Marie Clay

But I felt I had so much knowledge and experience to share that I created a coaching model the second part of the day for teachers because we had so many best practices to share, data that supported those research-proven strategies, intervention, which spilled over into the classroom.

And we built a comprehensive model within our school and within our district with reading recovery, push-in coaching, as well as staff development, and a lot of it centered around Mari Clay's theory.

Cool.

So it sounds like what you were doing was working.

So let's delve in.

What is Reading Recovery? How did it start, this balanced literacy or whole language approach to reading? Where it actually came from, it starts in New Zealand with a researcher called Marie Clay.

What she did was she watched and she observed.

She observed children in their first year of school as they were reading real books.

Problem two was that she didn't account for how those children had been taught.

So think about it this way.

If you're taught only one approach to reading, then that's the approach you're going to demonstrate, is it not? That's the approach that Marie Clay saw from these students.

She was watching what had already been taught in a particular way.