant professor Ana Rego.

UM STARS tutors use “best practices” that are derived from University-based research and address a complex collage of cultural, emotional, and socioeconomic factors, including the growing number of students whose first language is not English.

“At least in Miami, I think the teaching force understands issues of bilingualism a little better than in other parts of the country,” says Maria Carlo, a School of Education professor who came to the University last year from Harvard, where she studied the differences between how monolinguals and bilinguals learn to read. “As the demographics change for the entire country, every teacher is going to have to be an English as a Second Language teacher soon,” Carlo says.

Carlo joins other Department of Teaching and Learning professors, such as Elizabeth Harry and Arlene Clachar, who specialize in linguistic and cultural differences. Harry received a Fulbright scholarship this year to study problems faced by Moroccan immigrant schoolchildren in Spain. Clachar is researching ways to help teachers understand the linguistic structure of African-American Vernacular English, sometimes referred to as “Ebonics,” and the obstacles it presents for reading and writing standard English.


arental involvement is critical for boosting a child’s reading ability. Parents who don’t speak English may not know how to help or how to communicate with their children’s teachers. UM STARS conducts parent workshops to fortify at-home support.

“Sometimes teachers get the idea that parents don’t care,” says Teaching and Learning professor Harry Forgan, who is director of the School of Education’s Summer Reading Institute. “They do care, and they want the best for their children.” Forgan says teachers must convince parents that even if they can’t speak English, they can still help their children by reading to them in any language. “It gives children some sense of story structure—that stories have a beginning, middle, and an end, and that there are characters, plots, and settings.”

The Reading Institute is a two-week session funded by Project SUCCEED in which teachers from more than 50 Miami-Dade County Public Schools learn techniques to improve reading skills in their classrooms. Last year there were 423 applicants for 75 slots at the institute, held at West Laboratory Elementary School on the University’s Coral Gables campus every June for the past three years. Modeled after the successful Writing Institute, directed by Eveleen Lorton for the past 20 years, the Reading Institute has a simple mission—treat teachers with respect and stimulate their personal enthusiasm for reading.

“We have them think about their own journey as a reader and how they value reading. A lot of teachers now have emphasized the FCAT so much, they’ve forgotten the real reasons why we read,” Forgan explains.

Each day at the institute begins with the “print of the day,” a favorite joke or poem that the teachers share with each other. There are guest lectures by accomplished authors and researchers, and during group sessions teachers learn research-based practices such as Collaborative Strategic Reading. This system, devised by Schumm and former faculty members Janette Klingner (M.S. ’92, Ph.D. ’94) and Sharon Vaughn, places children into groups where each child plays a specific reading role. “Teachers realize that the practices they learn here will help children do well on the FCAT,” Forgan says.

esearched-based strategies in reading are valuable for teachers in all grades and subject areas, not only those specializing in language arts. After teaching math and science in Miami-Dade for 30 years, Peggy Cuevas (A.B. ’67) pursued a doctorate in reading at the Department of Teaching and Learning, where her husband Gilbert (A.B. ’67, M.Ed. ’74, Ph.D. ’75) has been a faculty member for more than 25 years. Why the switch to reading?

“The reason kids have so much trouble in science, for example, is because they can’t read,” says Cuevas, who graduated this spring. “I want to get content-area teachers to understand that it’s not enough to teach kids science. You have to teach them how to learn science.”

Her dissertation is a case study of seventh- and eighth-grade students at a Professional Development School who cannot read above a second-grade level. Doctoral students like Cuevas help UM STARS professors supervise and mentor the tutors. As the program expands, master’s student tutors will mentor undergraduates beginning to work with struggling readers. This is particularly important in light of Governor Jeb Bush’s Just Read, Florida! initiative, which last year doubled the amount of reading coursework required for undergraduate elementary and special education students.

UM STARS, the summer institutes, and hands-on experience for undergraduate as well as graduate students in the Professional Development Schools are making a difference on the local level. “Because we are doing research,” Schumm says, “we have an opportunity to share lessons learned with other communities, especially those that have changing demographics. We have the best laboratory in the world.”

“The School of Education is doing much more than working with kids,” Cuevas adds. “The fact that you can come to the University of Miami and be a better teacher, that’s the bottom line.”

A Little Help from My Friends

imes have changed,” says Joyce Corces, adjunct professor and director of the School of Education’s Support Network. “The student population has changed, and teachers need someone with experience to listen to them and give them advice.”
 

The first three years of a teacher’s career are the most vulnerable. Unruly classes, administrative pressures, and standardized tests such as the FCAT in Florida are often enough to make new teachers abandon the profession. Launched in 2000 with funds from Project SUCCEED, the Support Network is designed to decrease attrition and improve teaching performance among recent School of Education graduates. The advice comes from 17 experienced mentors, mostly teachers in the University’s Professional Development Schools. The mentors and about 40 participants meet four times a year for three years, plus a three-day institute each summer. Participants earn three credit hours a year applicable to graduate school.
 
The real value of the network, according to Corces, is camaraderie. Corces fields anywhere between five and 40 e-mails a night from members looking for help from mentors and other members on a particular hurdle.
 
“Part of it is socializing with people in your profession, which is very important,” Corces says. “Then it doesn’t become just a job.”