A Message from Charlie and Codruta Temple, and Alan Crawford

Implemented by

Ethnocultural Diversity Resource Center (EDRC) Romania
Nadacia Skola Dokoran, Slovakia (NSD) Slovakia
Centre for Education and Professional Development, Romania (CEPD)
Bulgarian Reading Association, Bulgaria (BulRA)
Romanian Reading and Writing for Critical Thinking Association, Romania (RWCT Romania)
Developmental Research Center for Pedagogical Initiatives Step by Step, Slovenia (SbS Slovenia)
Forum for Freedom in Education, Croatia (FFE Croatia)
Pro Didactica Educational Center, Moldova (Pro Didactica)

Experts and consultants

Charles Temple, PhD., Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Geneva, NY, USA, Educational Consultant of OSI New York, co-director of the Reading and Writing for Critical Thinking Project (RWCT) (1997-2001), international teacher trainer and author of materials on literacy development. Mr. Temple s contribution to the project is voluntary.
Alan Crawford, PhD, Educational Consultant of OSI New York, volunteer in the RWCT Project. International trainer and author of materials on literacy development, with expertise in working with linguistic minority populations. Mr. Crawford too contributes voluntarily to the project.
Codruta Temple, MA, Educational Consultant, RWCT Romania. Ph.D. candidate in literacy education and linguistics at Syracuse University, USA, former school director in Romania and trainer in initiatives of the Soros Open Network Romania, the Romanian Ministry of Education, and the British Council.

Summary of the project

Opportunities for success in the economic, political, and social realms depend closely on having at least a basic level of education. Virtually all of the initiatives for civil society, equity, and human rights that the RE:FINE program will support must presuppose that the recipients are able to read and write well enough to participate in social discourse. Yet more than half of the Roma children in Central Europe do not complete fourth grade.

Project heads and facilitators have worked in education for Roma children for many years. They originated what may have been the first iteration of OSI s popular Little Books project in 1998, and they have offered a range of educational, tutoring, and mentoring services for Roma children over the years. In the course of these years it has become clear that there is an urgent need of an intensely focused, assessment-based teaching model for helping young academically vulnerable children learn to read successfully.

For a number of reasons (the teaching of beginning reading, which receives intensive research in many countries, receives scant scholarly focus in Central Europe), educational efforts aimed at helping Roma children are still lacking the guidance that would be provided by a keen revelation of what this child does and does not know about reading and writing, what he/she needs to know at this moment, and how it might best be taught. Strategies for finding and revealing this information, a research-based trajectory of literacy development, and time-tested methods for effective intervention are available from educators in other parts of the world, especially from New Zealand and the United States.

The specific aims of this project are:

• to develop diagnostic instruments, in the languages of the participating countries, that can be used to assess children s emergent literacy concepts;
• to develop tutoring procedures, written up in training manuals, that are related to the diagnostic information revealed by the assessments
• to field test the assessments and tutoring strategies with at least twelve students in each participating country;
• to disseminate the findings, including all training materials, to groups concerned with the education of Roma children in each country, including Step by Step, Roma centers and RWCT programs.

The great promise of this project is both to develop testing and teaching procedures that have a high likelihood of success, and that will be relatively easy to disseminate to several other projects across Central and Eastern Europe who are concerned with the education of Roma children, both within the public education systems and NGOs.

The project is envisaged to last for two years, to be implemented between September 2005 and August 2007. However, we do not exclude the possibility of extending it beyond August 2007, by securing funding for it from other donor organizations.

Target Group and Area

The project will be implemented in 6 countries: Romania (two regions: north-western Romania Cluj area - and south-eastern Romania Bucharest area), Slovakia, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Croatia and Moldova.

The primary specific target group includes:

• 21 lead teachers (primary school teachers and teacher educators who work with Roma students) (3 in Slovakia, 3 in Bulgaria, 3 in Slovenia, 3 in Croatia, 3 in Moldova and 6 in Romania)
• 21 x an average of 5 primary school teachers (a total of 105) trained by each lead teachers
• a total of 84 Roma students (12 Roma students x 7 working organizations) assessed and supported by the lead teachers
• a total of 105 Roma students assessed and supported by the 90 trained primary school teachers

The indirect beneficiaries of the project will be:

• an estimated number of at least 1,500 teachers, colleagues of the lead teachers and the trained primary school teachers, who will be able to use the outputs of the project
• an estimated number of at least 7,500 Roma primary school students
• teacher training institutes and organizations, as well as Roma organizations, community centers, schools in disadvantaged areas, school districts, educationalists, literacy specialists, ministries of education in the partner countries
• families of the Roma children

View Project photo gallery

Final workshop from the "Academic Success for Roma Children" project

Academic Success for Roma Children

A report of the fourth and final workshop from the "Academic Success for Roma Children" project, that was held in Cluj, Romania, from March 12-15th. Participants in this project came from Bulgaria, Croatia, Moldova, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia.
The "Academic Success for Roma Children" project is administered by OSI-Budapest's RE:FINE program, but it has been funded by the Roma Education Fund. It is operated by the RWCT associations and Step by Step projects.
The focus of "Academic Success for Roma Children" has been to help educators from the participating countries-

1) to develop their own reading assessment instruments, including
(a) a variation of Marie Clay's Concepts About Print Test (lay-out of books, orientation of print on the page, knowing that print talks and not the picture);
(b) Darrell Morris' Early Reading Screening Inventory (alphabet knowledge, concept of word, phonemic segmentation, and simple word recognition);
(c) an Informal Reading Inventory, with graded lists of isolated words and text passages at graduated difficulty levels from early first through sixth grade, with two sets per level for pre- and post-administration. This instrument includes measures of fluency, word recognition, and several aspects of comprehension. This instrument was modeled after the Developmental Literacy Inventory by C. Temple, A. Crawford, and J. Gillet (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2008 [in press]).

2) to learn and field-test constructivist teaching methods for emergent literacy and beginning reading, including
(a) the Language-Experience Approach
(b) Shared Reading
(c) Shared Writing, including "Morning Message"
(d) Word study
(e) Developing reading fluency
(f) Developing vocabulary
(g) Comprehension-building strategies
(h) Oral language development for students with limited proficiency in the standard language

3) to learn techniques for differentiating instruction, to help all children who need fine-tuned instruction-and most especially Roma children--within a single classroom setting (i.e., without segregating children from each other).

In the first two workshops and before the third, participants developed their own versions of the assessment instruments, in their own languages. These instruments had sections that could be used from preschool through grade six, even though the focus of the project is on grades 1-3. The participants also translated a 90 page guidebook of teaching methods that was prepared for the project by Charles Temple, Alan Crawford, and Codruta Temple.

After nearly a year (the last workshop was in May of 2005, with the first two workshops in October and January of that academic year), all participants except two returned for this workshop. A new participant from Croatia attended-Zoran Pavletic, who is an RWCT trainer. Every country was represented by at least two participants.

In the progress reports that were shared at the beginning of the session people reported on substantial achievements. Participants in all countries have field-tested their instruments fairly widely with children. Although they were only asked to give preliminary workshops, in order to test the waters, they have already been fairly prolific in their training efforts, too, as can be seen from the table below:

The responses from the teachers have reportedly been very, very strong. Our participants passed on some choice quotes from their own trainees, as well as some of their own impressions:

Bulgaria:
/"It turned out that some students whom we considered to be good readers are not. Also, kids who look passive show very good scores."
"For the first time we are offered an alternative approach of remedial work on students' deficits in problematic areas."/

Croatia
/"[These methods are] useful in everyday work with children."
"We want more education like this!"/

Moldova
/"The teachers appreciated the impact of working individually with struggling readers."/

Romania:
/"At last, a useful workshop!"
"The assessment instruments should be made compulsory in public education."
"I hope these methods will attract [Roma children] and make them want to come to school."/

Slovakia:
/"Finally, I have a tool to find out real children's reading problems."
"It's good that we have not only tests but also tools to help the children" /

Slovenia:
/"I tested the child. Before I had totally different picture. Just now I find where he is."
"I want to know where they are and how to help them."
"These methods are useful for all struggling readers as well as normally developing ones. The model of differentiating instruction allows us to help Roma children in the class with everyone else, without segregating them." /

One of the most interesting accounts came from a primary school teacher from Cluj. She had worked in a preschool class (with five-year-old children), using the assessment instruments and the teaching methods from the "Academic Success" project. The assessment instruments revealed that many children knew many letters (some knew half the alphabet) and many had most of the important concepts about print. During the first six months of the school year she used Language Experience, Shared Reading, and word study methods with them, and she created big books and little books especially for these lessons. Most of the children learned to read simple text, and to build a small sight vocabulary-that is, they could recognize several words. The other teachers in the school were surprised by these results, as it is not standard practice in Romanian schools to teach anyone to read in preschool.

Future Developments

The success of the primary school teacher just cited is important. We believe that many schools in this region have lower success in teaching children to read than they should, given the efforts that the teachers make. We believe that if the teachers had available to them better assessment tools, better teaching techniques, and also better materials, many children-and especially Roma children and poor children with home environments that give limited support to their learning-could learn more successfully with less effort than is presently the case.

Therefore our hopes for the future of this project include these:
1) To disseminate to wider audiences in each country the assessment instruments and teaching methods that have been developed in the project;
2) To develop culturally inclusive teaching materials that can be used to make it easier to teach and learn reading;
3) To develop comprehensive programs for teaching for emergent literacy and beginning reading in kindergarten and first grade, complete with materials, lesson plans, and activities for learning centers.

At the conclusion of this workshop, the participants were encouraged to work with their local sponsoring organizations-RWCT and Step by Step-to arrange to publish the reading assessment instruments and offer dissemination workshops.

We are grateful to Levente Salat and Monica Caluser and their staff at the Ethnocultural Diversity Resources Center in Cluj for their excellent facilitation, and also to Maria Kovacs for her leadership.

We look forward to further conversations about this project with colleagues in the Reading and Writing for Critical Thinking and Step
by Step communities and with others who might be interested.

Charles Temple, Ph.D.

Cluj, Romania

March 16, 2007

View photo gallery of the Final workshop from the "Academic Success for Roma Children project"

View video files about the Final workshop from the "Academic Success for Roma Children" project

Video 1	[view online]	[download FLV]
Video 2	[view online]	[download FLV]
Video 3	[view online]	[download FLV]
Video 4	[view online]	[download FLV]